Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Review

The Dagger of Time is one of the few mechanics that changed what a game is allowed to ask of a player. Rewinding a botched jump sounds like a difficulty setting and works as the opposite. Because failure costs seconds rather than a reload, the designers can build sequences of six or seven linked moves and expect you to attempt them at speed, so the wall runs, the pillar swings, and the column climbs read as one continuous piece of choreography instead of a series of separate jumps.

The animation system selling that was well ahead of what the hardware normally delivered in 2003. The framing device does quiet, clever work as well, with the prince narrating his own adventure to a listener and interrupting himself whenever you die, which makes the rewind part of the fiction rather than a menu option. The combat is the weakest limb, a loop of vaults and parries that thins badly across the middle of the game, and it is the one part of the design that has not aged with the rest.

It hardly matters. This is the game that revived a dormant series, gave Ubisoft Montreal the vocabulary it would later spend on Assassin's Creed, and put a time rewind into a decade of action games behind it. Landmarks look like this.