Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown review – a new gaming kingdom awaits
PC, PS4/5, Switch, Xbox; Ubisoft
Thoroughly reimagined new iteration of 34-year-old series opens up a labyrinthine world littered with enemies and traps to overcome
Fixed in the sky above the entrance to Mount Qaf is a titanic statue frozen in the moment of its destruction; the pieces of a granite head shattered into chunks hang suspended in mid-fall. In the castle's tangle of trap-laden corridors, you will find characters who haven't aged a day in a hundred years, while others who arrived hours before you have already died of old age. Time doesn't obey normal rules within the cursed halls of the fortress, and you would do well to learn that lesson fast if you want to complete Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.
These oddities of time are appropriate for a game that reimagines and combines multiple generations of a series that dates back to 1989. Developer Jordan Mechner's original Prince of Persia was a 2D platformer in which you navigated a castle filled with false floors, guillotines, and sword-wielding guards to battle with the Grand Vizier. Meanwhile, in developer Ubisoft's hands, later reimaginings of the series saw the titular hero gain the ability to control time, pausing and reversing it to solve puzzles and dodge traps in a 3D world. In The Lost Crown, Ubisoft returns to the earlier games' side-on perspective while folding in the power over time of the later titles to create a sprawling, labyrinthine world littered with enemies and traps to overcome.
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