Level Design 101 - Prince of Persia

Sometimes, a game doesn’t sound so hot on paper. Take, for instance, the latest Prince of Persia. If you were to read the design doc, it would have words like “backtrack” and “re-navigate” all over the place. A lot of developers run into that problem; designing levels is hard, and budget constraints and time are both factors that heavily weigh on how much content they’re able to put into the product you see on store shelves. It’s with this in mind that, upon finally finishing Prince of Persia, I can only applaud what Ubisoft Montreal has accomplished with the world they created.

There are two central reasons Ubisoft succeeded at the level they did. For starters, each area of the world is unique, and you’ll never find yourself cursing at having to go back to a place you’ve already been. The world is big enough that you might go hours without revisiting an area you’ve already cleared, but when you do, it’s just so damn fun to navigate that it’s anything but a chore. The platforming has some of the most fluid and intuitive controls I’ve seen in quite some time - but great controls in the context of crappy level design wouldn’t impress me much. Fortunately, Ubisoft felt the same way, and went about crafting supremely satisfying, easily navigable environments to compliment the silky smooth controls. Some would call the game easy, and I wouldn’t argue against that. There’s not much challenge – you essentially can’t die, after all – but for me, the fun wasn’t in how hard the jumps and shimmies were to execute. In place of traditional platforming, where your character has to be positioned just right to accomplish anything, Prince of Persia opted for a more streamlined approach. One press of a button sends your character flying towards a wall, and you don’t have to press anything to continue momentum. It’s almost like a rhythm game, and once you’re in harmony with its beat, tunnel vision sets in and everything else just melts away. All this is made possible by the truly inventive spaces you find yourself in. While a game like Tomb Raider gives you the same basics to repeat in same-y looking areas, Prince of Persia’s landscape is as different as it is easy to progress in. Throughout the game, you’ll find yourself propelled against hot air balloons, flying through the air, Rez style, plummeting hundreds of feet down the side of a wall, swinging from poles and grappling onto vines. All of those activities blend seamlessly, and it honestly never gets old. It’s a game I could see myself going back to for a second, third, and even fourth time before it’s all said and done.


The second reason the game turned out as well as it did also has to do with the level design. I mentioned backtracking before, and it comes into play for the entire length of the game. The idea behind the game is that the world is becoming corrupted by an evil force, and as such, it’s polluting the environment with a black sludge over almost every surface. Your goal is to navigate through this shitty, dreary land and make your way to “fertile ground,” where you can then cleanse the surrounding area of all evil and shittiness. Once you do that, the environment instantly turns from dark and foreboding to bright, colorful and happy. Your goal is to then collect as many “light seeds” as you can, which are white orbs scattered throughout the world. They only become visible once an area is cleansed, so here is where the backtracking starts. But what makes this particular brand of backtracking enjoyable is the drastic visual change made to everything around you. Gone are the black pits of death waiting for you on almost all solid ground, and in its place are blades of green grass, flowers, and butterflies hovering just below eyesight. The darkness that once plagued the land has given way to illuminating sunlight, and you almost forget you’ve been there before. Previously barred areas are sometimes found, since the sludge covering a particular ledge or crevice is no longer there to bring down the décor. This aspect literally doubles the play time, and definitely not in a cheap way. Some of the most fun I had was in collecting the “light seeds” and seeing the places I had just come from in the new light of day. It also helps that the art style is such that Prince of Persia will still look good ten years from now.

If you couldn’t already tell, I loved this game. There was one particular boss that I found to be downright annoying to fight, but other than that, I enjoyed the combat a lot. It wasn’t my favorite part of the game – it got boring here and there – but it didn’t detract nearly enough from the otherwise fantastically designed game play to bring down my overall enjoyment. I’m pretty sure the next Prince of Persia game will be a direct sequel to this one, and I, for one, will be marking the days off my calendar until it jumps, shimmies and falls into my hands.