Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a stellar side-scrolling surprise

destructoid.com:

It’s nice to see the Prince of Persia series back in action. While the Sands of Time remake is still cooking, the series is going back to its 2D roots with The Lost Crown, an Ubisoft Montpellier project. And after playing a small slice of it, I’m pretty excited about the full game.

The Lost Crown feels like it pays homage to the foundation of Prince of Persia. The player takes up the role of Sargon, a new character who’s part of an elite band of warriors looking for the kidnapped Prince Ghassan. In the demo I played as part of Ubisoft’s presence in Los Angeles during Summer Game Fest 2023, I got a fairly good look at how Sargon’s journey plays out. There’s a whole lot of running, jumping, parrying, and plenty of spikes to dodge.

While some fans are more familiar with the 3D era of Prince of Persia, this iteration looks back towards the 2D. It is a search-action, Metroidvania-style game. Sargon can walljump, slide around, dash, and move at a decent clip. It’s not terribly surprising to see, as Ubisoft Montpellier has quite a legacy in 2D action with Rayman Origins and Legends.

The studio feels like it’s in full form here with The Lost Crown, as navigating is a joy. Within minutes, I was already experimenting with ways of combining my movement abilities to smoothly fly through the level. I played it twice, once on a hefty PC set-up and again on Nintendo Switch (which Ubisoft says is running at 60 FPS, and was very solid in my experience). It felt great to explore a level with all I’d learned, effortlessly flipping and sliding past spikes and enemies.

Of course, it’s not just platforming, but those aforementioned enemies too. Some kind of undead plague has struck the temple Sargon and crew are exploring, and zombie soldiers