Save The Prince?

I apologize for the wall of text last time. To prevent a similar blob this time I will not be discussing the art or story of Prince of Persia in detail today.

I had a great time playing the new Prince of Persia (the PS3/XBOX360 one as opposed to the original PC title). The art was beautiful, the story was intriguing, and the game mechanics were solid. The running, jumping, and climbing around like a monkey coalesced into one of the most tactile and enjoyable experiences I've had on the PS3. My closest comparison would be to Super Mario Galaxy, where regardless of the content it is fun to just run around aimlessly. When a game feels fun the moment you pick it up, then you know that you are in for a good time, and for the most part Prince of Persia doesn't disappoint.

I say mostly because I encountered a number of instances where what I told the game to do, and what the game decided it wanted me to do, were pretty far from each other. This would be a killing point in some titles, but Prince of Persia manages to dodge this particular bullet with a new, somewhat controversial mechanic.

In most games, when you miss a jump, or fail a block, you die and are forced to restart either from an earlier checkpoint or from an earlier save file. These deaths often mean large amounts of progress are lost, which force players to master game skills in order to avoid them (the stick in the carrot and stick approach). Prince of Persia eschews this by making your magical partner, Elika, save you whenever you would die. This includes missed jumps, enemies snapping your head off, or being sucked into pools of gooey darkness. In reality the game just restarts you back at the last stable platform you were on after your "death", but the designers cloak your deaths with animations of Elika saving you. You lose almost no progress when Elika saves you, and aside from trying to get one trophy, there are no repercussions for Elika saving you. What this meant for me as a player, is that I felt more free to play as fast and as carefree as I liked. I could ignore when I died a cheap death due to the game ignoring my commands or a cheap enemy.

While I criticized this feature when I first began (as I do enjoy punishingly difficult games), I came to realize that this was perhaps the best design decision in the series' history. What would have originally been a slow and tedious process of memorization of paths and then cursing at my PS3 when I invariably screwed up a jump, was instead a joyous and carefree romp. I was free to move fast, make careless mistakes, and laugh them off with my roommate. Furthermore, Elika's saves pulled double duty. Not only did the saves make the game more enjoyable, it also cemented the partnership between Elika and the Prince (your Avatar). The Prince does most of the work in the game, essentially ferrying Elika from area to area so that she may heal the corrupted land. This could have easily resulted in an uneven balance between the characters, and Elika would have appeared more as a damsel in distress rather than an ally against evil. Instead, the Prince is the one who needs saving, and if other players are anything like me, they needed a lot of saving, making Elika a much stronger, more independent character (the developers cement this even more by including dialogue for when Elika saves you a certain number of times).

As I finish this post I realize I barely introduced this game. I apologize for that, however I shall not be editing this post as I have a rather substantial Latin test tomorrow and really do need to go to sleep. I promise to include an introduction of Prince of Persia when I discuss the art and/or story tomorrow.