Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

I once again realized I haven’t reviewed enough non-Steam games this year – or, more specifically, I covered only one Wii game and only one Ubisoft game. Here’s my chance to remedy to that.

King and prince, ready for attack.
Things are about to go horribly wrong.

Prince of Persia has been on my radar perhaps since before I began writing this blog. There’s the movie, of course, and I’ve covered it. However, I remember trying the very first game in the series, or rather a port of it for the Super Nintendo, long ago... and failing quickly because I couldn’t figure out the combat mechanics and fend off the enemy swordsmen. Which takes us to a more recent time. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which the movie is based on, was one of the first games I obtained for free on Ubisoft Connect, formerly UPlay, through special events on the platform. Some time later, I found another game in the series, a port for the Nintendo Wii.

Why not cover both? They’ve been waiting long enough. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a Ubisoft game whose ports were released mainly in November 2003, with the Windows version out in December. I wasn’t planning on reviewing this game almost exactly 20 years after its release. Fun coincidence there. So, how's it like?

The Dagger of Time

This story begins as the army of Persia, King Sharaman and his son the Prince at the head, invades an Indian kingdom belonging to the Maharajah. They got word from that kingdom’s Vizier, betraying his leader, of a treasure held at the Palace, with the King intent on taking it. The Prince (no name given) is prepared for such a quest, having been trained his whole life. This is where we discover the controls to this game.

No wonder this guy made a plaything out of
time itself, he already mocks the very concept
of gravity. (Apologies for French text, I never
figured out how to change the game to English.)

One of the most praised aspects of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is the parkour-based platform gameplay. The Prince has a wide array of skills: Running upwards and sideways on walls, wall-jumping, moving up and down ledges, climbing and jumping betwen pillars, swinging from horizontal bars... The list goes on. You can tell that every area of the game was designed with all those skills in mind. It’s not rare to find rooms with nary a solid floor, forcing you to figure out an alternate path. The Prince regains health by drinking water. However, he can get hurt or die instantly if he falls from too high. You’ll only really figure out the right height to fall from through trial and error, of which there is a lot in this game. Controlling this hero is a little tricky at first, but very rewarding once you’ve got all the mechanics down.

To think, that first time rewind was accidental!

After sneaking his way around, the Prince finds the room that contains the treasures they were looking for. The first is an enormous hourglass that contains the Sands of Time. The second is a glowing dagger. As soon as he picks it up, the ceiling nearly falls on him, but time gets rewound to just before it happens, and he rolls out of the way.

He uses the dagger to escape the palace. The dagger’s main ability is to rewind time, allowing you to come back to a previous point, the game even rewinding the exact steps you’ve just taken. There’s a limited number of charges to the dagger, and using its power uses up a charge. You can also refill the dagger by planting it in patches of light; if you find eight patches, you unlock an extra charge.

These 4 charges are enough to start with, but at
the end you'll have 8 or 9. You'll need them all.
Trust me.

Still not sure how they did it (a quick research
implies a buffer-based trick), but 20 years later,
PoP:TSoT's time manipulation mechanic is still
regarded as one of the best ever implemented.

The dagger has a meter, which fills when you’re alive but depletes when you’re dead or rewinding, and it also represents how much time you can rewind. When that meter is full, you can rewind a couple of seconds, allowing you to try a different action to the one you just tried. However, if that meter is low, you might find out you can’t rewind far back enough to a point where you’re safe. As an example, say you get hit repeatedly by enemies, and it’s impossible to rewind to a point where you’re not being wailed on. This will happen a lot in combat.

Last but not least, the dagger also has a skill to slow down time, allowing the Prince to attack more swiftly for a short period of time, though enemies can still defend themselves.

Crumbling Castle

"Now, be a good kid and cause the apocalypse."
"What?"
"Oh, you didn't hear that right!"

The Persian army is victorious and brings its spoils of war home: The hourglass, the dagger (which the Prince asks to keep, despite the Vizier wanting it), and a group of women fated to become harem slaves. Hey, that’s how the times were. They bring this to the Sultan of Azad, a powerful ally of theirs. As the King presents the treasures, the Vizier explains that the Dagger can be used as a key to free the Sands of Time from the hourglass. The Prince is tricked into doing exactly that, and.. all Hell breaks loose. Apocalypse. The Sands take over people and turn them into zombies. In the chaos, the Vizier demands the dagger again, but the Prince flees the room.

Those guys with spears? They're protected
from your vaulting.

The Vizier has orchestrated all this and was planning to have both the sands and the dagger. It’s too late to think about that, now we must repair this mistake. And that involves making our way around a castle that’s not only filled with zombies and death traps, but also falling apart. Good thing we’re playing the ultimate parkour protagonist.

Dude's more skilled than all modern-day
Olympics-level acrobats, it's insane.

It's a bit hard to see, but she is taking part in
the battle with her bow and arrow.

