Prince of Persia The Sands of Time 2003

In Which Rat Hannah Has Thoughts

I (Rat Hannah) have been sharing a favorite childhood memory with Rat Meg in the form of streaming a 2023 playthrough of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. As we've been working our way through the game; Meg, for the first time, and me, having not touched the game for 15 years, opinions I've held for several years have been revisited and refined.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) is a story-driven, single-player action-adventure video game. It tells the tale of a young Prince who is tricked into starting the apocalypse, and his adventure-romance with the princess Farah as they seek to undo the damage caused by releasing the Sands of Time.

I like this game. I'm not going to deny that a good deal my emotion is nostalgia (Sands of Time is one of the first video games I remember), but it is genuinely a good game. For all the wonky 2000s camera controls and #Gamer narrative, it's a tightly-focused experience that knows exactly what it's trying to do. And then it does it. Well. It's a video game that knows it's a video game, and it uses that fact to its advantage. I think all story-driven video games should embrace their video-game-ness. Destroy the divide between story progression and gameplay! Conquer the medium!

Things that do not hold up over time include the rampant orientalism and the aforementioned camera controls. Honestly -- I have a pretty good setup for adapting human video games, but let me tell you, the camera controls do not have nearly enough finesse for the rat joystick that I use. I wired that bitch up directly to my PC and turned sensitivity up to the max, and still there were instances where I couldn't see the battle I was fighting in because the camera refused to move in the direction I needed it to.

Because of the wonky camera, it also ended up interacting weirdly with my directional buttons (which is a standard directional pad hooked up to my left hind leg). The spike trap sequences were hell, is what I'm saying.

Still, combat was fluid and enjoyable. With my front left paw on the camera and my front right paw working on combat, I was able to get through the battles with a respectable amount of effort. I appreciate the detailed control mapping that the Steam version of Sands of Time allows, as it was essential for getting this game to be rat-accessible.

I also deeply appreciate that the animal villains of this game featured beetles, vultures, (bats? birds? those flying things), but no rats. It would have been easy to toss some stereotypically diseased rat zombie in the zoo, or perhaps the torture chamber, but the developers thankfully sidestepped that trope, despite gleefully tossing in other unfortunate stereotypes into their cauldron.

All in all, four out of five cheeses. Points docked for or the sharp decline in chemistry after Farah confesses her love to the Prince's unconscious body and for Farah's historically inaccurate short skirt (I am serious, the midriff and the jewelry and the cleavage were all valid, you could've kept the sexy princess thing, it would have been totally above board, just cover up her legs oh my god even sheer fabric with slits would have been fine). Points regained for the kick ass setting and the inherent comedy of "this entire map is just some guy's house palace."

Until next time!