Prince of Persia (2008) starts off like a tale out of Arabian Nights. A rogue wanders the desert, loses himself in a sandstorm and falls into a story. A princess is being chased by palace guards, her father having made a pact with a dark god, and the rogue decides to help the girl by bringing life back to the desolate land. Then we play the game and come to the ending. Spoilers from here on out.
Elika has been using her lifeforce to heal the fertile grounds. The final healing, the one that takes place after the final boss fight, it kills her, but this is not the end of the game. In videogames, we always save the girl, so it's no surprise that the player is still in control of the Prince as he carries Elika’s body out of the temple. Each of the four sprawling areas of the game are now represented by 4 trees, and the player has to take his sword to each of them. It’s up to us to undo everything we’ve spent the entire game accomplishing, leading to an ending where Elika and the Prince are running from the unleashed dark god Ahriman. Sure if you’re playing the game on console, there’s DLC to right this wrong, but as a PC player playing the original release, having to end the game exactly where it started made me wonder why I spent all those hours playing it. This video’s purpose is to explore whether or not there was any actual point in playing Prince of Persia, and why. Enjoy.
Elika
You know that saying that the destination is not the point, it’s the journey that matters? For most games I would agree. The joy of them comes in the act of playing. Often a strong or even satisfying ending feels like a bonus. That such endings seem to be rare we’ll overlook. It can be overlooked because the act of playing the game itself is the memorable and enjoyable part of the experience. I did not find that to be the case with Prince of Persia. I think that’s why I was so mad when the game kept going after the initial credits. “Wait, I’ve beaten the final boss and saved the day, and you want me to play more of this? Ugh.” So why am I so down on the gameplay? Why did I find the act of playing Prince of Persia so tedious and frustrating? A good place to start is Elika and her utility to the player.
Move over Elizabeth, move over Ellie, because Elika was the birth of the unobtrusive helpful AI companion (why do they all have names that start with E?). If the player wants to, they can talk to Elika to learn more about the areas they’re exploring, but that’s something I rarely did. During platforming, pressing the Elika button will engage a double jump, and during combat the same button will fling Elika into the foe as a magic attack. Her most important role however is savior. Prince of Persia has no lives. If the player fails a platforming challenge or gets outclassed in a fight, rather than dying and having to suffer through a loading screen, Elika reaches out her hand and rescues the Prince. Within seconds we’re either back at the last piece of solid ground, or back in the fight, the enemy having regained a chunk of their health. It’s Elika’s ability to rescue the Prince that I feel is at the heart of the problems plaguing Prince of Persia, and it’s likely not for the reasons you think.
Inconsistency
My biggest problem with Prince of Persia is the inconsistency of the platforming. Let’s start with the double jump. Sometimes it’s obvious that the upcoming gap is too wide for the Prince to jump across and that the Elika button needs to be pressed. More often than not, I would only know a gap was too wide because the screen started to grey, letting me know that if I didn’t press that button immediately Elika would reach out her hand and I’d have to try again. Next let’s talk about the blobs. Part way through the game, blobs are introduced as a platforming obstacle. They crawl up and down the wall, the idea being to wall run around them when they’re out of the way. The issue is that by this point, the game is throwing large platforming sequences at the player. Often the player will have to circumvent the blobs on multiple occasions during a sequence, and the blobs at the end won’t be visible when the player chooses to start the run. I can line up my wall-run to avoid the blobs at the start, but by the time I get to the final wall-run, there’s no way to avoid the blobs and I get sent back to the beginning. Also, depending on where the player hits the wall to start a wall-run, the wall might run out before the animation is finished, or you finish too early, and it’s time for Elika to rescue the Prince once more.
I think rather than finetuning the platforming and level design to account for these inconsistencies, the fact that the player couldn’t die, that if they fell an animation would play and Elika would save them, was used as a band-aid to cover up the problem. I failed a lot during my time with Prince of Persia. I saw that Elika animation again and again. I swore more during the 10 hour runtime of Prince of Persia than the 37 hours I spent playing Dark Souls. There was a clear distinction too. It was very obvious when I was at fault. During these instances when the animation played, I knew what I had done wrong and I prepared to try again. Most of the time however, I felt the game was at fault. That’s when the swears would come out. After a string of such failures (often related to the blobs) I would blurt out “Just tell me what you want me to do.” Yes there’s no loading screens, and being rescued by Elika only takes a couple of seconds, but when the player feels that the game is at fault for wasting those couple of seconds, not only does that time add up, but the player’s enjoyment and tolerance built up from the parts that do work is ground down, and that was my experience.
