The new Prince of Persia, which arrives 13 years after the last canonical installment of the saga, puts us in the shoes of someone who is not the prince of Persia. As a start, this is already quite iconoclastic, but the game's breaks do not end there. Ubisoft's latest game is a fantastic installment of the saga that, although there is a long year ahead, strongly and surprisingly imposes its candidacy to be among the best of 2024.
And it is that no matter how much Prince of Persia: The Lost Crownlet's put ourselves in the shoes of Sargon —one of the Persian Seven Immortals, who is entrusted with the task of finding Prince Ghassan, kidnapped under strange circumstances—, what is important is the mechanical framework of the game, which very intelligently undoes the drift that the saga had taken to deliver an excellent work that bases its strength on returning to its origins.
If we do a little archeology we will see that the series follows the general path of the entire medium a bit: Prince of Persia emerged in 1989; In 1999 he would make the leap to three dimensions, and from 2003 to 2010 the Sands of Time saga would arrive, which added parkour to the three-dimensional environments (we can say that the style of those games is a direct antecedent of the saga. Assassin's Creed) and a rewind mechanic that added the temporal dimension to the platforms and made the game a very interesting experience.
Now, when no one expected anything from a saga that did not take advantage of its jump to the cinema, and when the mechanical drift of the game series seemed to have been subsumed by Ubisoft in Assassin's Creedthe saga returns to its origins with a story in scroll two-dimensional horizontal that deeply embraces the original hallmarks of the franchise and that, without anyone anticipating it, suddenly rises to one of the best exponents of the genre metroidvania.
This genre, metroidvaniais called that because, well, those who laid its foundations were the sagas Metroid and Castlevania. These games bore good fruit in the late 90s based on two fundamental pillars: two dimensions and an extensive and deep map that was explored in a non-linear way. That is, we did not move from phase to phase, but we could enter the map from the beginning until we found some obstacle that prevented us from moving forward; obstacle that we could overcome with some object that we found in some other part of the map itself.
Since 2000 the metroidvania They experienced a resurgence for the simple reason that the playable scheme is very effective when it comes to setting up a game, and that it can be much cheaper than a three-dimensional game if done independently. In 2017 it appeared the sublimation of this type of games, Hollow Knightwhich became one of the best games in history by combining two specific ingredients: the characteristics of the metroidvania added those of the saga souls (extreme difficulty, the double death concept that penalizes all player progress). In addition, it was a wonderful game in terms of setting, sound and level design. It is not this one Prince of Persia does not reach the levels of excellence (a strange and murky excellence, but excellence nonetheless) of Hollow Knightbut it is not unreasonable to say that it is the best metroidvania since 2018 when this game came out.
It's curious. Years and years improving graphics and three-dimensional environments, investing money and talent in perfecting real-time combat, so that in recent years some of the best games (Sky bluethe saga of Ori, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, cuphead, Inside), are played in two-dimensional format. And for some of the best combat systems (Persona 5, Baldur's Gate III, Octopath Traveler) be in turns.
That is to say, we are experiencing a brutal explosion of creativity forward, but, in a counterintuitive movement, also backwards: towards the templates and structures that already proved their effectiveness decades ago. The lesson is said and learned: sometimes it is better to perfect a formula that already exists than to try to reinvent Coca-Cola.
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