2024's first excellent video game: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

Plus: Your gaming calendar for the week ahead

Prince of Persia: he Lost Crown. Screenshot: Ubisoft Montpellier / Ubisofr

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a marvel, a side-scrolling action and exploration game so good that the long-running portmanteau identifying its genre should probably be spelled “metroidvansia” from now on. (Some assistance, if you need that one explained.)

I’m playing on Xbox Series X, where I’m 27.45% through the game, clocking 7:57:35. Maybe it’ll take a turn for the terrible, but I doubt it. (It’s also coming to Switch, PlayStation, PC and Luna, FYI.)

Releasing next week, the The Lost Crown is a January delight, a game that arrives after the holiday rush to start the new year right. See also: last year’s Dead Space remake as well as the lifetime trophy holder for Best January Video Game.

Throughout my nearly eight hours in The Lost Crown, I’ve been adventuring as a warrior named Sargon, who has entered the complicated architecture of Mount Qaf to save the titular prince.

Like a great Metroid game, the peak pleasure of The Lost Crown comes as you solve problems you nearly forgot you had. 

Into the cities, depths and forests of Mount Qaf our hero goes, slashing twin swords at enemies, climbing beautiful walls, stopping briefly at a tunnel containing two confounding doors (hmmm… opening the near one keeps shutting the far one), turning back to swing off a horizontal pole, up toward a boss battle, playing for hours and hours more and then getting a new power that…wait a minute…could this help with those doors? Time to head back.

Just as role-playing games present the fantasy that, if you put the effort in, you will always get stronger and smarter, games of The Lost Crown’s type present the dream that life’s many confusions can all be cleared up. 

There is a balance to that kind of design, delicately achieved by The Lost Crown’s creators at Ubisoft Montpellier. These games can easily become overwhelming with their secrets and can tilt into the tedious with all their required doubling back. Not here. Mount Qaf is packed with complex passageways and mysterious quirks, but Sargon moves so quickly and smoothly—and his expansive arsenal of attacks and counter-attacks are so satisfying—that backtracking is seldom dull. His powers, only half of which I’ve obtained so far, make his movement magical, an aerial ballet of flips, dashes and cooler techniques best not spoiled.

It helps that The Lost Crown is designed so that even players with the worst memories can keep track of all the conundrums they want to clarify. The game is packed with tools for virtual note-taking: you can pin the map with icons to represent areas you want to return to; better, you can take take a screenshot of a suspicious area and pin that to the map, the easier to remember why some isthmus in the purple portion of the map seemed worth a revisit. This being a Ubisoft AAA game, you could also buy the $10 more expensive version of The Lost Crown, which grants three days of early access and a bird that will fly near Sargon and chirp when he enters a room that contains hidden, unclaimed treasure. (In an amusing undermining of that premium offer, The Lost Crown’s designers also permit any player to obtain an optional charm that chimes when Sargon is close to a hidden treasure chest. And while we’re tracking Ubi-isms, TLC does not appear to have any DLC and certainly no season pass. Maybe someone overslept again?)

The main difference between this game and the great Metroids and Castlevanias: lots of spiky traps. Mount Qaf is full of optional traps full of rolling spikes, trap doors and other problems to navigate. Also cool: Even this game’s secret areas have secret areas.

My Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown take is not an outlier. The Lost Crown is getting raves, because it’s good and possibly because it helps to arrive with low expectations. The launch trailer for this game was hated on last June, at least on YouTube, but sometimes such games turn out terrific.

Not that I was hating it last June.

I played it then. I took notes, which I am sharing here in full.

I nailed it exactly seven months ago. Expect more of that prescience as Game File continues.

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The week ahead

Sunday, Jan. 14

• Awesome Games Done Quick returns for a week’s worth of live, commentated speedrunning. They’re doing it for charity again, and there will be runs for Baldur’s Gate III, Sneak King, Hades, Bluey: The Video Game and SOMEONE IS GOING TO SPEEDRUN GYROMITE WITH ASSISTANCE FROM THEIR DOG (they’ve done it before!). Full schedule here. The dog speedrun is slated for 2:18pm ET on Tuesday.

Tuesday, Jan. 16

• Game Boy Advance role-playing game classics Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age are added to the playable library of GBA classics for Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers. (Zeitgeist watch: The series also got an unexpected shout-out during December’s The Game Awards.)

Thursday, Jan. 18

• Bulletstorm VR (PSVR2, Meta Quest, Steam VR), Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (PC, console, Luna)  and Turnip Boy Robs a Bank (PC, console) are released.

Friday, Jan. 19

• The Last Of Us Part II: Remastered (PS5) and Another Code: Recollection (Switch) are released.

• Pokémon-with-guns game Palworld (PC) begins early access.

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In brief…

🎮 Jennell Jaquays, pioneering tabletop and video game designer, has died. She was 67. 

🚨 Discord is laying off 170 workers, or 17% of its workforce, The Verge reports. 

🤖 Valve will permit game developers to include AI-generated content in games submitted for sale in its PC store, but will require them to disclose it during submission, the company has announced. Valve will include “much” of that disclosure in games’ store listings, so the public can see.

• Valve says it will also introduce a tool that lets players report illegal content in games that include live-generated AI content. 

🤔 SAG-AFTRA reacted to union members’ complaints this week regarding a controversial deal with AI voice acting firm Replica Studios by publishing the contract’s full terms, a summary and an FAQ. The documents confirm that the arrangement was not subject to a referendum by the full union membership but was made by the committee bargaining voice actors’ overall contract with game publishers. 

• The Replica deal mandates the standard minimum VO rate of $956.75 for a 4-hour session to record voice for AI and allows Replica to use “digital replicas” of member’s voices at the 4-hour session fee, for every 300 lines of dialogue (or 3000 words). Use of deceased actors’ voices requires consent and payment at those rates.

😲 Benoit Clerc, head of publishing at mid-size publisher Nacon, tells GamesIndustry that “[t]here are too many games currently on the market,” a glut he blames on over-investment stemming from the gaming boom that occurred during the peak of COVID lockdowns. It’s making it too hard for games to get noticed, he says. (For more along those lines, read my overview of what went wrong for gaming in 2023.)

🧱 Microsoft’s Mojang Studios and external partner Blackbird Interactive are ending post-release development for Minecraft Legends, which launched last April. Minecraft spin-offs such as Legends and Minecraft Dungeons have gotten decent reception but haven’t had the staying power of the core game.

💬 After Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League got panned by some preview writers, Warner Bros. has taken the unusual step of lifting the NDA on the game’s alpha test from late last year, MP1st reports. The publisher is no doubt hoping that players from those sessions will have more positive things to say.

⁉️ The company formerly called GameShark says they were just guessing when they recently said they’d launch a new product “to coincide with the Nintendo Switch 2 in September 2024.”