You run around collecting scrolls to unlock new abilities, an electronic rock soundtrack more befitting of the GBA’s DOOM ports than Prince of Persia blares over everything, enemies are a mix of mystical animals and other rejected concepts from the main game, and there’s some kind of poorly explained RPG leveling up system at the heart of it all. This is exactly the type of weird gaming experience I love to find, but I’m not sure I could recommend playing it in the slightest. It takes a lot to break me. I’ve suffered through a lot of horrible titles and it’s not like I have anything against Metroidvanias, even if I don’t typically gravitate towards them. This however, brought me to a point where I simply couldn’t take anymore.

I reached a point where I had no idea how to progress any further. All the good Metroidvanias I’ve touched have always given you at least a rough idea of where you need to go next. Here though, you have no clue so you just sort of go through whatever path forward you can find and grabbing what you can until you hit that inevitable brick wall which forces you backtrack. Totally typical for the genre I know, and so that’s precisely what I did. Strange thing is I got pretty dang deep before this happened. But whatever, right? Anyways, I’m revisiting nearby areas and am running into the problem that all those other previously locked paths are still locked to me. I obviously haven’t found the necessary item or skills required to open them yet. That’s frustrating because I feel as if I’d been quite thorough in my exploration up to then. That’s when the realization hits me that I’m going to have to go BAAAACK, and I’m just not willing to do that.

You see, rooms in this are positively bursting at their seems with traps and other obstacles, demanding a fairly slow, methodical, and very careful use of your movements from the player since checkpoints and save locations a few, meaning death can lead to significant retreading of previously completed challenges. I didn’t have fun making it past all that the first time and I was NOT doing it again. Consequently, I resorted to cheats. Something I rarely do. Nope, didn’t help. Even with the full range of objects and powers available to me I seemingly had no choice but to hoof it possibly as far as the starting areas. Along the way of which would be the Farah sections where you play as both her and the Prince, and those are tedious because you can only switch between the two characters at specific spots. Heck naw, that's the moments I broke. Tapped out. Game beat me instead of the other way around.

And you know what? I don't regret it. The sole reason I picked this up was for the property it's attached to, and it didn't even do a good job of representing it. Your time-rewinding powers are basically useless. If you fall past a certain distance it won't save you because I guess that would require it to reload more of the stage than the cartridge can handle, and you're better off letting in yourself die anyways since you need to preserve that precious sand for as long as possible to use on the bosses. Four of six of which by the way, according to YouTube, are the same gryphon used repeatedly. Honestly, I would rather play the painful J2ME version than this. Sands of Time should have stuck exclusively to home consoles.

4/10