Prince of Persia The Lost Crown review: Ubisoft’s Metroidvania royal treatment
The key tenet of a Metroidvania game is that you backtrack – you journey back to once-explored areas and use your newly-acquired powers to forge new paths, reach new ledges, backflip into obscured passageways that contain treasure. It’s part of the game; intuitive and self-aware, and smart developers leave breadcrumbs for you to nibble on as you head back through to the beginning of the game, your avatar’s body humming with new-found power. En route, you may discover more things – secrets, more hidden paths, respawned enemies with a grudge – and you get distracted and pulled from your circular orbit.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has mastered this ebb and flow, artisanally guiding you around its expansive map with an almost sadistic wave of its hand. The story, cheesy and wrought as it is, is about humans pretending at politics at the behest of an absent god, and that’s what you feel like as a player as you trek from east to west, again, puppeted by the strings of the deified powers of the developer. Why? Because you must, because you crave power, because you want to set things right.
But the story isn’t why you came here, is it? Unless you’re hungry for the subtext and lore buried in Hollow Knight’s Hallownest and told in the margins, Metroidvania titles have never really excelled at stories – it’s best to keep things simple: go here, do this, win. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’s biggest failing is attempting to knit a complex narrative together, realised with haughty dialogue and Saturday Morning Cartoon visuals. It’s all A Bit Much. But it’s set dressing for the real star of the show: the map.