I have mixed feelings on the Lost Crown

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I'd been hearing great things about Prince of Persia the Lost Crown, and a couple of my friends recommended the game to me, so it was just a matter of time. If I am being completely honest, I never really played Prince of Persia games back in the day; the only time I touched the franchise was playing a little bit of Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame from 1993 and that's about it. But the Lost Crown, being a metroidvania as opposed to an action-adventure, piqued my interest. And I also heard that in this game you can take a picture of an area blocked by progression and pin it on the map, so the next time you don't have to wonder whether it was a dash or a double jump you're missing, and I just had to see this mind-blowing feature for myself.

In the Lost Crown we play as Sargon, one of the so-called Immortals — renowned warriors that protect Persia from all evil. After celebrating a victory on the battlefield, we find out that Ghassan, the only son of Queen Thomyris and the eponymous Prince of Persia, is abducted. All Immortals, including Sargon, immediately set out in pursuit and end up on Mount Qaf, an ancient place that fell to a mysterious curse 30 years ago, where time seems to flow differently.

The Lost Crown reminded me once again why I always complete games that I want to share my opinion on: some games just start off great, and then, unfortunately, go downhill, which was exactly my experience with this installment of Prince of Persia. But let's start with the things I did genuinely enjoy.

The Lost Crown is a beautiful game that boasts a number of vastly different areas: from the ancient citadel of Mount Qaf to the lush green forest surrounding it, to the blue-tinged archives, to the giant tower covered in ice and snow, to the sewers filled with poisonous muck, to the prison buried deep in golden sands. Whatever you can think of, it's likely here. As an enjoyer of Hollow Knight's Deepnest, I do wish that the Crown's version of it was bigger and darker, but I still had a lot of fun there. The backgrounds are stunning, as is the design of most bosses, enemies and characters. 

Also, the rumors were true, and you actually can take pictures of the world and pin them to the map! Even though it didn't change my overall experience as dramatically as I expected because you still have regular pins and can just designate them to mean different things for you, like a diamond meaning that a double jump is required (I do it all the time), it was still very nice. I mostly took pictures of areas where I had no clue what to do or puzzles I couldn't or didn't want to solve immediately. You have a limited number of pictures, and this resource is gone forever once spent, meaning that you don't get it back when you erase a picture you don't need anymore, like you would a pin. Luckily, this resource is a type of reward and can be found all around Mount Qaf.

I really enjoyed special puzzles in different areas where there is an empty place for a chest, and you need to understand what's missing in the environment to make the chest manifest. Loved that, reminded me a lot of finding koroks in BotW and TotK, where you need to be keen on your surroundings and notice if something is not quite right. In the Lost Crown the solution is often in the same room, or in the same area: you need to look around, examine statues and the background in case there is a clue hidden somewhere. Some puzzles, however, are more complicated, but still fun.

I have to mention that there is a deflect system, and any game with good deflects automatically gets praise from me. All regular attacks can be deflected, but the red ones you need to dodge. There are also yellow attacks, and if you manage to deflect those, you'll get a short cutscene of Sargon instantly killing an enemy or dealing a lot of damage to a boss. I loved the smooth acrobatic action; movement feels great, but I couldn't help but notice that dueling felt much better than fighting several enemies at once. Sargon can get staggered against a wall relatively quickly, and sometimes it's difficult to tell what's happening on the screen with all the flashy effects.

However, in my opinion, a metroidvania is only as good as its backtracking flow, and it is my biggest complaint about The Lost Crown — the backtracking is simply abysmal. Half of my playtime is just running around, and I am aware that I am supposed to be doing that because it's one of the pillars of the genre, but I've played so many metroidvanias with better backtracking. The map is enormous, but you can't teleport between Wak-Wak trees (the checkpoints) until the end of the game. Instead, you need to use special teleports that are so few and far between that it becomes a big pain in the side. There is usually one or two teleports on average per area, and every area is a huge bundle of sprawling corridors, and the teleports are often somewhere to the side. The teleport in the Forest is blocked by progression, so until you get the required ability, you're not only going to traverse the Forest on foot, but you're going to backtrack TO the Forest on foot too from the hub area. The Lost Crown is a platforming-heavy metroidvania, I know, but sometimes the game forced me to do some pretty complicated platforming sequences just for backtracking, when in other titles I can think of, they would need to be conquered only once, and then there'd be a shortcut, or a fast travel point. The decision to prevent players from teleporting between Trees up until the point it doesn't matter anymore, crippled the game significantly in my experience. You might say, 'Well, Shetani, that's double standards, because you praised exploration in Nine Sols, and there you can't teleport between nodes for quite a long while either'. And I'll tell you what it is. It's SIZE. Nine Sols is 10 times more compact than the Lost Crown, and way, way denser so you're never really too far away from a node and can always go back to base. In Prince of Persia I often caught myself wanting to get back to the hub to buy or upgrade something, looking at the map and being like, 'I'll have to go into a different area where I have a teleport, platform my way there, go to the hub and then backtrack all the way to continue exploration' so I almost never did it.

