Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Accessibility Review

If you’ve followed my work over the past few years, you may be aware that these days I rarely play or review Ubisoft games.

In the summer of 2020 allegations arose of poor treatment of developers at the hands of upper management, and continued reports in the years since have suggested that within some parts of the company very little has changed between then and now. While it’s not a universal experience, many Ubisoft employees still feel unsafe in their workplace, and I’ve made a point to prioritise discussing that information over discussing their games until we see true reforms from Ubisoft leadership.

However, it’s also true that Ubisoft is one of the major players in the big budget video game accessibility space, and sometimes a Ubisoft studio will release a video game that I would be remiss not to discuss on this accessibility focused review show.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is one of those titles that is so notable in terms of the strides forward it is making in terms of accessibility that I need to make an exception and discuss it here.

In particular, as a gamer with aphantasia who has often discussed the need for improved accessibility support in Metroidvania titles, I on a personal level need to discuss how impactful some of this game’s accessibility support tools have been for me.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a 2.5D side scrolling action adventure platformer where you play as Sargon, a warrior tasked with travelling to a cursed city in order to rescue a kidnapped prince. Equipped with melee and ranged attacks, a dodge, a mid air dash and a parry, players are tasked with exploring a labyrinthine environment filled with paths which cannot be explored until new abilities are discovered, necessitating backtracking to discover new paths toward progression.

As someone who loves Metroidvania titles in theory, but often struggles to enjoy them in practice, I want to start this review by talking a little bit about my history with the genre, and some examples of games that I found particularly hard to play, or felt supported in playing.

I have a condition called aphantasia, meaning I have a lack of any visual imagination or memory. In practice, this makes it pretty difficult for me to play Metroidvania games, as the genre often requires a degree of memorisation of not only how to navigate a deliberately maze like environment, but also specifically being able to remember where you saw a door opened by a newly unlocked power, which might have last been seen a few hours and multiple locations ago.

Carrion, a game in which you play as a giant tentacle meat blob murdering your way to freedom from a scientific facility, was a great game that I loved but really struggled to play. Presenting some of the worst accessibility the genre can muster, the game didn’t feature any kind of map support whatsoever, requiring memorisation of the entire map, not just the location of newly accessible pathways post power up.

In terms of a more accessible recent example, I got on pretty well with 2021’s Metroid Dread, which had the option to display on the map icons of any dead end paths the player had encountered, and the type of lock the player encountered there, meaning that when a new powerup was unlocked it was possible to methodically backtrack to every newly opened pathway previously encountered in the game.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown takes things a step further, and offers some really appreciated tools for traversal that really meant a huge deal to me. I’ve had a far easier time navigating in this Metroidvania than any in the past, without feeling like the game has entirely removed my ability to explore organically. It has walked the line perfectly on how much support to provide, and I genuinely cannot overstate how much I appreciate the example this sets.

Firstly, let’s talk about Guided Mode. When active, the location of the next major plot progression objective is always visible on your in game map. The game doesn’t show you how to get there, but it gives the player a general sense of where they’re trying to reach, to help guide progression through the world. Additionally, as you explore, the map will automatically populate with map markers for available and blocked paths.

Beyond that, the in-game map can be manually populated with eight types of map marker, noting the presence of arrows or shooting targets, traps, mystery objects, enemies, important objectives, locked doors, people, and treasures.

But the true star of the show in terms of aphantasia accessibility is Memory Shards, an item which allows the player to take a screenshot of the game at any time with a quick press of down on the D-Pad, which gets automatically pinned to your in-game map for easy viewing in context.

The memory shard feature really gets to the heart of what I struggle with in Metroidvania titles as someone with memory and visualisation issues. As great as it is that doors are automatically marked as blocked, and I can add genetic markers for types of things that I want to remember, sometimes something is so important that I need a reminder of exactly what it is that I saw, and exactly where to come back to for it.

Was that enemy marker there to remind me of an enemy that’s easy to farm for resources, or one that I can’t yet work out how to kill?

While markers generally have ambiguity, a contextual reminder that tells me not just that something here was important and the sort of category it fell into, but why it was important, exactly what was going on there, is a huge deal. It lets me look at any time at what I saw, rather than having to run back to check based on markers and which one I think I need to go to, and potentially find out that I’d misremembered something specific and this was not the enemy marker I thought I was heading to.

While most modern game consoles allow for taking screenshots on a system level, being able to pin them to the map makes them so much more useful. Not only are they mapped to locations, but I can check them without having to leave the game, go to my screenshots, look at them, then try and remember that information, and put it back into context when I get back to the game.

My previous solution had been to take a screenshot of the game, then one of the map, and then to try and use both later to remind myself of what was happening. That method often failed, if I’ve taken two batches of screenshot and map screenshot, my screenshot has a map on either side of it, with me often ending up mixing up which map and which gameplay screenshot went together. This really takes that sort of confusion out of the equation, it streamlines that kind of process I was already trying to find for myself.