Rhythm and Flow
Now the main criticism against the deathless mechanic has been it removes the stakes from the game. Never mind that we’re still having ridiculous arguments about difficulty in games in 2021, but back in 2008, the idea that a game would remove death altogether felt different, and many were not happy about it. They felt that it removed all tension from the game. It removed any stakes, and it removed the challenge because there was no penalty for failure. Now this removal of challenge I kind of agree with, but that’s because the game has an open world nature, so there’s no steady progression of difficulty. It’s all kind of flat. Anyway, would it surprise you that my thoughts about why the deathless mechanic is a bad idea come at it from the other side? I’ve mentioned that the deathless mechanic feels like a band-aid, but what it’s covering up is also going against the aims of the developers.
In an interview with Joystiq (hey remember Joystiq?) Prince of Persia producer Ben Mattes had this to say. “In many ways, we actually consider Prince of Persia to be a rhythm game in its platforming sequences, because when it works well, you get into the same sort of Zen-like state when you're platforming that you have in Guitar Hero. The world just shuts down and it just washes over you; you're completely lost in the experience. You're not picking out things like, "I have to press 'A' to do this," or "I have to press 'B' to do that" – just like you're not thinking, "I have to use this finger to hit the green key." Anyone who's played Guitar Hero for a couple of weeks ... they're not even thinking anymore about what their fingers are doing.” Now does this sense of rhythm and flow, and not having to think about your next button press sound like the experience of the game I’ve painted so far? No. Elika is supposed to be part of that. Did you just fall down? Well get back up and return to that non-thinking state. Be the platforming. Unfortunately instead, the lack of death is covering up a lack of platforming polish. When the platforming is inconsistent, and the inconsistency is in part because it’s so easy to just try again, needless to say the times I fell into this flow state Mattes describes were few and far between.
The Best Moment
Having mentioned that I thought an escalation of challenge was lacking due to the open world nature of the game, it may not surprise you to discover that the one time I felt both a sense of challenge and a sense of flow was during the final battle with Ahriman. The battle has long sequences of platforming. There was tension, there was reading the landscape in front of me and there was a thrill with wondering if I could get through the encounter unscathed. In this fight, I feel I experienced the game the way it was meant to be. I saw the game at its best, and it’s a shame that it only happened during the final boss. I was about to leave the game happy, not only because of what I had just played through but because I found the revelation that Elika had been using her life to revitalise the fertile grounds genuinely shocking. I thought it bold. Right at the end, the game course corrected and I felt like all the frustration I experienced to get to this point was worth it… and then I had to undo it all.
Destroying the four trees to bring Elika back to life contained more frustration with the game’s platforming inconsistency, but I also felt anger that the game was making me do this. You can argue that I could have walked away during the credits, but if there’s still game to play, I’m going to play it. It’s like those games that make the player commit horrific violence and then chastise them for it. It rings hollow. I resented Prince of Persia for not ending on its strongest moment, and undercutting everything that I had struggled to accomplish. Prince of Persia fought me every step of the way and with its final moments metaphorically flipped me the bird. I don’t care if there’s a DLC epilogue. After this experience, I wouldn’t want to play it. This is why I think playing Prince of Persia was ultimately a futile experience.
Questions, thank yous, and what’s next
But what are your thoughts? Did you enjoy your time with Prince of Persia? What do you think of the deathless mechanic? Did you play the Epilogue DLC, and if so, did it change your view of the game? I’d love to hear all about it down in the comments. Well that was fun. I often don’t play games I dislike all the way through, but it can be a positive. It helps strengthen my critical muscles to find out what wasn’t working for me. I hope you enjoyed it. There were a few pieces of criticism that helped inform my view on the game and links to them are in the description. That’s another critique down, and not long after the last one. Wow. Unfortunately I don’t think the turnaround for the next critique will be as speedy. I’m playing Planescape: Torment. It’s about time. I’ve wanted to play through it for years, and I bet there’s a lot of great criticism already written on it too. I hope you stick around for that one. I have a feeling it’s going to be good. If you enjoyed this video I’d appreciate anything you can do that helps get it in front of more eyeballs. Thanks for watching, and I hope you’re all having a wonderful day.
