Ubisoft has focused on reviving older IP’s for the past few years. Their recent success with Rainbow Six: Siege, Ghost Recon: Wildlands, and the upcoming reboot of The Settlers have shown Ubisoft’s skill in bringing old gaming experiences back with a modern take.
Prince of Persia has not received this treatment, which is a massive shame. Sands of Time is one of the most influential video games made in the 2000s, combining storytelling through gameplay with phenomenal puzzles. Its usage of time manipulation and movement has rarely been seen since. Here are 10 ways that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time changed the gaming landscape forever.
10 Art Style
Prince of Persia is known for its Middle Eastern-inspired visuals and fantastical-yet-grounded locations. This focus on grounded fantasy is the cornerstone of many games today.
Destiny, Skyrim, and plenty of other video games follow this similar design philosophy. Every room seems grandiose in either design or scale, yet has grounded elements that pull in players to make them feel that this could be a real place. Combined with the great music, anyone who plays Sands of Time will immediately notice its unique atmosphere.
9 Camera Improvements
Plenty of third-person video games struggle with having consistent player cameras. Sometimes cameras can get stuck in geometry or get covered with a nearby wall.
Sands of Time doesn’t have a perfect camera, but it’s close. Perspective changes while wall-running or fighting are frequent enough to give a better angle on the action while maintaining focus on what’s around the player. Titles such as Darksiders would go on to include this perspective shift when needed, helping gameplay feel smooth and engaging.
8 Companions
The Prince is accompanied by Farah for most of the game. She can fire arrows at enemies and help solve puzzles that would otherwise be impossible.
Well, Sands of Time wasn’t technically the first game to improve on companion design. Ico is a fantastic example of making an escort mission an entire game, and Ubisoft used Ico as a reference point for making companions in future games like Farah. Players even get to play as Farah at certain points, helping draw a personal connection to that character. The writing in Sands of Time also helped humanize her instead of just making her into a game mechanic.
7 Story Within Gameplay
Half-Life shook the industry with its interactive cutscenes, but Sands of Time further improved the formula with added banter in the gameplay itself.
Prince and Farah will talk to each other as they complete puzzles and engage in combat. Cinematics are still a core part of telling the story, but the information is also given while the player is traversing the level. It makes exposition dumps more digestible and gives the player something to focus on while they mindlessly traverse an area, a technique that nearly every big-budget game uses today.
6 Co-op puzzles in single-player titles
This is a strange thing to mention, but it is exceeding rare to find single-player puzzles that revolve around multiple characters. Sands of Time is one of the first games of the 6th generation to do this to great effect.
While the Prince can manipulate time to some degree, plenty of puzzles and areas require her help to progress through. The Prince might not be able to slip through small cracks and crevices, but Farah can. Her banter can also make puzzles less of a slog to progress through if the player ever gets stuck, something that Portal and its sequel would utilize to great effect as well.
5 Parkour
There is something so exciting about running on walls and traversing a massive play space. Sands of Time is one of the best examples of how to make wall-running work in a third-person setting.
Players have complete control of their character when running on walls, climbing up objects, and navigating dangerous traps. Jumping between walls is also possible, making traversing the environment go from being mundane to requiring a degree of skill. Mastering the parkour system of Sands of Time makes players feel empowered. This single mechanic was the entire basis for Mirror’s Edge, which that game would revise into a first-person perspective to great effect.
4 Action Game Puzzles
While Farah can help the player solve puzzles to some degree, the Prince needs to do most of the work to progress through the game. The design and spectacle of some of these puzzles hold up to this day.
Players manipulate entire platforms with switches that shift large areas of the map. Blades and traps populate plenty of hallways that players will need to wall run through. Manipulating switches in a pattern to unlock an entrance was also expertly done here, and those who got stuck could hear banter from companions to make the lack of action more engaging. Many adventure games have taken cues from Sands of Time because of how fun these puzzles could get.
3 Rhythmic Combat
The Batman Arkham series not only showed gamers that superhero games can be engaging, but it also showed how satisfying rhythmic combat can be.
Sands of Time used a similar system for combat. Players could strike, dodge, and parry attacks that were heading their way. Instead of spamming attacks like most other action titles at the time, Sands of Time focused on timing and forward-thinking instead. If players made major mistakes, they could use the power of their dagger to manipulate time or use powerful moves. It isn’t as refined as Batman Arkham City, but it holds its own after all these years.
2 Time Manipulation
Slowing down or controlling time is objectively cool. Changing the game speed can add a massive layer of depth to nearly any video game, from puzzles to shooters.
Sands of Time allows players to rewind time up to ten seconds before the present. Not only is this useful for overall traversal, but combat also gets even more interesting when you take into account this mechanic. You can undo mistakes in combat, or use it to slow combat and make critical decisions with more time to spare. Being able to buff your speed and slow time with the power of haste also allowed players a way out of tough combat situations.
1 Encouraging Experimentation
More than combat, however, time manipulation allowed Ubisoft to encourage one of the most important mechanics in any video game: experimentation.
Many video games struggle with encouraging players to experiment with systems. If the player fails through dying, they are set back to a checkpoint. In Prince of Persia, they can set time back a few seconds and try again, providing immediate feedback while giving the player complete control of their actions. It is a fantastic way of allowing players multiple attempts that they can control, and it also allows the developers to make encounters around rewinding as well. Games like GRID have borrowed this mechanic to great effect, but few games have encouraged experimentation as masterfully as Sands of Time did.
NEXT: The 10 Best Xbox Games Of The 2000s, Ranked