When all of these features are put together, the end result is that Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown gives me a general sense of where I need to get to, automated markers for basic progression information, the tools to mark notes on my own map, and the ability to see exactly what I encountered previously in the game and where. This is exactly the kind of support I have been asking for in this genre for years, and I can’t praise it highly enough.

Moving to the rest of the game’s settings offerings, The Lost Crown is also notably the first example we’ve seen of high contrast mode visuals being added to a Ubisoft game, and the execution is pretty solid. Players are offered three different colour presets for how in-game elements should be highlighted, which appear to be designed around accommodating for common types of colour blindness. Players can customise whether the background is greyscale, and whether interactables are highlighted, but they cannot fully customise their high contrast mode colour palettes.

Additionally, there is no way to turn high contrast mode on and off on the fly during gameplay. It can only be toggled in the settings menu, which cannot be accessed during cutscenes.

If you, like me, typically use high contrast mode during gameplay but not so much during cutscenes, you can’t really turn high contrast mode off if you stumble into a cutscene without warning. It’s not a huge issue, but the ability to turn the setting on and off dynamically in a future update would be really appreciated.

In addition, for players who benefit from additional visual input on points of interaction, you can turn on a setting where a white dot appears on any in-game object which can be interacted with, which I really appreciated for visual clarity. The game’s HUD can also be made larger.

Beyond that, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown features a whole host of other accessibility settings options that I’m going to try and quickly rattle through.

Where applicable, all of these changes can be seen previewed in the settings menu itself, meaning you don’t need to exit the menu to check how a new setting will look during gameplay.

The game opens with a quick series of accessibility settings selection menus on first boot. It’s not as robust as the quick start guide seen in things like God of War: Ragnarok, but it does allow for setting a few basics before the game begins. You can also access a settings menu from the title screen, but only the Display and Sound menus are initially available. In a slightly confusing move, much of the settings menu isn’t available until you start a save, then pause the game and access the settings from there, once you have control of the character. This includes High Contrast Mode, a setting that ideally would have been available before starting the game, and cannot be turned on until the end of the opening cutscene.

Players can change subtitle text to an alternative font, change the opacity of the background visible behind subtitles, and alter game audio via a series of custom sliders.

There are a number of difficulty modes available to players when they first boot up the game, each of which tells you up front what it means for specific aspects of difficulty in a numbered fashion. Difficulty can then be further customised by the player, allowing for tweaking of enemy damage, environmental damage, enemy health, parry difficulty, dodge window, Athra depletion rate, Athra gain, and Athra loss rate from damage. For some context, Athra is a meter which charges when you parry or deal damage, and can be used to activate powerful abilities, as long as you don’t lose that meter by taking damage from enemies.

In terms of combat and traversal assists, Melee Targeting Assist means that, in combat, the player will always face the direction of the nearest enemy in combat. Players can also adjust aim assist for weapons and powers which are manually aimed, and have the option to turn on portals which appear before difficult platforming challenges, and can be activated to skip past a tricky platforming section with no penalty. Additionally, players can switch off a button mashing quick time event to escape from being frozen by enemies, but they unfortunately can’t turn button holds into toggles which is a common setting seen in other titles.

Lastly, I really appreciate that The Lost Crown contains a fairly traditional RPG levelling system, which doesn’t reset currency gained upon death. Enemies drop currency which can be used to purchase either equipable amulets for special effects, or simply traditional stat boosts to their build. This in practice meant that, even when death occurred and set me backward on the map, I still felt like I was gaining resources which would eventually help me to overcome any difficulty spikes present.

For a lot of regular enemies, if I’d beaten them once already, I could just kind of jump past them until I got back to where I was actually trying to make progress, and not feel like I was losing out because I did that.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a real step forward for accessibility in the Metroidvania space. Not only is it innovative in terms of supporting players with aphantasia like myself with traversal, but it also offers robust gameplay and difficulty customisation, and a very solid high contrast mode implementation. I could nitpick things that I prefer about other implementations of High Contrast Mode, but it’s a really impressive first attempt at the feature, and one that I’m incredibly excited to see.

Also, the game’s on Switch, and I’m always really happy to see more video games available on Switch that support High Contrast Mode.

My biggest issue, and this is one that I’ve been bringing up a lot over the past few months, is that I really dislike that Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was made available three days early to players who are willing to pay a premium for the game’s more expensive edition. This is a trend which has become increasingly prevalent since the summer of 2023, and one which I feel preys on impulsivity in a way which particularly impacts disabled players. I believe that the practice isn’t in line with accessible principles, and I will continue to make the argument that it’s not a monetisation method which should be employed by companies that are aiming to toward accessibility.

That said, The Lost Crown undoubtedly sets a new bar for accessibility within its genre, and I would not be surprised to see it winning accessibility awards when the end of this year rolls around.