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Overview
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands sits in the timeline between The Sands of Time and The Two Thrones, picking up with the Prince visiting his brother Malik's kingdom at the worst possible moment. Malik, facing a losing battle against invaders threatening his treasury, makes a catastrophic call: he breaks Solomon's Seal and releases Solomon's Army, a horde of sand-formed creatures that promptly turns every soldier in the kingdom into a stone statue. The Prince and Malik each hold half the seal that keeps them protected, and the entire game flows from that single, terrible decision.
The story keeps a tight focus on brotherhood, pride, and consequence. Malik isn't a villain so much as a man who chose the wrong shortcut, and watching that tension play out gives the narrative more weight than a standard monster-of-the-week setup. The Prince also gains a spirit guide named Razia, a Djinn who teaches him the elemental powers he needs to push through the ruined palace.
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Gameplay and mechanics
The Forgotten Sands rebuilds the movement system that made Sands of Time memorable. Wall-running, pole-swinging, and mid-air course corrections are all present, and the level design puts them to constant use through collapsing corridors and vertical tower climbs.
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Key mechanics at a glance:
- Freeze water: turn cascading waterfalls into solid platforms
- Rewind time: recover from missed jumps instantly
- Whirlwind: blast enemies back with a wind surge
- Stone skin: absorb incoming damage temporarily
- Upgrade trees: spend experience on combat and elemental abilities
The water-freezing mechanic is the standout addition. Certain sections flood with torrents that would kill the Prince on contact, and flipping them into climbable ice structures mid-run creates some of the most satisfying platforming sequences in the series. The timing window is generous enough to feel fluid rather than punishing.
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Combat runs on a hack-and-slash loop. Sand creatures spawn in waves, and the Prince carves through them using a sword combo system augmented by those elemental powers. It never reaches the depth of a dedicated character-action game, but the spectacle of freezing a waterfall, running across it, then detonating a wind burst into a crowd of enemies keeps the moment-to-moment action from going stale.
World and setting
Malik's palace is the entire stage, and Ubisoft Montreal uses that single location well. The architecture shifts from ornate throne rooms to flooded cisterns to crumbling outer walls, giving each chapter a distinct visual texture without the game ever leaving the same building. Sand creatures dissolve satisfyingly on death, and the environmental destruction sells the idea that the kingdom is actively falling apart around you.
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The Djinn lore adds a layer of Persian mythology that the Sands of Time trilogy had always gestured toward but rarely committed to. Razia's guidance grounds the elemental powers in the world's internal logic rather than treating them as arbitrary upgrades.
Impact and legacy
The Forgotten Sands released alongside the Prince of Persia film in May 2010, which put it in an awkward marketing position, but the game itself is a direct continuation of the Sands of Time storyline rather than a film tie-in. For players who bounced off the 2008 reboot's art direction and wanted the original Prince back, it delivered exactly that: acrobatic platforming, time-manipulation mechanics, and a story that treated the source material seriously. The upgrade system and elemental powers give it enough mechanical identity to stand apart from its predecessors while staying firmly within the action-adventure platformer genre that defined the series.