Fruitless back-and-forths over Tomb Raider often put me in the same headspace: thinkin' about Oddworld. Now there's a solid cinematic platformer for the PlayStation 1, one with expressive characters, imaginative environments, a great sense of humor and actual messaging to compliment it's fun and often challenging puzzles. Lara can't like, mind control a bear and make it explode. I rest my case.

But opening up my copy of Abe's Oddysee immediately presents something bleakly funny: the definition of a quintology. Oh Lorne. Poor Lorne. They screwed the man at every turn. From pressing the first run of discs with a repeatable, game breaking bug (in Lorne's words, the person who made this call was not "a Gamer"), to Gamestop publishing a guide that immediately funneled new players into the most difficult hidden screens of the game, to his regrets over Exoddus and Sony throwing Soulstorm up on PS+ to die... Like Xenosaga and Shenmue, it doesn't matter if you have a story to tell or the creativity and temerity to do it, the games industry will chew you up and spit you out like some form of tangy meat popsicle. New n' tasty indeed.

Listen to Lorne Lanning talk about Oddworld for any length of time, and it becomes quickly apparent just how passionate and creatively driven he is. Ars Technica's extended War Stories interview is something I throw on at least once a year because I find his background to be fascinating, and his recollections on navigating creative and industrial fields leading to the formation of his studio, Oddworld Inhabitants, provides a considerable amount of insight as to how his worldview - and consequentially, the themes of Oddworld - formed.

Abe's Oddysee was always intended to have a message, and so gameplay was appropriately designed around the particular anxieties and beliefs Lorne wished to express. As funny as it would be to find Abe strapped, you don't shoot guns, something that was a point of contention with staff at Oddworld Inhabitants. Instead, you "shoot words" (and farts) through gamespeak, a mechanic that allows the player to interface on a more personal level with the game than simply pulling a trigger... Though through mind control, you do still do that. Sometimes the creative process demands compromise.

One complaint I would have about this system is that much of your time rescuing Modokons is front and backloaded, with an extremely lengthy middle game chronicling Abe's trials outside of Rupture Farms tucking most Modokon rescues behind hidden screens and portals. To a certain extent, loading the game so full of secrets is good and provides replayability, but I found the puzzles in which you're trying to disarm a hazardous area and lead as many Modokons to safety as possible to be more engaging than the segmented puzzle rooms of Paramonia and Scrabania. Elum, Abe's mount, does fill this role somewhat, but I twice had him despawn requiring me to reload a save and lose progress, so I'm a little upset with him right now.

The end game also gets absolutely brutal, placing checkpoints far and between sequences that require precise timing and manipulation of enemies. Controls are rarely the issue so much as understanding the order of operations to get through the multiple levels of Rupture Farms, but when everything clicks and you execute on a perfect run, it feels good. The end of Abe's Oddysee has some of the most genuinely tense moment-to-moment gameplay on the system, it is agonizing as it is great. Wait, what do you mean I didn't save enough Modokons? Hold on, why am I being teleported back to the start of Rupture Farms, wait--

While the experience of playing Oddysee can at times be a bit uneven and even frustrating, I do think it comes together into something really special. The texture of the pre-rendered environments, the clay-like quality of the character sprites, the ways in which Rupture's oppressive and hostile factory gives way to barren wastelands drained of resources and life all for the sake of capital, and how that is conveyed humorously both through the game's writing and the player's own machinations... it's great. I really like Abe's Oddysee. 3.5 out of 5 smooches on the cheek for Mr. Lanning, but not 5 because Lorne is apparently never allowed to have a quintology of anything. I don't make the rules.

I'm probably going to repeat a lot of similar points that Larry Davis brought up in his review, so... what he said.

14 years after The Forgotten Sands, Prince of Persia is finally back, and the folks over at Ubisoft Monpellier understood the assignment: crap up good movement and puzzle solving with dreadful combat and an over-reliance on mobs of spongy enemies.

Parrying and punishing is the bread and butter of Sargon's kit, a rhythm you want to maintain to build meter for more devastating abilities, but when you're just trying to get to your next objective or explore some crypt, constantly getting beaned from all sides by low-level goons that have a bafflingly high HP pool gets really annoying. You might think bosses better leverage this system being that they're one-on-one encounters, but most fall into the same rote strategy of playing defensively until they open themselves up for a cinematic counter.

At least one of these bosses actively punishes dynamic play by spamming teleports and parries when the player behaves aggressively, resulting in a fight that requires you sit Sargon in a corner so the boss will fall into a pattern of throwing out the same three attacks, permitting you to plink away at his health at the end of each sequence. I'm pretty sure this isn't an intentional lesson so much as the AI doesn't know how to deal with you remaining still, but I would describe combat as being bizarrely passive despite how much you're given to work with.

The pendulum does eventually swing in the other direction when you gather up enough ingots to upgrade Sargon's weapons, but enemies never quite keep pace with the player's growth, resulting in a game that's entirely too frustrating in the early half and almost comically easy in the second.

And sure, you might argue that a search-action game is all about making the player feel progressively more empowered as they plumb the depths of whatever hostile labyrinth they're trapped in, but almost all the gains Sargon actually makes are bought and paid for with time crystals. In Super Metroid, Samus slowly gains abilities and expands her inventory through exploration. In Symphony of the Night, Alucard can find a variety of capes, armors, and weapons that allows the player to directly build their character. While The Lost Crown's most secluded areas occasionally house a heart container or equipable charm (most of which are borderline useless), they'll more often dead end with 40 crystals and a piece of paper with a full length Backloggd essay written on it -- I ain't reading that, I don't have time! Growth feels far more tied to the economics of the world and what you can afford than it does exploration. Hell, sometimes you'll even go out of your way to reach a secret alcove and find there's nothing at all.

Before I punch out from my shift at the hot take factory, where I work as a foreman to support my factory wife and my 2.5 factory kids, I will say that Lost Crown is a much more enjoyable experience when you decouple yourself from the typical search-action loop of exploring every nook and cranny and instead focus on the main path. There's some genuinely great platforming sequences and puzzles that make good use of Sargon's traversal abilities, and the layout of Mount Qaf is easy to read and navigate your way through thanks to the game setting objective markers and allowing you to photograph areas of interest for quick reference on the map.

The story has its share of contrivances, especially early on, but I did find myself surprisingly invested by the end of the game, and although most characters can be described as "well-meaning but criminally and suicidally stupid," the concept of Mount Qaf existing within a bubble of fractured space and time is enough to carry the narrative whenever the character writing falls short. I really like the idea that every character and NPC is perceiving time differently, some being displaced by decades whereas others are made to exist within a singular moment for eternity.

Lost Crown doesn't stick the landing for me. It gets a lot about the search-action formula wrong, particularly with character growth and incentivizing exploration off the beaten path. The combat is rough and excessive, and sometimes you'll spend ten minutes throwing yourself to a meat grinder trial-and-erroring your way through pattern memorization all for a pair of pants, but there's still something here. Traversal feels good, the visual design is great, and the core loop is satisfying enough to elevate Lost Crown from being a bad game to being perfectly mediocre, maybe even serviceable. In other words, it's a Prince of Persia game.

Gonna buy a shirt that says "I'd rather be playing Touhou Luna Nights."