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Prince of Persia

Game Mechanics

Prince of Persia is a game of platforms, subgenre of the action game. The goal of the game is to complete all 12 levels in the time allowed, that is, an hour. It is one of the few games of the time to integrate a time limit and not integrate the notion of score.

The player controls a character seen from profile that can run, walk, fall, jump, cling and fight with the sword. Each level is cut into several fixed screens: when the player-controlled character approaches the end of a screen, the next screen is loaded. Each screen consists of three floors of platforms symbolized by slabs on which the player can move.

Some slabs have special features. Many of them are unstable and collapse for a few moments after the character walks on or strikes them below. Other slabs trigger mechanisms for opening or closing grids. In each level, a slab allows to open the door opening the access to the next level, but no indication is given to the player to know where this slab is: it is up to him to look for it at the whole level.

The player has a life bar initially composed of three points symbolized by three triangles. This lifebar can be affected in different ways during the game. The player loses a point of life if he drops two floors, if he receives a sword stroke during a fight or if a slab falls on his head. He loses all of his life bar one stroke if he is trapped (pics coming out of the ground and sharp plates), if he falls more than two floors or if he confronts a guard without having previously pulled out his sword. The player can recover lost points of life and extend his life bar by drinking potions arranged in various places of the game. Red potions can recover a point of life while blue potions must be avoided as they remove a point of life. The red potions contained in a large vase allow to extend the life bar of an additional point. The life bar is also regenerated entirely when passing from one level to another.

When the bar is empty completely, the protagonist "deaths" without it being a situation of game over. The player continues the game by taking the action at the beginning of the level started with a life bar again filled. The only situation game over occurs when the game time of one hour is exhausted: having failed to deliver the princess in the time allowed, the fate of the princess is sealed. The game stops and a short cinematic allows the player to see that the play where it was held is now empty and that the one hour sablier is up.

During the fighting phases, the player must manage to kill his opponent by inflicting as many sword strokes as this one at points of life. Another way to defeat an opponent is to get him back until he is caught in a trap or fall of a platform.

Most opponents are relatively simple to defeat because they do not have any particular tactics in their way of fighting. Some opponents make exception to this rule. In level 3, the player is forced to fight against a skeleton that does not have a lifebar and is not sensitive to the blows he receives: the only way to defeat him is to push him back until he falls from a platform. In level 6, a corpulent guard manages to counter most of the shots that are carried to him and the player must in turn counter the response to not be touched. In Level 8, a guard adopts a defensive strategy that forces the player to trigger each offensive. Finally, in level 12, Jaffar, which constitutes the boss at the end of the game, manages to counter some shots and to respond: the fact that it has 6 points of life actually one of the hardest opponents to defeat.

During the game, some elements of gameplay appear in a unique way.

In level 7, two green potions each have an inverse effect. One of them, which the player must necessarily drink to finish the level, allows him to reduce the effects of gravity and manage gently a long drop of several floors to reach the exit door of the level. The second potion, to be avoided, reverses the gravity by reversing the direction of the screen: the player can continue the adventure, but the control of the game becomes complex because the character evolves in reverse directional commands.

Level 12 has an additional difficulty by integrating a portion of invisible slabs above the void. The player must move on these slabs by initially having the impression of getting into the void, which prompts him to perform counterintuitive action against the rules of gameplay which prevail in the rest of the game. This same level 12 is also divided into two separate parts separated by a backup point similar to the passage of an additional level. This backup point is located a few screens before the fight with Jaffar and thus allows the player, if defeated during the final fight, to continue the adventure by taking the action from this backup point and not from the beginning of level 12.

In some versions of the game on MS-DOS, an intermediate level is present between level 1 and level 2, to check if the player has bought the game. This level includes a large set of potions associated with letters from the Latin alphabet. An indication at the bottom of the screen asks the player to refer to the game manual to identify the letter corresponding to the drinking potion to access the second level.