We find another survivor: Farah, the Maharajah’s daughter, who was brought along to be taken into slavery. Joy. The Prince reunites with her, and she ends up helping him with various puzzles that the Prince wouldn’t have been able to solve on his own. She is armed with a bow and can shoot at enemies, though this comes with caveats: A) She’s not a very quick shooter, B) she can hit the Prince if he’s in the way, C) enemies can target her for attacks, and D) if she dies, that’s also an instant Game Over, so you have to watch over her. She’s not an unpleasant character, but her AI is a mixed bag; she’s helpful in platforming segments, but pretty bad in combat situations and it's a headache to take her into account there.

Enemies Everywhere

This is one of the earlier battles in the game, and
already you can be attacked from all sides.

Which takes me to: Combat! I hate it. The Prince can attack by swiping with his sabre and the Dagger of Time. That's it. He can vault over an opponent, jumping over them to sneak extra hits in, provided the enemies aren't armed against that trick. He’s lacking in special moves, so combat boils down to using the same attacks repeatedly, with the occasional use of the terrain for feats. For added annoyance, the game chooses your target for you, meaning you can never make that decision yourself, nor can you “opt out” of battle to, as an example, refill your HP at a fountain if needed.

The sand zombies can only be defeated in two ways: The main is their essence being sucked back into the dagger when they're KO, which is done at the press of a key (E by default on PC). This also refills a charge of the dagger. Later, we gain an extra ability that refills when the Dagger’s normal charges are all full. With that ability, we swing the dagger at an enemy who's not KO to turn them to sand right away. You’ll destroy them in two more hits, but they won’t refill a charge.

Don't even argue, you're going back in!
Goddamn sand zombies, I swear.

Oh! I forgot to mention. If you run away from
a bunch of enemies in an attempt to head to a
fountain or something, they can just teleport
back near you. In fact, you'll frequently see them
teleport close by at random. Why?
"Because fuck you", says this game.

However! Every time a battle begins, you’re facing multiple enemies at once, and it’s easy for them to trap the Prince between them. I stopped counting the number of times I ran out of dagger charges because I was mobbed from all sides, by enemies that counter vaulting, with no way to rewind far back enough to get out of the cycle of hurting. As you defeat them, new enemies will keep spawning, so you don’t get any respite until they’re all dead. You never know how many enemies the game has set up in a certain area; but it will always be "too fucking many". Some rooms are cramped, and furniture can get in the way (and since the game auto-targets enemies, you can’t attack furniture to break it!). There's an unnecessary yet unskippable cutscene every time a battle has been won, where the Princes sheathes his weapons. The worst part is that most enemy encounters feel the same; sure, the enemies can differ, but it's “beat enemies, more spawn, beat those, more spawn, till the game decides it's enough” every fucking time. It gets horribly repetitive.

I distinctly remember the first boss battle in this game – same concept, with enemies that keep spawning. The only difference was the boss himself: King Sharaman, as a sand zombie, which couldn’t be harmed until all the other zombies had been defeated. What a pain in the ass.

I wouldn't have recognized Sharaman without the beard. /s
Also shout-out to the zombie behind who looks less like he's
swinging his spear and more like he's partying.

One upside of these sepia flash-forwards is that
they may show you how to solve some future
puzzles, if you can catch the glimpses.

The only other notable event is the Prince seeing vultures carry the hourglass to a tower where the Vizier waits. Not much of a story past thius point, aside from the Prince and Farah helping each other across the castle’s many sectors. Though see a relationship develop between them as they overcome these trials. The Prince also goes from haughty and arrogant to somewhat humbler. Oh! And when we reach save points, the protagonist will see visions of what’s to come – platforming segments at first, but later, glimpses of cutscenes that happen near the end, with a worrisome fate awaiting Farah...

While we’re at special mentions, can I also slip a word about the camera? It’s not exactly a controversial statement to say that games at the time still struggled with their camera, is it? Yeah, it’s an issue here as well. Sure, you can press F to look in first-person for a moment, but it doesn’t help much whenever the camera moves erratically in battle, or when it decides to be at just the wrong angle while platforming. Ugh.

Theft

They do more there than just bathe, if you
catch my drift.

Following a grueling battle on an elevator, the Prince and Farah make it to the hourglass. However, they encounter the Vizier, who casts a spell to send the protagonists flying. They grab the dagger before the villain can, but land in a tomb and must climb the tower all over again. Farah tells the Prince a magic word taught by her mother, a word only she knows, which opens a secret passageway. Farah goes in first and the Prince follows. The next puzzles lead him to secret baths, in which he bathes with the Maharajah’s daughter.

When the Prince awakens, his sword and the dagger are gone, stolen by Farah. Thankfully, in this tomb, the Prince finds a sword that will let him kill any enemy in one hit. One puzzle to solve and it’s ours. However, without the dagger, we can no longer rewind time.

In other words: One mistake and you're dead.
If you're climbing, better do it flawlessly.

We catch up to Farah who is also going back up the Tower of Fate and follow along in some of the toughest sections yet. No rewinding, sparse save points, platforming that requires every single of your skills, and of course the goddamn camera is as unhelpful as possible. The enemies go down easily, but there’s still two dozens at every battle.

