Prince of Persia

The animation changed how movement felt

Almost every review starts with the same reaction: the Prince moves with unusual weight and detail. ASM, Génération 4, Joystick, Computer Gaming World, inCider/A+, Video Games & Computer Entertainment, The One, and the Japanese magazines all spend time on running, jumping, grabbing ledges, falling, and sword fighting. Some publications even separate animation from graphics in their scoring and give the two very different results. Génération 4 gives the animation 94% while rating graphics at 60%; Joystick gives animation 20/20 and graphics 14/20. That gap shows what critics were actually responding to.

The important point is that animation is not only decoration. A running jump needs space. A standing jump covers a different distance. The Prince cannot stop or turn instantly. Reaching for a ledge works only from the right position. Reviewers repeatedly connect those details to the way the player has to read a room before moving. The body on screen becomes part of the rules.

That makes the controls one of the few places where the praise is not completely uniform. Micom BASIC Magazine is very clear that the movement can feel strange at first. The game does not react like a faster arcade platformer, and early mistakes come from expecting it to. The One, Tilt, The Games Machine, and CVG are more positive. They describe the controls as precise once the player understands the timing and accepts that every action has a visible start and finish.

This difference matters because it changes how the same feature can be read. One critic sees weight and precision; another sees a short learning curve. What almost nobody argues is that the movement is incidental. Whether they immediately loved it or needed time to adjust, reviewers treated it as the center of the game.

Jumps and traps turn each room into a small puzzle

Prince of Persia is often described as an action game, but the period reviews keep returning to observation and memory. Floors collapse. Gates close. Pressure plates open doors. Spikes punish careless movement. Potions can help or harm. Some routes are obvious only after the player has already failed once. The rooms are small, but the game asks the player to read them before moving through them.

Game Player’s and the later PC Strategy Guide make this point especially well. They describe progress as a mix of movement and problem solving: looking across a room, spotting switches, remembering traps, and deciding which ledge can actually be reached. Génération 4 also praises the balance between reflexes and thought. Micromanía focuses on the need to memorize hazards, while Computer Gaming World treats exploration and puzzle solving as major parts of the adventure rather than pauses between action scenes.

The animation is what makes these puzzles feel physical. The player is not simply choosing whether to jump; the player has to judge the run-up, the edge, the landing, and whether there is enough room to stop afterwards. A loose tile or a closing gate becomes more interesting because the Prince cannot instantly cancel one movement into another.

This is also why trial and error appears in so many reviews without automatically becoming a complaint. Failure teaches distance, timing, or the layout of the next room. The criticism appears when repeated attempts become too expensive, especially with the one-hour limit and restricted saving. But the basic idea of learning through failed jumps is usually accepted as part of the design.

The sword fights are simple, but timing still matters

Combat uses very few actions. The Prince can advance, retreat, strike, and parry. Several reviews mention how small that move set is, but most do not treat the simplicity as a major weakness. The Games Machine notes that different opponents still need different approaches, while Computer Gaming World and Joystick value the tension created by timing and position.

The fights work because they reuse the same movement rules as the platforming. A guard near a ledge is not the same problem as a guard in a wide room. Being pushed backwards can be dangerous even before the enemy lands the next hit. The player has to watch distance and rhythm instead of attacking as fast as possible.

This makes combat easy to read. There are no long move lists, special attacks, or complicated statistics. The player learns when to wait, when to parry, and when to step forward. The result is small in scope but consistent with the rest of the game. The duels test patience in the same way the jumps test timing.

The period reviews rarely present sword fighting as the main attraction. It is one part of a larger rhythm that moves between running, jumping, searching, waiting, and fighting. That is important because it explains why the game could feel varied even with a limited set of verbs. Variety came less from adding new mechanics than from changing the situation around familiar actions.

The one-hour limit changes how failure feels

The Princess must be rescued within one hour. Contemporary reviews generally accept that limit as part of the game rather than treating it as an arbitrary obstacle. It gives every failed jump, wrong turn, and unnecessary fight a cost. Learning a level is useful, but learning it also consumes the same time needed to finish the game.

inCider/A+ treats replaying levels as a normal part of improvement. Tilt and Joystick also present the rising difficulty as one of the reasons the game stays engaging. Micom BASIC Magazine describes a similar learning process from another angle: once the player understands the unusual movement, actions that looked difficult become more reliable.

The harsher comments focus less on the timer itself and more on repetition around it. Several early versions do not allow saving from the beginning, so a player can spend time relearning material before reaching the point that actually caused trouble. CVG and Video Games & Computer Entertainment both pay attention to this problem, even though their overall verdicts remain very positive.

The reviews also disagree slightly on where the challenge really starts. Génération 4 thinks much of the first part is fairly easy and suggests the game becomes demanding later. Joystick is much more emphatic about the difficulty of the final levels. Together, those views describe a game with a clear curve rather than constant punishment from the first screen.

What never changes is the source of progress. The Prince does not gain new movement abilities or a stronger sword. The player improves by learning how far he can jump, when a trap triggers, how a guard reacts, and which route wastes less time. The difficulty therefore comes from mastery rather than character growth.

The Prince impressed critics more than the rooms around him

The biggest visual disagreement is easy to understand. Some reviews use very high graphics scores because the moving character looked so advanced. Video Games & Computer Entertainment gives graphics 10/10 and describes the game as a technical triumph. inCider/A+ is also very positive about what the Apple II version achieves. Other publications separate the Prince from the rest of the screen and are much less impressed by walls, corridors, and repeated backgrounds.

Génération 4, Joystick, ASM, Power Play, and The Games Machine all make some version of this distinction. The common idea is that the character looks alive while the rooms around him can look plain. The difference is how much that matters. For Joystick and TGM, the animation and playability easily compensate. For Power Play, they do not.

Power Play is the clearest negative outlier in the corpus. Its 66% overall score is far below the strongest reviews, and the criticism is not that the animation fails. It argues that the rest of the game offers too little variety around that achievement. That makes the review useful: it shows that even in 1990, not every critic treated technical novelty as enough by itself.

Sound is less important to the debate. Scores vary between versions, and several reviews rate it well below animation and playability. The exact technical quality depends too much on the platform to combine those numbers into one verdict. What can be said safely is that no review treats sound as the reason Prince of Persia stands out.

The Japanese coverage focuses on learning the Prince

Micom BASIC Magazine and Technopolis are useful because they spend more time explaining how the game feels to learn. Micom BASIC Magazine does not simply praise the animation; it describes the early awkwardness of judging steps, jumps, and distances, then explains how that awkwardness fades as the player understands the Prince’s movement.

That emphasis makes the Japanese coverage slightly different from reviews that lead with spectacle. The visual effect still matters, but the interest quickly moves to control, repeated attempts, enemy behavior, and the way action and puzzle solving work together. Technopolis similarly presents the game through practical situations, showing how the opening areas teach movement and traps.

Micom BASIC Magazine also discusses the Replay Mode included in the PC-98 version, which could record and replay a run. That feature belongs to a specific conversion and should not be treated as part of the 1989 Apple II release. Still, the attention it receives is revealing. A mode built around watching the Prince move made sense precisely because the animation itself was one of the game’s attractions.

Taken together with the Western reviews, these articles reinforce the same basic point from another direction: Prince of Persia was not memorable because it simply looked smooth. It made players learn a new relationship between animation, timing, and control.