Videogame review: Prince of Persia (2008)

[jrw]

Prince of Persia (2008)

This isn't really a review, it's just a mental dump what was on my mind as I played through the game. It kind of assumes you're familiar with the game already and how it's laid out.

Briefly: you control the prince, and are running around the whole time with an NPC named Elika, trying to bring light back to a kingdom that has been thrown into darkness and "corruption." There's a temple that's a central base, and then four main areas to explore, each of which has six levels in it, that are sometimes closed off until you activate colored "power plates" (red, blue, yellow, green) back at the temple, which you can only do when you collect enough "light seeds," little glowing white balls that appear everywhere after you drive the corruption out of an area. Meanwhile, you clamber acrobatically around, sometimes having to solve puzzles where you rotate gears and other machinery, and occasionally fight bad guys. Each area has an area boss that fights you at the end of every level within that area.

Okay, that's what the game is like. Or rather, that's what the game nominally is. The commentary below is what the game is like.

Some spoilers follow.

Gripes and grouses, general and specific
First, a long list of gripes, that I jotted down during play when something irritated me enough that I wanted to make a note of it.

1. "Corruption" looks like plastic garbage bags.
   
2. The colored power plates are really boring, except for the green one, which requires you to control what happens every step of the way. The others are just 'press the magic button' and are pretty much identical, instead of being four unique things. And the yellow one where you crash into shit while flying? That sucks on a lot of levels. Alternating between boring and really fucking irritating is a bad scale to be on.
   
3. Sometimes the game totally forgets to be interactive. A lot is made of these four black gates, and how you can't open them yet. then when it comes time to be able to open them, it doesn't even let you initiate it. Not by starting a conversation with Elika, not by pushing 'Y' at least, for god's sake. No, you walk near it and a cutscene runs. Gee, that's loads of fun.
   
4. It'd be nice if after a serious conversation there were a bit of bridge dialogue instead of going back into the background loop, which is always jarring lighthearted banter that clangs after a serious conversation. But there's a lot of reasons the dialogue system is tricky, so at least I'm sympathetic there.
   
5. The game makes you retrace steps redundantly an awful lot, especially while seed-hunting. there's always ones on a one-way trip coming back to where you start from, so to get those you have to come all the way back then go all the way out again. Not to mention the fact that you might have covered that ground twice before on your way to and from a section that was open, passing through one that's still "closed" because you don't have the right colored button active yet.
   
6. Making you go back to the temple all the time to activate stuff is not really that great, design-wise. the world is designed to be this maze of connected areas that you can hop around between. often I'd see an interesting path and want to take it, and I could - I just couldn't do anything when I got there, because it wasn't active yet. And later when it was active, I'd have to plod around trying to get back to where I'd already been. In the spirit of letting players find their own way through the game it would have been nice to encourage this kind of random exploration of the map, following your own whims about where you wanted to go next. In a way it's just as linear as the original, but more frustrating because it shows you areas you can't actually interact with way before you can.
   
7. Sometimes it feels like I'm playing Prince of Persia for kindergarteners or something. very few areas are really tricky to play. Where's the beautiful design work of the original? It had so many great level designs where it's really puzzling to work out what to do. Here - geez, the number of gameplay elements they simply removed from the original is boggling.
   
8. They tried to improve on the original by making it so you automatically flip to the other side of a pillar when you jump to it, so that you're set up to hop to the next one immediately. that's kind of nice (but also reduces your interaction). However, they also kept the thing I hated most about pillars in the first one, which is that when I want to rotate around one, I always go in the opposite direction that I'm intending to. When I don't think about it, I instinctually move in the wrong direction. when I stop and think about it, I still move in the wrong direction. I must be the only one who has this problem, but I don't get what the deal is.
   
9. Running on walls is one thing, but a prince who can clamber across ceilings stretches things a little too far. that's not acrobatic agility, that's ... absurd.
   
