Very difficult for me to rate this game, I thought the writing, characters and atmosphere was pretty good, voice acting was fine but nothing special, but the gameplay was horrendous and the game overall failed at it's main objective for me, being scary. It overall exemplified why I don't really play horror games without combat as they need maintain a sweet spot between boring and frustrating, feeling the treat of failure but rarely if ever actually failing. During the game's chase scenes I felt a good deal of both, but rarely tension and never scared. Some of them felt like a bad roguelike where it it is expected that you die a lot and you just have to remember which rout to take and when you get ambushed, and once I understood this I was completely out of the scene being mostly bored until I got trough it. I know I'm maybe being a bit harsh on a free (and short) game, but I don't really consider price when reviewing a game (unless it is baked into the game trough microtransaction or similar). That said, outside the chases, I liked the atmosphere and story, and the ending made me feel slightly more positive about the game. I am interested in seeing what this team does next with the series but will be cautious if this is representative of how they'll do gameplay.

One of the first game I ever played and one of my favourite from my childhood, and it still holds up to this day. Great art, sound design and atmosphere, the game speak system is (almost) as fun to play around with at age 31 as it was at age 9, great and varied puzzle platforming. While this is only my second full replay as an adult I actually enjoyed it more this time. Last playthrough I wanted to 100% it, something I never did as I kid (mostly because the game always froze up at a specific part on disk 1), and used a guide to do so. While I glad I did that, playing without a guide is so much more enjoyable, and I was only missing 9 at the end (I believe I remember one specific secret area I missed on disk 1). Overall one of my favourites as a kid remains one of my favourites as an adult. I want to give it 5 stars for nostalgia but a 4.5 better summarises my feelings of this specific playthrough.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a pretty good metroidvania that, while not easy, focuses more on spectacle in it's combat than challenge.

Platforming: The strongest part of the game for me. I not usually a fan of 2D platformers, but this game manages a good balance of fun and varied movement with challenges that are difficult enough to be challenging but not overly frustrating (with one optional exception).

Combat: Does the job. The focus here is primarily on spectacle with some bosses providing a decent challenge. I found the sound effects of the swords swinging to be a bit lacklustre but not so much as to be distracting. Biggest disappointment is that the final optional boss was a pushover, would have liked at least one really tough optional boss.

Story: It had one. Somewhat forgettable and predictable, but does a good enough job of establishing what you're doing. Weirdly one character seemed to just disappear from the story. Voice acting was pretty good, not excellent but did the job.

Puzzles: While not a major focus the ones that are there are mostly good. (Though one or two optional ones that most players will likely need to use a guide for)

Exploration: The game lets you take a picture of the environment so you can easily check where you might be able to use a new ability. Other than that fairly standard fair for a metroidvania.

Bugs: For a game otherwise as polished the game had a surprising number of bugs. The most common being one where the camera stopped following Sargon, this was fixed by going back in frame and moving the camera a bit. A few game breaking ones where I had to restart the game. Whenever this happened I had luckily just saved so they did no have a big impact on my enjoyment of the game. The biggest bug is one where I am missing one Damascus Ingot (Crafting Material) to get my bow fully upgraded (only thing I'm missing for 100% and platinum trophy), I have finished all side quests and gotten all treasures according to the map so I can only assume this is a bug.

Summary: Good platforming, decent combat but to buggy to recommend at the time of writing. With some patches though it is definitely something I'd recommend to any metroidvania fan.