Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown There will be an accessibility feature included that you will probably need in every Metroidvania from now on.
One thing nearly everyone can agree on is that Metroidvania can be a bit confusing. I’m sure if you’ve ever played a game you’ve found yourself thinking, “Wait, where is that place again? What does it look like?” and then you spent an hour looking for it until you accidentally found it Where you should go. Well, at least in the upcoming Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, you don’t have to worry about that anymore, thanks to its Memento feature.
As detailed in Ubisoft’s recently released Accessibility Depth video, Memory Fragmentation’s feature is simple: it takes a screenshot of your location and pins it to the map. If you hover over that part of the map, you can see that screenshot to remind you of the situation. “This is actually a new feature for this type of game,” senior game programmer Cristophe de Labrouche explained in a deep dive.
“We did a lot of testing because we didn’t know if players would use it. Once they got it, they loved it. They put them everywhere in the game. They really, really used it.” Honestly, This sounds like an incredible feature. Sure, it’s fun to get lost sometimes, but sometimes you don’t want to waste time looking for your way back to a place only to find out that it’s not actually where you wanted to be.
“A lot of players said it was helpful and it looked natural,” senior game designer Rémi Boutin also noted. “I think it really pushes the boundaries of the genre and I’d like to see this feature in other games.”
There are many other cool features highlighted in the deep dive video, such as guided mode, and many other options.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, the best game Dom played at the Summer Games Festival, will be released on January 18th for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC.