During Summer Game Fest we were invited to take part in a series of hands-on and off sessions for a number of games from Ubisoft as part of Ubisoft Forward. One of the games we got hands-on tie with was the freshly-revealed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown -- a reset of the series overall and one brimming with style.

On top of playing, we also got to speak to the game's art-director, Jean-Christophe Alessandri for lots of insight into the game's lengthy dev cycle and what the team hopes it is achieving with this, essentially, reboot.



Here's a snippet from our hands-on and interview feature, linked below.

Even on Switch the game runs at a smooth 60fps, helped largely by a minimalist art style that definitely kept the tech side of things easier for the less flex-ready systems, though that doesn’t mean this has been a flash-in-the-pan dev cycle. Art director, Jean-Christophe Alessandri wasn’t shy in telling us the game had been in development for “several years” and, in fact, looked relieved in doing so.

“From the beginning we made this choice to create … really, this kind of game, and go back to the roots of [the original] production,” Jean-Christophe tells me. “And having some references… for example, we are an action adventure-game and platformer; we have references from the Metroidvania genre so it made perfect sense to choose this kind of format.

“[Still] we are not [specifically] a ‘Metroid’ kind of game,” he continued. “We take some references, some mechanics from that; some structure. But we also [mainly consider ourselves] an action-adventure platformer with all the ingredients you can find in a real Prince of Persia game.”

Click here for the full Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown write-up.