If not teleporting between Trees accessible from the very start of the game, the Lost Crown could benefit hugely from something like a Homeward Bone. Sometimes in a middle of a ridiculously long platforming section I'd be like nah, I'd rather go explore or fight someone, but there was no way to get out. Sometimes I could just platform back, but many sequences, funnily enough, are not designed for you to go back halfway if you suddenly change your mind.

The Lost Crown is about 70% platforming and 30% fighting, and both these aspects are unfortunately flawed. I played on the standard difficulty because I always expect it to provide the most balanced experience. Now, I usually describe myself as a fairly mediocre player when it comes to mechanics, but combat on the standard difficulty is much easier than I expected. Not a single boss required more than 3-4 tries. At the start of the game, I just shoved whatever talismans I found along the way into whatever slots I had, and it worked just fine. The problem, however, was not that I was a touch too powerful for the world around me, but the consequence of me not being incentivized to seek out more power. For instance, in Nine Sols I always felt like I was on the verge of being too weak for my environment, which constantly pushed me to venture deeper into the world, explore, overcome platforming and fighting challenges in hopes of finding just a modicum of power that will make me just a tiny bit stronger. In the Lost Crown all rewards very quickly lost their appeal because I didn't need them. Consequently, exploration also fell from the list of my priorities because the platforming sequences were often long, and the reward — negligible. I guess I am just a different kind of player; I know people who did all the platforming just for the fun of it, regardless of whether or not the reward was enticing to them. You won't catch me doing three minutes of platforming unless there is a promise of power OR a story reason for doing so.

Don't get me wrong, the Lost Crown has some truly incredible platforming bits that have great flow, and when you finish them, you feel on top of the world. Unfortunately, it also has long intestines of spikes, rotating blades and falling platforms where halfway through you lose the very point of doing it. Most of the platforming would benefit from being shorter — maybe a little more intense — but shorter. Prince of Persia has what I classify as "reactive platforming", where you don't really see the whole picture, or the whole sequence you need to overcome, but you kind of just jump and then try to react as quickly as possible to what you see next. As you can imagine, it's not that hard when it's just a few platforms, a couple saws and grapples above a spiky pit, but it becomes absolutely draining when there is no end in sight. Surprisingly, you can't really look up or down that far, as I would expect from a metroidvania, to assess the situation and maybe come up with a couple of moves beforehand. Also, despite having a whole bunch of accessibility options, which is awesome, you can't rebind keys in the Lost Crown. One of Sargon's abilities that is crucial for many platforming challenges, especially in mid-game, is bound by default to pressing the right stick on a controller — the most awkward button you can bind anything to. And you have to use it quickly and almost always in the air. I managed, even sometimes barely, but I can easily see it becoming a problem for many people.

I enjoyed the Lost Crown tremendously at the beginning, but then its charm started wearing off as the game became more and more thin: there were less and less invisible walls that I happily hunted for, less complexity to levels and more of just... distance. In my opinion, the game could benefit greatly from just being more compact. Many platforming sequences are way too long, loop back on themselves, and the reward for them is often insufficient, considering that on a standard difficulty bosses do not deal much damage to you, and you have a generous health bar and a few heals. I am very precious about my metroidvanias, and I usually try to explore every corner of the map and do as much stuff as possible, but here I lost all steam halfway through. I was still interested in the story and characters — I loved playing as Sargon, he is a great protagonist — so I just focused on completing the main quest without taking detours. It turned out to be quite a pleasant change of pace, and I was able to complete the game without exhausting myself over nothing.

If you've played the Lost Crown, please, tell me what you liked and disliked about it, I'll be reading the comments as always. In the end, the game was a mixed bag for me: I loved many aspects of it, but the way its metroidvania core is designed and the overall balance weren't much to my liking.

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Thank you very much for your time. Take care.