NOTE: This is a transfer of a review originally posted on the game jolt forums. A new review of a game I did not do before will appear here shortly

Prince of Persia is a rather simple set up platform game, at least in concept, as it was very ground-breaking for its animation techniques at the time setting the standard for the games to come.

Story

The is set up in the "Stories of 1001 nights" theme and takes us to ancient Persia, where the sultan is absent, and the evil visier Jaffar, wants to abuse the situation to seize the throne. The simplest way to do so is to force the Sultan's daughter into merriage, but she keeps refusing, until Jaffar summons a great hourglass. It will take an hour before the hourglass runs out and will make the princess disappear forever.
You assume the role of the princess' lover, who was thrown into the dungeons by Jaffar. You have one hour to make your way out of the dungeons and to strike down the evil magician, in order to save the princess' life.

A classic story of love... Don't we all LOVE it?

Gameplay

When it comes to the technical part of the game, the focus lied on smooth animations, the torches on the background had a realistic looking fire and the arms and legs of the hero (and his enemies) had to have a kind of realisitic result. However, due to the limited resources of the time, this made the developers decide to leave out scrolling effects. This does work out in the gameplay, though. Now all levels are devived in small portions and they are not that hard to navigate through. Still the game offers great challenges. You still have spikes to jump over and enemies to fight.

Of course, you can jump, and you can also jump up a higher platform by pulling yourself up (an elemement we also saw later in Tomb Raider).

You need to find a sword halfway the first level allowing you to fight guards. Eventually you need to find the door that exits the level allowing you access to the next level.

SECRET TIP: What I must note here is that the time ticks away while the end music sounds at the end of each level, however, you can "cheat" by pausing the game until the song's over. For all levels together it can save you almost 5 or 6 minutes of time.

There is no limit in how many times you can die, however dying will restart the level and the time you used to get as far as you got before you died will be wasted. You can only save the start of the level, so it makes no sense to go for the "save-frequently" option, because when you load a game you'll always be at the start of the level (and if you didn't save right after entering the level you also suffer from wasted time), and that might be one of the weaknesses of this game. The game would really have benefitted from a better save routine.
Furthermore, the savegame routine only works on level 3 and above.

Copy Protection

Unfortunately Prince of Persia features a "Doc-Check" copy protection (unless you have a hacked version of the game... Naughty-naughty). These kinds of copy-protections were very common back in the old days. They purpose is, as the name suggest to prevent the game from being copied illegally. If you have the legal version of the game this should be no problem.

In order to verify you have a legal version of the game, you'll get into the level shown above when you complete level 1, or if you load a savegame (if you do this and you didn't exit the game after already having gone through the copy protection before, the level will be skipped). If you have a game manual, just check the requested page, line and worth and drink the potion with the starting letter of that word. If you have it wrong 3 times the game will exit immediately. If you drink the right potion the door will open.

If you have a collector's version of the game, you may have gotten a list with all the correct letters in stead.

Bosses

Yeah, the game features 4 boss enemies. The first is encountered on level 3 where you'll meet an invicible skeleton. Since it's invincible you'll need to figure out a different way to beat it. At level 6 you'll meet a fat guard, who is more aggressive than the other guards. At level 12 there are 2 bosses, first your mirror image, and killing it will kill yourself, so find a way to get past it, and the second and final boss is, of course, the vizier Jafar himself.

Controls

WASD is not supported, as it was not common in those days (in fact no game at all had support for it back then). You just control the hero with the arrow keys. You can jump with the up key, duck with the down key and grab onto stuff with the shift key. When you encounter an enemy you'll automatically draw your sword (if you have one) and you can use shift to hit the enemy. If you do it on the right moment you can use up+shift to parry an enemy attack. Especially when fighting the fat guard or the visier himself mastery of this technique is of vital importance. The controls are not hard to learn and as level 1 and 2 are fairly easy, you have enough time to practice until you get your first real challenge in level 3.

Then some special keys you may wanna know about:

• ctrl-g Save game (only saves the start of the level)

• shift-l Level skip. Only works up to level 4 or 5 and will limit the time to 15 minutes which is not enough to finish the game from that point.

• ctrl-r Resets the game to the start screen

• ctrl-l Only works in the start screen. Loads a savegame.

• ctrl-q Quits the game (you won't be asked for confirmation).

Obtaining and playing this game in modern times

Like most games in this thread, you need an emulator to play this game. The game works perfectly in DOSBox. Since the game is (despite its groundbreaking graphic style for its time) not demanding on hardware you don't need to play with the config settings of DOSBox at all.

Trying to obtain a legal copy of the game (or even an illegal one) can lead you astray as the is also a 3D action series with the same name and maybe even officially of the same franchize, but I'm sorry I need to say it, but they have NOTHING TO DO AT ALL with this gem, but they will very likely pop up in nearly every google search you do. I tried to find it, but everything leads to that modern series and not to the original, as if it never existed.

I bought my own copy years ago, but I deem it unlikely you can still buy that. If you know a place where you can legally obtain this game, link me, and I shall update this review.