Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown Is The First In The Series To Properly Represent Zoroastrianism

The original Prince of Persia had a very white-looking dude fighting some skeletons. The second game had some guy dressed as Aladdin fighting people in bird masks. Prince of Persia 3D was too graphically intensive for my parents' PC – it’s the reason I learned what a graphics card was. The Sands of Time trilogy showed the Prince performing all sorts of time shenanigans, going through an emo phase, and even hearing voices in his head. What I'm trying to say is that none of these games showed anything that sounded like the ancient Persian folk tales my dad told me about as a kid – until Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

I belong to a Parsi Zoroastrian family in India. My ancestors, Zoroastrians from what is now called Iran, fled from persecution to western India. As Parsis, we changed our ways to fit into society better, incorporating the local language, culture, food, and many other things into our own lives. Parsis are very different from Zoroastrians who currently live in Iran – we don't speak the same language, eat the same food, or even have many of the same customs. However, some things have endured over the generations – our prayers and our stories.

The Sands of Time trilogy mostly only featured architecture and symbolism from Persian history, while the 2008 reboot and its spin-off stuck with simply name-dropping characters from Persian mythology. The Lost Crown doesn't claim to be historically or mythically accurate, but the lore doesn't feel as bastardized as it did in the previous games. This is because the writers have retained at least some of the original context instead of just symbolism and name dropping. For example, when I first met the blacksmith Kaheva, I immediately knew it was a direct reference to Kaveh the blacksmith, who forged the weapon that defeated the villain Zohak and the chains that bound him in a cave below Mount Damavand for eternity.

It's this kind of attention to detail and faithfulness to the source material that the original games lacked. Conversely, another name for Zohak was Dahaka, which you may remember as the monstrous, smokey guardian of time in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within – a classic case of simply using a name without relevance to the name’s source.

Parsi Zoroastrians aren’t represented in foreign media often, since there are barely 200,000 of us on the planet. We had to settle for being caricatures in Bollywood movies or having the entire class turn to look at us whenever we were mentioned in history class. Our most famous global export was Freddie Mercury, so at least we had that. When The Lost Crown presented the same architecture as the temple outside my house, or when the lore brought up the Towers of Silence, or even when the names of my grandfather, father-in-law, nephew, and several friends were mentioned, I finally felt that my culture was represented in a triple-A video game.

Of course, the game isn't historically accurate. Ubisoft Montpellier mentioned that it's set in a fictionalised version of ancient Persia – the time mechanics are a dead giveaway, too. But the difference between The Lost Crown and previous Prince of Persia games is that the team made an effort to weave Persian history, culture, and heritage into the lore and visuals, rather than simply dropping Persian names into the plot or randomly sticking an Asho Farohar onto a wall.

Persian folklore has a wealth of interesting stories – the tragedy of Rustom and Sohrab, the corruption of Zohak, the hero Gordafarid, all written about in the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi. With the number of triple-A studios reaching out to various mythologies for inspiration, developers should take a page out of Ubisoft Montpellier's playbook on how to adapt one of the richest mythologies in existence. The writers didn't need to pay such close attention to the lore, given that it's a Metroidvania, but I'm truly grateful that they did.