Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time opens with a lie. King Sharaman of Persia and his son, known only as the Prince, march through India toward Azad and sack a city with help from the local Maharajah’s traitorous Vizier. The Prince, hungry for his first taste of honour and glory, heads straight for the treasure vaults. What he finds there — the Hourglass and the Dagger of Time — sets off a disaster he spends the rest of the game trying to undo.
Ubisoft Montreal built the 2003 action-adventure around that mistake. The game released on Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox and Windows. Jordan Mechner, who created the Prince of Persia series, served as creative consultant, designer and scenario writer. The result is a reboot that understands exactly what made the original worth rebooting.
The Dagger and the Sands
The central mechanic is the Dagger of Time. It lets the Prince reverse, accelerate and slow time itself. That is not a gimmick bolted onto a platformer. It is the spine of the whole design. Fall into a trap and you can rewind a few seconds and try the jump again. Get surrounded by sand monsters and you can slow the fight to a crawl, pick your strikes, then let the world snap back to speed.
The Sands of Time curse is what the Prince unleashes when the Vizier tricks him into using the Dagger of Time on the Hourglass. A sandstorm engulfs the kingdom. Everyone in the palace turns into a monster. Only three people remain unchanged, each protected by an artifact: the Prince by his dagger, Princess Farah by a medallion, and the Vizier by a staff.
Farah and the Prince
The Prince does not trust Farah at first. The Persians took her prisoner after sacking her father’s city, and she has every reason to want him dead. The game tracks the thaw. The two grow closer as they fight through the palace, and the writing lets that change happen in small steps rather than one cutscene.
The pair spend the middle of the game trying to return the Sands to the Hourglass, which the Vizier moves to the top of the Tower of Dawn. Sand monsters waylay them constantly, including a sand-possessed King Sharaman. The traps set in motion in the hopes of killing the creatures kill the Prince just as often. By the late game his armour is in shreds and his body is covered in wounds. That wear is the point.
Kakolookia
Trapped in a tomb and waiting to die, Farah tells the Prince a story she has never told anyone. When she was small, her mother gave her a secret magic word to escape anything that scared her: “Kakolookia.”
The Prince repeats it and finds himself in a tunnel winding down to a dreamlike bathhouse, like the magic fountains he used earlier to restore his health. Farah is there. They make love. He wakes in the tomb and finds the cavern was only a dream — and that Farah, the Dagger and his sword are gone. She left him her medallion, the one thing that protects him from the Sands.
if you want to live, die in love
The Tower of Dawn
The Prince climbs the Tower of Dawn from the outside to reach Farah. He finds her overwhelmed by sand monsters, dangling over a cliff by the Dagger. He grabs the blade. She realizes he will die to save her, so she lets go and falls to her death in the Hourglass room below. The Prince tries to rewind time and finds the sand tanks empty — she had used them all.
He massacres the last of the sand monsters in the tower and descends to weep over her body. The Vizier emerges from the shadows and offers him a partnership and eternal life. The Prince refuses. He drives the Dagger of Time into the Hourglass and rewinds time to the night before the invasion.
Just Call Me Kakolookia
The Prince wakes still holding the Dagger of Time and slips into Farah’s bedroom. He tells her everything. She does not remember any of it, because none of it has happened yet. The Vizier finds them and tries to kill them both, telling the Prince that he suffers from consumption and would die in any event, and that his plan was to cure his imminent death with eternal life. The Prince kills him in the fight that follows.
He returns the Dagger of Time to Farah. She asks why he invented such an unbelievable story to prove the Vizier’s treachery. He kisses her, hoping she will remember. She rebuffs him. He uses the dagger to erase the kiss and tells her it was just a story. Then she asks his name.
“Just call me Kakolookia,” he says, and leaves.
What the Dagger Gets Right
The Sands of Time earns its reputation because the time mechanic and the story are the same idea. The Prince’s power is regret made playable. Every rewind is a small confession that he got it wrong, and the ending — erasing a kiss he was not allowed to keep — is the same move at full scale.
The combat is the weakest part. Fights against sand monsters repeat, and the game leans on them harder than the platforming deserves. The palace and the Tower of Dawn carry the real invention, and the traps do more for tension than any enemy encounter.
Ubisoft Montreal also solved a problem the series had carried since Mechner’s original: how to make a third-person platformer feel fluid rather than fussy. The Prince’s speed and agility are the whole vocabulary here, and the camera mostly keeps up. When it does not, the Dagger of Time covers for it.
The Score
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a reboot that treats its source as a foundation rather than a relic. It is short, it is smart about its one big idea, and it ends on a line that lands. The combat drags and the back half leans on sand monsters too often, but the climb up the Tower of Dawn and the tomb scene with Farah are among the best sequences of their generation.
The published score stands at 8.4 of 10, per the IGDB critic aggregate across 7 outlets.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
