If you’ve played a Metroidvania before, you’ve had this moment: you come across a pit of spikes that’s too wide for your current gear and then you hope and pray that by the time you hit the air dash or the double jump or whatever whatever you have, you will remember to go back to this place. And then, six hours later, when you get that upgrade, you’re like, “Where was that pit of spikes?” And you’ll spend hours wandering around trying to wander back to it, going crazy in the process.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crownthe new 2.5D Metroidvania from Ubisoft, has an ingenious solution to this problem.
Previously, the way to remember where the pit of nails was required careful note-taking, sometimes on graph paper.
More modern Metroidvanias, like last year’s excellent one Blasphemous 2, have added customizable in-game map makers, but they have their limits. Does the skull icon I left on the map indicate that there is a big nasty monster in this place, or that there is a collectible skull here that I can’t reach? It takes some forethought and guesswork to come up with a design language for how you use your markers. Invariably, you’ll still have to run back to that spot to see if your last upgrade is enough to overcome what was there when you marked it.
Image: Ubisoft Montpellier/Ubisoft via Polygon
In Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, the solution to this problem is actually quite simple. You can take a screenshot at any time and the game will pin that screenshot to the map for you to view later. If it’s that pit with spikes, you’ll know if you’ve found the right upgrade to cross that pit, and you won’t even have to walk back to confirm it’s the right spot. It is literally a photographic memory.
There are minor limitations to this. You can only have a limited number of Memory Shards (as they’re called) active at a time, so you can’t extinguish the entire card in screenshots. But because you can also place customizable markers alongside these screenshots, you’ll never have to guess where to go for your next upgrade or now-reachable chest.
I’d love to see this appear in other games as well. In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for the much more annoying double screenshot method I use: one screenshot of the map, one screenshot of the gameplay.