10. Having the run on walls button be the same button as the "jump" button is also absurd. why not have it so I hold a trigger down to run on a wall or something?
    
11. I didn't like having to fight army after army of bad guys in the first one, so I'm glad that's gone. having to fight the same four bad guy bosses twelve times each, I'm not sure that's a great replacement. Especially since they're all basically the same fight repeated. one boss you have to shove around, so he's different, but the other three are fought the exact same way, and you fight each of them over and over again. Why was that a good idea?
    
12. I don't know why they limited the camera movement so much. I can never look around my environment as much as I need to, to see what I need to do or just get the lay of the land. They've removed the first-person-view toggle, which removes your ability to look 360 degrees (or whatever number of degrees it is for looking every direction in a sphere). Sometimes I honestly can't see what I'm supposed to jump to next because the camera won't move to where I can look in the right spot. and sometimes I miss picking up glowing seeds because I can't see them when I'm up on a wall, because the camera moves even less when you're on a vertical surface. Incredibly irritating.
    
13. Often Elika will start speaking as soon as we make it to a higher platform in a level, something along the lines of "Okay, we need to use that plate if we're going to keep going." - and I haven't even seen what plate she's talking about or even looked around at all yet, because I only touched down a second ago. and I can't look around when she's saying this. So it seems out of order for her to say this. Can't you wait until I ask her?
    
14. I guess it's nice that she has hints for how to solve things, not that any of them are especially challenging puzzles, but sometimes I just want some conversation and instead she starts telling me how to move gears around.
    
15. There's no conversation at all when you're not standing on solid ground. Weird, because (narrative designer/writer) Andy Walsh mentioned during his talk (at AGDC 08) that there was a special level of dialogue for when you're in a specific situation, like walking on a balance beam or hanging on a pillar. I guess everything he wrote for those situations got axed.
    
16. Trying to find those last few missing "light seeds" is exactly like trying to find your keys in your house, or some other lost item, where you look and you look and you look, and they're here somewhere, so you have to look in the same few areas fifty times, over and over again. It induces a state of mental and emotional fatigue that is truly wearing. This happens in real life all the time, and so having a supposed piece of entertainment software accurately recreate this same crappy feeling is pretty disheartening.
    
17. The alchemist areas have as a background ambience a high-pitched dog whistle broken-monitor whine that is not intermittent, it is ceaseless. And so as we run around for hour after hour, we're forced to listen to this auditory irritant, guaranteed to set one's nerves on edge and make one highly irritable, if not driven mad by the sound of it. Who thought that was a good idea? For god's sake, people. (Note: the whistle finally shut off about five minutes after I wrote this, but I couldn't figure out what had made it stop.)
    
18. There was also a passageway in the Alchemist area that was seemingly impassable, because the black tentacles shooting out of the wall were mismatched in timing. You had to run past one pair along a wall, then jump to another wall that had a second pair, and when it was okay to pass the first ones, the second ones were just launching. I tried eight or nine times. Once, while waiting for maybe a better synchronization, I suffocated and died from bad air. What the hell, people? The most aggravating part of this is that I didn't need to go down that route, I was in the last area of the game that I hadn't played, and decided to just check down that connecting corridor for completeness' sake. I got past the tentacles one way, but they were impassible going the other way, due to the timing involved in reaching them from the other direction (which involved clambering past other obstacles first). So I got myself trapped and unable to go back the way I came, just because I was curious to explore a little bit before finishing off this level. Fortunately, I saved the game right before I went that way, but it was highly annoying that I had to restore my game in order to make it back, because I could not see any way of making it past that double pair of tentacles with the mismatched timing they had.

Endgame commentary
By this point, I'd gotten to the endgame, the final level with the final über-boss. I actually made one or two positive comments, perhaps buoyed by coming to the end.

1. Woo hoo! Got through the last orgy of hopping, running, and flying from plate to plate at the climax in one go! This game has totally trained me how to play it.
   
