The important thing tenet of a Metroidvania sport is that you just backtrack – you journey again to once-explored areas and use your newly-acquired powers to forge new paths, attain new ledges, backflip into obscured passageways that comprise treasure. It’s a part of the sport; intuitive and self-aware, and sensible builders depart breadcrumbs so that you can nibble on as you head again by to the start of the sport, your avatar’s physique buzzing with new-found energy. En route, you might uncover extra issues – secrets and techniques, extra hidden paths, respawned enemies with a grudge – and also you get distracted and pulled out of your round orbit.
Prince of Persia: The Misplaced Crown has mastered this ebb and move, artisanally guiding you round its expansive map with an nearly sadistic wave of its hand. The story, tacky and wrought as it’s, is about people pretending at politics on the behest of an absent god, and that’s what you’re feeling like as a participant as you trek from east to west, once more, puppeted by the strings of the deified powers of the developer. Why? Since you should, since you crave energy, since you need to set issues proper.
However the story isn’t why you got here right here, is it? Until you’re hungry for the subtext and lore buried in Hole Knight’s Hallownest and informed within the margins, Metroidvania titles have by no means actually excelled at tales – it’s finest to maintain issues easy: go right here, do that, win. Prince of Persia: The Misplaced Crown’s greatest failing is trying to knit a posh narrative collectively, realised with haughty dialogue and Saturday Morning Cartoon visuals. It’s all A Bit A lot. However it’s set dressing for the true star of the present: the map.
