[COLUMN] Everyone Should Steal From Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown | by Marty Sliva (Patreon)

Sometimes you come across a mechanic in a game and think to yourself “every single game should steal from this.” And while we’re only a few weeks into 2024, I feel like I’ve already found this year’s mechanic that I hope becomes the norm for games going forward.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a very good, very familiar Metroidvania. The combat is responsive and filled with room for expression, whether you’re fighting common goons or room-sized bosses. These are augmented by various talismans you can equip to give you an array of stat buffs and cater to a given playstyle, though the limited slots means that you’ll have to make some tough decisions.

Our hero Sargon feels great to control while solving platforming challenges and nicely designed puzzles through the use of an ever-growing array of jumps, dashes, and time-altering abilities. And it’s all set in the cursed city of Mount Qaf, which unfolds in the familiar and satisfying way that all of the best Metroidvania maps do. Think Planet Zebes, Dracula’s Castle, and Hallownest – while I’m only 10 hours into The Lost Crown, Mount Qaf sits nicely alongside those classics.

If you’ve played any of the aforementioned genre staples from that last sentence, then you’ll be pretty familiar with everything I just outlined about Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. And yes, while it doesn't reinvent the wheel, everything it offers is finely tuned and fully fleshed out, creating an experience that just feels wonderful from top to bottom. This isn’t surprising, considering that this comes from Ubisoft Montpellier, the studio responsible for Beyond Good & Evil, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and Rayman Origins+Legends. Why Ubisoft wasn’t banging this drum throughout the game’s marketing is beyond me.

But amidst all of this familiarity, there’s one thing The Lost Crown does that I haven’t seen before across the genre. Early on in the game, you gain access to a tool known as Memory Shards. The narrative conceit is that the cursed Mount Qaf treats the concepts of time, memory, and reality in a rather fluid manner, so this item helps you stay tethered to sights you’ve come across by allowing you to take a snapshot of the game at any given moment and pin it to that exact location on your sprawling map. Hover back over that icon, and you can view the full photo you took, reminding you of exactly what that place looks like, and what secrets it might hold.

This seems so simple on paper, but is ridiculously useful in practice, especially given the common flow of the Metroidvania genre. Think about how many times you’ve come across an obstacle that you can’t quite solve yet – a ledge too high or far, a switch that requires some kind of unknown mechanism, or a color-coded object linked to an ability you don’t have yet. Some time later, could be an hour or could be 10, you gain access to the skill or tool needed to solve that scenario, but by then you’ve long-forgotten about that previous obstacle.

Some games solve this by conveying too much information on the map and marking down every single one of these moments you come across, taking away your sense of discovery. Others keep you in the dark the whole time, relying on the chance that you stumble back through that area once you’re better equipped. But what The Lost Crown does with its Memory Shards is give you agency in creating your own Metroidvania gameplay flow.

I like games with a sense of cartography. Drawing my own maps on the bottom screen of a 3DS as I delve deeper into the dungeons of Persona Q. Surveying the world around me and comparing it to a diegetic map in Miasmata or the treasure hunts of Sea of Thieves. Climbing up to the highest point around me in Breath of the Wild and making a note of every point of interest I can spot before the horizon. In an era where so many in-game maps feel like they’ve been vomited on with icons and quest markers and collectables and resources, I appreciate a developer that starts with a lighter pour and trusts that I’ll be ordering another once that’s done.

The Memory Shards feature feels like such a simple evolution of letting us put pins and reminders on an in-game map, but it’s one that I could imagine so many games adopting going forward. The most recent example of a mechanic that sparked a similar kind of feeling in me was last year in Final Fantasy XVI’s Active Time Lore system, which not only allowed you to pop up a quick primer of all the proper nouns being tossed about any given scene, but also let you get caught up on all the moving pieces of the story if you happened to take a break from playing. Games like Final Fantasy XIII and Battlefield: Hardline had somewhat similar elements, but I’d love for that to become a norm in more games going forward.

Sometimes a game or a mechanic comes across and acts as a kind of mile-marker where it feels the industry turns to a new chapter of history afterwards. Stuff like Doom, Super Mario 64, Grand Theft Auto III, and Resident Evil 4 spring to mind, and more recently, Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring. But then there are individual mechanics that I hope will catch on, but haven’t received the same level of industry-wide absorption as I would’ve liked.

The fluid and reactive conversations of Firewatch, the bite-sized open world of A Short Hike, the rolling HP counters of EarthBound, and the Social Links of Persona are all elements I’d love to see in other games. Time will tell if the altruistic “strand” mechanics of Death Stranding catch on, and it’s common knowledge now that the genius Nemesis System of Shadow of Mordor/War is disappointingly locked behind a patent.

As it stands, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’s Memory Shard mechanic is a simple, yet brilliant evolution surrounded by countless highly refined elements of a familiar genre, which raises the entire experience to become the first truly standout game of 2024. Now let’s see what other developers do with that.