2. I have really good instincts as a player. To elaborate on that is an essay (or perhaps a paragraph or two) for another time. In this instance, I somehow had the narrative instinct to leave one area for last that was one of the more complex and interesting. Then, to really cap it all off, I rung up three achievements at once - reaching the highest point in the whole game, fighting my last battle with the last of the four main boss guys there and defeating him, and collecting all 1000 light seeds in the game, in one fell swoop. I don't know whether the final fight with the Alchemist is that exciting if you don't leave him for last (the game kind of scales up battle difficulty as it goes), but with floating in mid-air and being on an elevator platform that keeps moving up and down, it had a kinetic urgency to it that really made it fitting as a final battle arena. And it was the final battle arena because I, the player, decided to leave it for last, even though I didn't know what it would be like. It just shaped up that way. If the designers played a part in making all final battles be a bit climactic-feeling, then that's still good, because it means that designer and player worked together to create an effective climax to the game, giving me just enough freedom to do things in the order I wanted, and making sure to deliver the goods whenever I finally hit the end of the road.
   
3. If you're absolutely at the edge of some vines, hitting 'A' will make you run along the wall away from them. If you're not quite all the way at the edge, hitting A will make you spring away from the wall. Designing a final sequence around a lot of vine-crawling where the camera is a hundred feet away so that you can't tell whether you're all the way at the edge or not, and you're in a time-pressure hurry, such that the button that should get you to the next safe spot is the same as the one that will make you leap into the darkness and have to start all over again - I think that's retarded. Fucking don't do that.
   
4. The end of the game is nice. You hear this tangle of voices at war in one of the character's heads, saying "Choose life" / "Choose death". Then "the choice is not yours..." Which, they're right. Once again, it's not the player's choice to make a momentous choice for the characters. This choice isn't even given to the character we're playing. Hello, people? Hello? Why is it never the player's choice at these end scenes, eh? At least Myst got that right. The whole point is player choice, isn't it? Nope, apparently not. The player just gets to watch the cutscene happen.

Credits and epilogue
Then I made some comments about the credits and "bonus" epilogue scene. It's not really a bonus, but it feels like it. It's a bonus like when you go to see a band and they say "G'night!" and go off, expecting you to holler for an encore, which they've already rehearsed and is the same every show they play.

1. After that, the game ends in a very classy fashion. All the bad guys are dead and light has dispelled all darkness from the kingdom. Nothing left to do but exit. You walk out through some doors into a long hallway, and the credits start rolling. Partway down the hallway, the large doors scrape shut behind you. Farther down the hallway, another set of doors scrapes open, showing the beautiful land outside. Credits still rolling. I paused here, and I'm expecting a little more post-credits epilogue stuff to do, but this was very nicely done.
   
2. I think it's odd how inconspicuous and minor the cast is in the credits. They're about nine hundred names in, mixed in among other minor bunches of people who did important but not particularly prominent jobs on the game. I guess I'm used to Hollywood or something. But considering there's only two main actors, you think you could list them first or early on and get them out of the way for the design and graphics talent to follow. Because, you know, after listening to these voices for hours and hours, I was curious who they belonged to. I didn't know I'd have to watch with rigorous care into the seventh minute of credits to find out, you know? Odd prioritizing.
   

• [warning: spoilers for the epilogue]

1. Well, it turned out that the epilogue didn't fulfill my expectations. I almost thought I was going to have to eat my words, that it was presenting me with the "choose life / choose death" choice that I had just complained was withheld from me - but I was right after all. The only choices were "keep playing, and choose to once more unleash the evil that you just spent the entire game fighting and cleaning up after" or stop playing. I was hoping for a choice between that, which I saw as doing a terribly wrong thing, and doing the right thing - finding my way back to the canyon where I started the game, finding my donkey wandering around (minus the gold she was supposed to be carrying when the prince lost her just before the game started), tell her, "Well girl, let's go home," and wander off sadly, but having made the right moral choice. Instead, with great reluctance, I played out the only scenario available, and while it was very dramatic, it was not very satisfying and left me in bad spirits. There was one genuinely spooky moment when I walked back into this central chamber, and a deep demonic voice suddenly shouted, "SAVE YOUR MOTHER!" Or something like that. He said something about my mother, anyway. (Ha ha.) I have no idea what it was talking about. What mother? But it was really scary and jarred the daylights out of me and left my pulse racing.
   
