For as much yapping as he does, Ubisoft’s retooled and reborn Persian prince sure doesn’t spill many beans about his ultimate goals. As he accompanies the dainty, pretty, magicunspooling princess across corrupted, gorgeously illustrated inky-black landscapes, you’ll wonder just what’s he’s up to…but not for any lack of gum-flapping.

If anything, this new take on the Prince of Persia series — with its delightfully whimsical strokes of wide-eyed fantasy and lovely artistic bent — relies heavily on the development and interaction of its two leads: the enigmatic slacker Prince, who claims he’s just in it for the wine, women, and a lost donkey; and the smart, clever Princess Elika, who’s on a mission to reclaim her birthland from a recently freed dark god. To build the relationship between the two and give the game’s tale significant weight, there’s hella chatting to do.

For the most part, the charmingly silly, flirty exchanges (encouraged by a constant prompt to press the left bumper or trigger) work. The two are fiercely likeable yins to the other’s yang, even if the Prince sounds less like a wanderer from an exotic locale and more like some (totally gnarly) dude who just washed ashore, surfboard in hand. More importantly, the interaction stretches past mere conversation into airtight gameplay, with Elika and the Prince working in complete tandem to hopscotch sprawling wastelands soaked in pulsating, sinister black goo.

Your ultimate goal? To heal the land held hostage by Ahriman, a boogeyman god deadset on getting his gross, inky fingers all over the environment via his four henchmen. You can’t fight the creeping corruption head-on (you’ll just sink into its quicksand-like muckiness); instead you’ll have to take out the big bad involved in that specific area’s contamination.

You have four “lands” to conquer initially, each split into sub-areas. In each subsection, you’ll engage in a platform-style race to a certain area to meet up with the main boss character. You’ll beat him down, use Elika’s innate magical abilities to heal the place to its flowery former state, and then rush off to the next open area to repeat the process all over again.

Indeed, the game’s structure of “Clear Area B, then Move to Area C or D” is so tightly and transparently designed that it falls into a boxed-in pattern of checklist progression. There’s little surprise or delight when you know exactly what’s next in the pipeline at all times — “Oh, you mean there’s more wall-running, then fighting, then healing? You don’t say!” Granted, when you boil down pretty much any single-player adventure game, it involves a grocery list of responsibilities, tasks, and boss fights. But Prince of Persia lays it all out there for you to see in its fast-travel– capable map. This setup isn’t a dealbreaker — traveling between lands is still an intoxicating mix of jumps, grabs, and Elika-assisted co-op leaps across giant chasms — but the structure never feels as organic as the gameplay itself.

And the gameplay is damn tight. A feast of eye-popping vistas make welcome backdrops to inventive, thrill-ride pathways, while Prince’s ammo-belt full of moves (like a gauntlet wallslide, death-defying roof scrambling, and a dizzying set of “elemental plate” rocketing stages) scratch the adventuring itch just right. Cinematic combat against Ahriman’s followers has been trimmed down to spotlight a handful of encounters, rather than peppering the entire landscape with them. When you do have to take up arms, fighting presents a great blend of timed skill, boss-fight–style patterns, and Lego-esque stackable combos.

It’s immediately tangible, even from the title screen, that Prince of Persia is a labor of love, meant to bridge luxurious aesthetic and spitshine polish with emotional investment. And despite its overly repetitive structure, we found ourselves compelled to fight our way through to see how it all ends — donkey or not.

On Xbox 360

+ Amazingly fluid controls; environments have a quasiwide-open playground feel.

+ Good character interaction.

- Repetitive game design; anachronistic Prince.

? You say “fer-TILE,” I say “FER-tile”…

8.0