Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown — The Metroidvania Ubisoft Nearly Buried

There is a moment about two hours into The Lost Crown where you get the dash, and the game stops being a competent Metroidvania and becomes something you have to be physically removed from. It’s the air-dash, the Shadow of the Simurgh, and it does what every dash does — crosses a gap, cancels a state, opens the old rooms — except that Ubisoft Montpellier tuned the acceleration curve on it with what I can only describe as malice. It snaps. Sargon leaves a smear of light and arrives somewhere with the momentum still in your thumbs.

I have been playing platformers since a C64 and a tape deck, which is to say I have been playing platformers for long enough to be extremely boring about how things feel. This one feels correct.

What it is and what happened to it

Ubisoft Montpellier released Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown on 15 January 2024, on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series, Xbox One, Switch and PC. It’s a 2D side-on Metroidvania. You play Sargon, the youngest of a warrior band called the Immortals, sent to Mount Qaf to retrieve the kidnapped Prince Ghassan and finding that Mount Qaf has some opinions about the passage of time.

Montpellier are the studio behind Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends, and you can feel that pedigree in every frame of the animation. They are also, historically, the studio Ubisoft lets make the strange one.

The release window was a bloodbath. The Lost Crown landed in the middle of January, four days before Palworld appeared from nowhere and ate the entire conversation for a month, and a fortnight before Tekken 8 and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. A mid-priced 2D Metroidvania under a dormant brand, from a publisher whose business is open worlds with towers in them, went out into that and — predictably — struggled to be heard. Ubisoft did release a demo, and the demo is genuinely one of the better ones anyone has shipped; it just needed someone to look at it.

The game deserved better weather.

The parry is the whole conversation

Combat is built on a single flash. Enemies telegraph attacks with a yellow glow, and a yellow-glow attack can be parried on a tight window. Some attacks glow red, and a red attack cannot be parried at all — you dodge, or you eat it.

That’s it. That’s the grammar. And it works because the game commits to it absolutely: the yellow-red distinction is honoured by every enemy in the game including the final ones, the window doesn’t shift depending on the arena, and the parry animation gives you a distinct, tactile, slightly ridiculous counter-flourish that makes you want to do it again.

The obvious ancestor is Sekiro, and the debt is unhidden. What Montpellier changed is instructive. Sekiro’s parry is a posture economy — you’re parrying to build towards a break, so the parry is a resource action, and missing one costs you accumulated work. The Lost Crown’s parry is a state action. Hitting it doesn’t build a meter towards a win condition; it opens a window. The pressure is lower and the rhythm is faster, which suits a 2D plane where you can see the whole fight at once and there’s no camera to fight.

That decision is why the game reads as breezy where Sekiro reads as an exam. Nine Sols took the same parry into 2D and kept the exam. Both are right. They just want different things from you.

Layered on top: Athra, a meter you fill by fighting well and spend on special attacks, and an amulet system where you slot buffs into a limited number of sockets. The amulets are the light-RPG layer and they’re fine — a couple of them change how you play, most of them adjust a number. The build depth here is shallow and I don’t think that’s a flaw; the game’s argument is that execution is the interesting axis, and it stakes everything on that.

The map system is the actual achievement

Here is the part I want people to steal.

Metroidvanias have a memory problem. You find a locked thing at hour two, you get its key at hour nine, and in between you are supposed to have remembered a particular ledge in a particular room out of two hundred. The genre’s answers are map markers you place manually, which are a symbol soup you stop reading, and wikis, which are a confession of failure.

The Lost Crown gives you Memory Shards. You stand at the thing you can’t do yet, press a button, and the game takes a screenshot and pins it to that spot on the map. Later, when you have the tool, you open the map and you’re looking at an actual picture of the actual obstacle, and you know instantly whether your new ability solves it.

It’s obvious. It’s so obvious that its absence from twenty years of the genre is an indictment. And it does something subtler than convenience: because logging a puzzle is now cheap and precise, the designers could afford to be much denser with locked content than they otherwise could. Mount Qaf is packed with things you can’t do yet, and the density never becomes anxiety, because the game gave you a filing cabinet.

Compare Metroid Dread, which solved the same problem by narrowing the map into a mostly-linear tube with guided doors. Nintendo removed the navigation burden by removing the navigation. Montpellier kept the sprawl and gave you a better tool. Theirs is the harder trick and the more generous one.

The accessibility options are cut from the same cloth. There’s a platform assistance option, adjustable enemy damage, a guided or exploration mode for the map. None of it is buried in a menu apologising for itself. You can dial the game to the shape of your evening, which for a design this tightly tuned is a remarkably confident thing to allow.

Where it fights itself

The story is the weak axis. The Immortals — Vahram leading, Anahita among them — are drawn broadly, the voice performances swing between committed and stranded, and the plot’s shape is visible from the second hour. Mount Qaf itself is a better character than anyone standing on it.

The art direction is the other place opinion divides. The environments are gorgeous, the animation is superb, and the character designs land somewhere near a mid-budget anime and will not be to everybody’s taste. This got a lot of attention at reveal and it is, having played it, the least interesting thing about the game.

The bigger structural complaint: the back third leans on combat arenas — lock the doors, spawn three waves — as a pacing tool, and after twenty hours of the best 2D platforming Ubisoft has ever produced, being asked to stand in a box and fight is a demotion. The platforming challenge rooms in the late game are the answer the designers already knew was better. There should have been more of those and fewer boxes.

The verdict

The Lost Crown is the best-feeling 2D action game a major publisher has shipped in a decade, and its map system is a genuine contribution to a genre thirty-eight years old. It moves, it’s generous, it respects both your reflexes and your schedule, and it is completely uninterested in wasting your time — which from a company that built its reputation on 200-hour checklists is close to an apology.

Buy it on whatever you own. It runs well everywhere, including Switch, which given the density of what’s on screen is its own small piece of craft.

The tragedy is a scheduling decision. Somebody at Ubisoft looked at a calendar in January 2024 and decided this was the moment, and then Palworld happened, and the best thing the company put out in years went past most people at a distance.

If it hooks you, go and play Metroid Dread for the other end of the design argument, and then Nine Sols when you want the parry to hurt.

Spoilers below

The time-loop material in the back half is where the design and the fiction finally shake hands. Mount Qaf’s temporal instability stops being set dressing the moment you get the abilities that let you manipulate it directly — the shadow clone you place and recall, the frozen platforms — and the game starts building rooms that are essentially a musical bar you have to play in the correct order.

That’s when it becomes clear what the Simurgh powers are really for. They aren’t traversal upgrades with a story hat on. Each one is a new verb in a puzzle grammar, and the late-game rooms conjugate all of them at once: place the clone, dash to it, recall, use the recall’s momentum to reach the thing the dash alone couldn’t. Those rooms are the peak of the whole game and there are maybe a dozen of them.

Vahram’s turn is telegraphed roughly the instant he opens his mouth, and the betrayal lands anyway, for a purely mechanical reason: you fought alongside him in the opening, so the game taught you his moveset as an ally before it made you answer it as an enemy. Nobody says anything clever about it. The game just trusts that your hands remember. That’s the whole design philosophy in one boss fight.