I have a soft spot for metroidvanias. It’s a genre that seems to scratch many itches at once, and the floor to entry is rather low in terms of development. They can be taken in bite size chunks, can have varying levels of difficulty, typically have some interesting storyline, and the branching paths make for some interesting options. Hollow Knight, Ori, and Blasphemous still sit way atop for me, though there are many others close by, like Bloodstained. Heck, Dead Cells has a good foothold in the genre too!

The recent Price of Persia game is a full on reboot of the series and most closely emulates the Hollow Knight attempt at the genre, to varying degrees. About 15 hours or so to get through for the basics, 20 if you want to reach closer to 100% (which I do not recommend).

The map is absolutely sprawling, with most branches relating to trap traversal, followed by backdoors to skip it in the future. You have a core melee attack, a limited range option, and then “magic” of sorts. You have amulets that provide passive skill buffs, which you are limited to equip. Movement traversal skills (like double jump) come after key boss fights. There are side quests, health boosts, upgrades from materials and so on. Those are the pieces of a metroidvania, it would not be one without.

Should I talk about the ability to take pictures of the map? This is neat but not groundbreaking… every metroidvania has had the ability to mark the map with specific icons. Guess I’m just not getting it.

The heart of a metroidvania is more than the pieces, but how they connect. And the true heart of a metroidvania is in the fluidity, the balance between combat and movement. Hollow Knight is a gold standard for a reason, it nails this absolutely perfectly. Blasphemous 1 went a bit too much into combat, an issue admirably resolved in the sequel. PoP struggles in this area due to design choices. By the time you’ve acquired every movement power, the fluidity is there as you can quickly zip across the map and avoid tough enemies or plow through simple ones. But that’s truly the last hour or so of gameplay, with 20 prior being a relative slog of imprecise controls.

I mentioned that most of the game relates to trap traversal, which is not a bad thing in itself. Platforming can be fun, if the tools are there to help. Sadly, I have been spoiled with games like Celeste. PoP doesn’t have fixed camera angles, it zooms in and out depending on the map, which messes with visual cues. Second, it has imperfect pixel placement, so that a jump done once will work, but done the same way a second time will not (this is exacerbated in the late quest “Impossible Climb”). I completed all the challenges, and the wide majority on the first go, but it’s clear that there are issues here. And hats off to the developers on this… they added an accessibility feature that allows you to skip all “normal” trap traversals. This is a massive sanity check near the tail end of the game.

I’ll also pick on the magic system for a bit, because it’s interesting in concept and flawed in execution. You have a magic source – athra – that fills up a bar up to 3 levels. You have about a dozen skills to choose from that empty 1 to 3 bars and either deal damage (11 of them) or heal you (costs 2 bars). You can only slot 2 of them at any time. For most players, one of those will always be the healing option as healing alternatives are quite low in the game and damage comes from everywhere. So you effectively have 1 skill to chose from and generally want to keep close to 2 bars ready for a heal. Athra gains are slow, you may fill up 3 bars total in a boss fight. Which in practical terms, means you’re only going to use a simple melee attack (as it’s the only consistent damage source) and never a tier 3 option, which effectively wastes an entire game system. Sure, you can supplement magic moves through amulets, but those are best reserved for melee augments.

A quick note on the parry mechanic which is becoming more and more popular. It’s here, there’s a visual queue for what can be parried or not, and is a great option for bosses. Miss the timing and you take extra damage. It works great in 1v1 battles, and horrendously in group settings, which is fine by me.

Bosses and mini-bosses are a highlight. The fights are well structured, reward memorization, and with a single exception, avoid super cheese. I’d have liked more of them to break up the exploration portions, especially the middle part of the game (turn on Guided mode, trust me). Everyone has multiple stages, and the final fight feels like it will never end. Quite well done.

There’s one movement skill that’s interesting, a sort of timewarp where you leave an impression and can zoom back to it on command. It’s never used in standard combat, a few odd times in optional trap levels, a lot in the optional puzzle rooms. It can be great for some boss fights, if you put is somewhere “safe” and want to avoid an AE attack. Cool idea.

The “extras” are odd here. There’s a few quests, nothing too ornery (the bird one was bugged and could not complete). There are some “hidden” puzzles for you to figure out, which was fun. Also some optional trap traversal areas. Combined, they reward you with partial hearts (yay!), amulets & slots (cool!), ore to upgrade weapons (yes!), gems to buy stuff and coins to upgrade amulets (YMMV). So you’re going to want to do most of these, with the exception of the extra coins. See, you can upgrade every amulet twice, the first time for gems, the second for gems + 1 coin. There are 37 amulets, you’re going to upgrade maybe 6 of them.

Notice how I haven’t talked about the story or lore? Yeah, well, there’s not much there. There are 50 odd lore objects that provide near zero added context. Persian mythology is ripe for options here, lost opportunity.

While PoP is a good metroidvania, it doesn’t dethrone any of the pantheon. I am not a fan of the AAA pricing on this game, not when there are dozens and dozens of frankly better metroidvanias you can get for less than half the price. The great news is that the demo should still be available – give that a shot as it’s a pretty good approximation of the mid-point of the game.