Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is really great. It has solid combat, good metroidvania-style progression, and looks incredible. The story and writing break down hard at the end, but it is otherwise a really excellent experience.

Visually, this game is great, the environments are cool and interesting and even though it is set in this mountain, they manage to go to some really interesting places that are unique and visually stunning. The frozen sea and underground sand caves stand out especially.

Combat is a pretty straightforward side scrolling brawler, but dodge and parry mechanics make things feel fast, engaging, and fun. A couple of the powers you acquire along the way work into the combat, but mainly in the form of movement and repositioning abilities. I never really got sick of fighting enemies and the bosses usually took a couple of tries to learn their patterns and get parrying and countering them down.
Some minor bonuses can also be applied (basically like badges from Hollow Knight) that can change your gameplay in pretty significant ways. I enjoyed this part of the game and like that I could opt into new systems and powers in a fluid way like this.
Along with the combat, the traversal is where this game shines. You only get a few abilities beyond metroidvania staples like double jump and dash, but they are all pretty unique and fun. The shadow especially is cool, which lets you set a shadow of yourself then warp back to it later. The game has a ton of cool navigation puzzles that verge on Celeste levels of complication but (for the most part) are intuitive and readable enough that you can execute on the fly and make it through, which feels really great.
A couple of sections have cheap, kill-you-to-teach-you sections, specifically the sections with the smashing pillars and one particular puzzle where you are avoiding saw blade patterns in a room, but these only slightly mar things overall.

The Narrative starts out fine, if a bit generic, but by about the halfway point ceases to make sense and then just slips farther and farther into unintelligibility. It is written as though the writers are afraid to make anyone actually bad, so every enemy assumes Sargon is evil, is almost comedically unwilling to listen to him, attacks, then has a heel turn immediately upon death as though they had some sort of noble purpose. Other characters just feel like they were forgotten or cut which makes the narrative feel unfinished and rushed.
Most of the end feels like metaphysical nonsense that isn't very motivated or foreshadowed with an ending that barely wraps things up. It is all written like a really bad anime, including an antagonist who basically goes Super Saiyan. A game like this hardly needs a story of any kind, as Hollow Knight proves, and Lost Crown only suffers for what is presented here.

The rest of the game is so solid that the narrative doesn't bring it down too much, so it is still worth playing and is definitely one of the best games in the genre from the past couple of years. The traversal and combat, though not super unique, are so well executed that it is worth playing for that alone.

These episodes work well as more Citizen Sleeper even though they aren't seeking to add much to the game beyond a bit more narrative. It isn't quite as striking to me as the base game is and the mechanics begin to break down a bit more by this point.

I enjoyed playing through them and the narrative is pretty much in line with the rest of the game. It works well enough, but most every character is a familiar combination of extreme emotional availability and deeply rooted trauma. This is definitely just the writing style of the game, but the more characters that get added, the more apparent it becomes. The events are sort of unique and interesting sci-fi that I enjoyed having a hand in. Like the base game, it feels afraid to pull its punches -- everything has most of the consequence removed from it and bad outcomes are eminently avoidable.

My sleeper is basically a god at this point. I can do any task immediately and most of the timers and tasks here to provide some level of difficulty simply don't. I don't know if this is avoidable in the systems themselves, but part of the problem is that the systems are used as problem solvers for every situation, rather than skewing occasionally into ways for the player to make decisions or influence things. One specific roadblock at the end of these DLCs almost feels like you are going to be making intentional choices about how things play out, but in the end you just do everything for everyone and the narrative moves along to where it was always going. Your binary choice at the end only having a minor impact on things.

These episodes are quick to play through and give a bit more shape to this world and a bit more catharsis to the base game. Definitely worth checking out, but I would have liked them to push these systems, narrative, and world a bit farther.