Killing enemies in one hit feels so good. Finally,
we're not powerless! It's nice against those
hammer-wielding Thanos-looking mofos.

Oh, we can bring her back. There's a way.

We arrive too late to save Farah who, cornered by enemies, falls down a hole in the floor. The Prince reaches for her hand but fails and  grabs the blade of the dagger. She lets go and falls to her death. She has spent the mystical weapon’s charges, so we can't rewind. The Prince heads to the room of the hourglass and encounters the Vizier, who promises immortality with the power of the Sands. Having lost everything, the Prince instead decides to plant the dagger into the hourglass...

...which resets time all the way back to before the attack on the Maharajah’s castle. Our hero still has the dagger, so he sneaks into the enemy castle to give it back to Farah. Hey, you know how the Prince was narrating this whole story to us since the beginning? Telling us “No, that’s not how it happened” when we got a Game Over, or bemoaning that we were leaving if we took a break? Yep, turns out he was telling the whole story to Farah, who is very skeptical.

The average encounter was harder than this!

However, they are attacked by the Vizier. The second and final boss in the game. The other boss was much harder than this. Killing this villain feels more like tying a loose end than a climactic finale. Lame fight, too: He summons clones, one at a time, and we beat them 1-on-1. With a full dagger charge, too. Easy battle. With the Vizier dead, the Prince tries to give the dagger back, but Farah still doesn’t believe his story. Realizing that this woman didn't live this grand adventure and doesn't love him, he leaves. Though not without telling the princess her secret word, as a final proof that those events did happen... Cue credits!

Final words

Oh, I'm about to step on surprise spikes.

I know Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is beloved as a gaming classic by gamers who braved its many challenges and came out on top. It’s had glowing reviews and is well-regarded to the point that all future Prince of Persia games suffered by comparison to it. It was also a game-changer in two ways, popularizing “parkour platforming” and featuring what is still seen as one of the best time manipulation effects in gaming history. The nostalgia is strong with this one.

The Prince hangs around quite a bit.

But I don’t have that attachment to it, and unfortunately, the years weren’t kind to this legendary title. Officially, the game is a combo of platform and puzzle, though it does feel uneven in that regard – unless you consider “how to get from Point A to Point B” a good form of puzzle, seeing as it’s the prime challenge in several rooms. The protagonist’s many parkour skills makes for a very special feel in how he plays, and it’s very rewarding once you learn to use it most efficiently. I can see why that type of gameplay caught on, and why Ubisoft ran with it for later Prince of Persia entries, as well as later franchises like Assassin’s Creed. Going through the areas felt great when I knew where to go and how to get there.

However, the game is also repetitive to a fault. Putting aside maybe the first and last hours, a huge chunk of the game is just going through areas. Sure, we get crumbs of story, mainly in the Prince’s changing attitude and the relationship he develops with Farah, but not much else aside from the sights. Thankfully, some puzzle-oriented rooms have clever ideas and work well with the platforming concept of parkour.

Using wall jumps to go upwards, and
sometimes downward when the walls are
spread apart enough... genius.

Really useful in a pinch if you're stuck... provided
you didn't just suck a charge back in.

I think the dagger’s time abilities are mostly well-implemented. The maximum amount of time you can rewind is long enough and there are enough drawbacks to not let such a skill completely break the game. Getting to add new charges by hunting down light patches is a great touch. The downsides: Since sucking an enemy’s sands back in resets the timer to zero and there’s always too many enemies around at once, you will frequently Game Over just because you got hit by a sneak attack right after filling a charge and cannot rewind. And there’s a “slow-motion” ability I mentioned earlier, which is cool, but it’s never explained nor relevant to the story, and thus never necessary; you might play the whole game without ever using it (later games find a use for it, though).

Light redirection puzzles. A classic!

I showed enough combat scenes in this review.
Here, have a platforming scene instead.

Combat is, by far, the weakest element. Everything contributes to making this a painful, annoying, again repetitive mechanic that's rarely fun. For several reasons: The Prince’s lack of special moves, barring vaulting and the rare acrobatic move done with walls; always having to fight groups of about five enemies at once, who can easily trap the Prince in a cycle of damage; no mercy invincibility; and most battles are a constant stream of enemies, twenty or even more, that aren’t properly killed unless taken back into the dagger or destroyed by another of its powers. Some tweaks to the formula would have been appreciated. The only saving grace is the final sword we obtain, which makes those battles not trivial, but easier – everything before that point is fucking torture. That flaw was so bad that beating this game was a battle of attrition, I got so irritated by combat alone that I wanted to give up. On a different note, I was disappointed that there were only two boss battles in the game – bit of a missed opportunity in my opinion, but then again, considering my gripes, maybe that's for the better.

In short: Some amazing ideas here and I see why it revolutionized the industry, but the problems are very noticeable nowadays. It's a precursor, so though it does some things really well, it set a groundwork for later games to further improve on. It’s worth trying because of the legacy it has left, but be aware of its issues. I’m not done with Prince of Persia though! My next review will be on another game in the series. Seeing as it's a Wii game though, it might take me some time to finish it. Stay tuned!