Prince of Persia's story is pretty straightforward. A dark god named Ahriman is corrupting the land with a tar-like darkness and the hero stumbles in with Elika to help restore the lands and prevent the end of the world. As far as computer controlled companions go, Elika is one of the best we've dealt with. She doesn't get in the way, die or hinder the player's progress by falling behind. In addition to using her powers to purge the lands of corruption, she can lend her abilities for magical attacks, assists with jumping, accesses special powers from magical wall plates and saves players from falling to their deaths. Players have the option to speak with her to learn more about the world or the characters, and some of the conversations are actually kind of witty and charming.

We were also astonished to find that the keyboard and mouse controls work pretty decently for the PC version. That doesn't mean we didn't prefer using a gamepad, especially since much of the game requires exceptional timing, but those who don't want to shell out money for a controller can get by quite nicely. This is probably an indicator of what many will find fault with, in that the game is considerably easier than any of the three Prince of Persia games that came before it. That's great for us, since we weren't very good at the previous games, but those looking for some kind of extreme challenge will be disappointed. Elika will rescue the player from every misstep and reset the hero to solid ground preceding a world puzzle. Additionally, she'll do a last minute rescue to save the hero from certain death during combat. The latter move restores a significant amount of health back to the creature, which simply prolongs the battle. While the game is much more accessible to non-hardcore players, at no point did we feel a sense of peril in anything we did. It didn't take us very long to beat the game, and we didn't see much incentive to play through it again once we were done. While many might look down on the game's ease, the low difficulty had an unexpected benefit. We felt much freer to experiment less frustrated when we messed up than with previous games.

Some of the world puzzles can get a bit tricky, but there's nothing that can't be overcome with a little persistence and memory. Players can press a button to have Elika summon a ball of light that will trace exactly where they need to go to reach their destination. Our main complaints are that some puzzles, particularly the ones where corruption is moving along the walls, requires more luck than skill. It takes more hopeful guessing than careful timing to avoid being consumed when turning a corner or when being launched from one magical wall plate to another. We had mixed feelings about the little extra hop the hero does automatically whenever he lands on a wall. In most cases, we could rely on it, but it would sometimes cause us to inadvertently jump off walls.