Every time I return to it, I think "this time I will beat it" and I always end up giving up.

The mechanical foundation is obviously great and even expanded with the dual-wielding combat and new tricks, but I find everything else about the game to be worse.

The aesthetics obviously. It's like something Zack Snyder would direct. And, as in the case with many of Zack Snyder's works, my question is: why? Prince of Persia was clearly a fairytale inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, why shove it into this brutalized and sexualized shell? Prince of Persia is just not the vehicle for these ideas. Perhaps they tried to copy God of War or something.

But furthermore I just cannot stand the brownness of it. It's as brown as Deus Ex: Human Revolution is orange. Pick any random screenshot from it and there's a 90%+ chance it'll be predominantly brown. After a while I just feel like I'm traversing tunnels of mud (to put it nicely, if you know what I mean), and this creates a strong aversion to even coming back to the game.

But the single worst thing about it is the backtracking. It's like: "remember how much you liked the brown tunnels earlier? Well, we thought so, so we brought them back again! And again!" And repeat ad nauseam.

I must've had much more patience when I was younger because I remember getting quite far in the game, even though I wasn't a huge fan of it then either (I was kinda riding on the hype of it being a new Prince of Persia game), but at this age I get sick of this kind of shit real quick. Also, I used to have this game on 3 CDs with the awful StarForce DRM, but ended up losing it in a wager to my friend. I was kinda bummed that day, but in retrospect ... eh...