Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Action-adventure 2003 Ubisoft Montreal Prince of Persia ⏱ Long · ~10–30 h

An elegant reboot of the series with acrobatic parkour; the dagger can rewind time.

An elegant reboot of the legendary series that dazzled with fluid parkour and the idea of controlling time. Thanks to a magical dagger, the Prince can rewind time and undo his falls as well as mistakes in combat, which was revolutionary at the time. Acrobatic wall-running, clever puzzles and the poetic atmosphere of the One Thousand and One Nights created a timeless gem. Sands of Time inspired a whole generation of action adventures and to this day remains one of the best-aged games of its era.

The same title elsewhere (3)

The game launched simultaneously on PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox, and the core experience — acrobatic parkour and rewinding time with the dagger — stays essentially the same across all three. The differences are mostly technical: Xbox, thanks to more powerful hardware and extra memory, usually delivers slightly sharper textures and a steadier frame rate than the competition, while the PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions are very close to each other, with any gaps being mostly cosmetic. None of the versions had content or levels noticeably cut, so today's platform choice comes down mainly to which controller and emulation setup you have on hand, not how much of the game you'd be missing.