My Prince is in Another Game

I’m a Prince of Persia fanboy. I’ve played every game, I saw movie on opening day, and I think the 2008 game is the pinnacle of series in terms of creativity and innovation. But my price is gone, and the guy I’m left with feels like an insincere imitation.

The best thing about Prince of Persia as a series is that there’s no narrative canon. Characters and worlds can change from game to game, to movie to comic, and it’s more than okay, it’s expected. This gives developers and writers an incredible amount of freedom to experiment, to distill the series down to its core elements and rebuild from there. That’s what Ubisoft did with the 2008 Prince of Persia. They rebuilt the game with an increased focus on the core elements: Platforming, characters, and a strong sense of momentum, as well as adding a beautiful new art style and a creative workaround to pointless deaths. That game was a symbol of everything that made the franchise unique. Even if other fans were upset by the changes, the very fact that there were changes spoke to the flexibility of the series and should be praised.

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands seems to represent everything contrary to those ideas. The 2008 game was not universally loved by critics by any stretch of the imagination, though it did sell well over time. As someone who loved that game, it’s hard not to see The Forgotten Sands as knee-jerk pandering to those critics who loved the last-gen games more, since the story is an interquel, taking place between The Sands of Time and Warrior Within.

To be even more cynical, there are vague connections between this game and the movie. Specifically, a tight brother-brother relationship, and it’s curious how the major city in the game looks a lot like the major city in the movie. Subtle similarities like these seem designed to take advantage of unwitting buyers, people looking for a game based on the movie, whereas a sequel to the 2008 game would be too obviously different thanks to its unique art style.

But The Forgotten Sands isn’t all bad. It plays like a combination of those last-gen games and the 2008 game, mixing the environmental puzzles of Sands of Time with the momentum of Prince of Persia (2008). It feels like a spiritual sequel to the latter, but this only highlights the strangeness of the setting. By abandoning that new universe in favor of the old, while still evolving the gameplay, The Forgotten Sands ends up feeling like a bastard child of both worlds, not actually belonging to either one but sharing too much to properly stand on its own.

Overall it feels like a pandering cash-in, and no fan wants to see that happen to a series they love. I’m hoping the next game takes us back to that colorful world with the vagabond Prince, the lovely Elika, and the evil Arhiman. After seeing how much that style of gameplay evolved in The Forgotten Sands, that future sequel should be something truly extraordinary, if it ever comes at all.