2. After playing out the rest of this epilogue, it ran the credits again, which was weird, because if you've gotten that far you've already seen the credits once. It ran the same credit animation that you can get by going to the options from the game's main menu and watching them, only it removed the ability to halt the credits and go to the menu. Unskippable credits! That's a major offense. I don't see the point of that. Even less so since I'd already seen the credits once. Why make them unskippable at all, let alone when they're obviously a repeat for the player? Just barmy.
   
3. I also don't like how certain things are completely removed from my ability. Like with the black gates, where just walking towards them starts a cutscene instead of at least letting me push a button, there was something critical in the epilogue to do, and I anticipated what it was, and wanted to kind of walk to a spot and push a button, but instead as soon as I walked the barest step towards the spot a cutscene took over.

Bonus material

After all this, I watched some of the behind-the-scenes videos on the bonus disc, all of which were apparently taken from web videos that used to play on the website, or maybe they're still there now. If they are, that makes the idea of a bonus disc of material kind of hollow or irrelevant. Not only that, but you only get one or two of these videos out of the many others they refer to as being on the website. What, there's not enough disc space to put all of them on there? And of course they choose a bunch that are all redundant with each other, and slim on actual offerings of how they actually did the work.

1. They did take a lot of time to brag about the content system ("Every single fight is like a boss fight!" Yeah-huh.), and the unique system of chaining attacks together into longer strings. In a menu of the game, you can see a list of these attacks, all those button sequences that I could barely make sense of in table format (after the fact, after watching these videos, the table finally made sense), and not in the slightest in the tree-view. They kept talking in these videos about how simple the tree-view made doing these chains of attacks. Since I never understood how it worked (I looked at it, tried to make sense of it, and watched as the prince did absolutely nothing in the way of chaining attacks, making me think I'd made no sense of it after all.) I only managed them every random once and a while. I guess it's good that you can get through the whole game without ever figuring it out, but wouldn't it have been nice to be able to do that the whole time, especially since they were so keen on the system and wanted players to enjoy it? Or, you know, might have even designed all the battles so that you're supposed to do this, otherwise it takes forever and it's really tedious to win? Mmhmm. If they were so proud of this fight system, why didn't they offer an in-game tutorial in chained attacks? At most there was the chart and tree view, each unexplained, and an exhortation to use chained attacks that came on loading screens. I don't quite understand that.
   
2. There was also on the bonus disc the content of an official help book for the game, in which I learned that you could break free from an opponent grabbing you by hitting the Grab button, which I didn't know about. Might have come in handy once or twice. But I'm confused to learn that, since every time an opponent grabbed me, the game immediately did one of those "Quick, hit the [X/Y/A/B] button or else!" overlays, so I was consigned to doing that or else taking a severe beating, which happened a lot of the time since I just don't have the reaction time I need, or because I'm already busy hitting a different button, or because I can never remember where the A button is, and the time it takes to read the letter A, try to remember that it's the bottom button, and tell my thumb to hit it, is too long for the game, and I get severely pummeled.

So, that's over with. I guess on balance it sounds like I hated it since I had so many peeves and gripes, but it did keep me occupied and I did finish the whole thing and I did collect all 1000 hidden glowy things. If they resurrect the series for yet another installment, I might even play it. Is it possible I enjoyed it despite my lengthy gripes? Quite possibly so.