#35: Prince of Persia (Brøderbund, Amiga, 1990)

In every other game we’ve covered thus far, whatever narrative elements have existed have generally been conveyed through text, either on screen or in the game manual, or in pre-rendered cutscenes, where the game momentarily wrests control from the player to explain what it’s all about, thus temporarily ceasing to actually be a game. But Prince of Persia is better than that; near every one of its twelve levels ends with some kind of plot twist, but it’s always conveyed through game mechanics, leaving you in control as the scene plays out, and it cannot be overstated how much better this works to draw the player into the plot. Not every one of these little scenelets is a winner, but I can attest that those that do work really will stick with you.

The end of each level (to begin with, at least) is a huge door that must be opened with a switch a couple of screens away, and inevitably, when you return to the door having pressed the switch, something has changed along the way to create a new obstacle; an ominous skeleton on the ground has risen to unlife and must be fended off with your sword, for instance. Or, as in level four, your path is suddenly blocked by a full length mirror with no way around it. Your only choice, then, is to leap through the mirror, and in doing so, create a shadow self that leaps back the other way. This moment could easily have been portrayed in a cutscene, but is infinitely more striking because you, the player, must make an active choice to not just tentatively step through the mirror but to charge at it full tilt and dive through without hesitation, to abandon yourself fully to the other side.

And this is far from the last you will see of your reflected doppelganger. Throughout the game, he serves as a thorn in your side, stealing health potions and slamming gates on you, before finally, at the end of level twelve, you come face to face, swords drawn in a climactic confrontation. But while your swordfighting skill has, by this point, been honed by the legions of anonymous guards you have dispatched along the way, you will soon find that this experience is of no use in this fight, because any wound you inflict upon your opponent will also be inflicted upon yourself. No, the only way to win this battle with yourself is to put away your sword, to realize that violence only begets more violence and to make a decision to break the endless cycle.

Of course, this message is slightly undermined a few minutes later when you have to pull out your sword again to fight Jaffar, and one can’t help but feel like reversing the order of these two fights would only have made the ending stronger, but I cannot stress enough that even without this change, it stands head and shoulders above the narrative efforts of every other game we’ve seen so far. This is a meticulously well-crafted game, and it should be lauded for that.

Which only makes it all the more frustrating that a game that has clearly had an awful lot of thought put into every aspect of its presentation still casts a blond white guy as the protagonist despite the setting making this overwhelmingly unlikely.