She reaches out with that slender, delicate hand and evaporates the danger before it takes its usual toll. You seemingly fall to your death, yet she’s right there to pull you up and away from the corrosive depths. The motions are there: rhythmic platforming, daring combat, all the stumbles and spills, too. But death, in the traditional sense, never greets our princely hero.

Through the eye of the structure of play, redoing is the very fabric of game experiences; working around obstacles and learning from mistakes. But through the lens of context, player death is an ugly and unavoidable break from the illusion and construction of believable spaces. Continually, and perhaps even forever, stuck at an odd place, autosave retreads carry on as oddities that have proved imperative to structure, yet blasphemous to common sense.

With Prince of Persia, rebooted from the brooding days of man-mascara and rock riffs, developer Ubisoft Montreal looks to place the pieces of sense and play in equilibrium. The personified patch to the problem is Elika, a white clad damsel who tames your distress. She swoops in at the sight of any besetment, turning the threat to dust, and quickly returns to your side, letting you get back to the sway of a wall run or swing of a blade. Though if you’re looking for absolute reasoning behind her death defying tricks, well, just leave that to the wonders and mysteries of magic.

No longer is it about turning back the Sands of Time in order to come to grips with tricky combat and demanding platforming. Elika’s figurative safety net is spread thick underneath every jump, and the ease of getting back to the line of movement enforces the very feel of the Prince’s fresh hops and skids, which have taken on a new tempo. If the serene and tranquil environments don’t lull you into a quiet trance, the cascade of visual cues will surely complete the calming effects. Few elements beg to be looked upon with action or adventure as their key tone, but rather wide windowed timing and near rhythmic aspects to the flow of movement fully prescribe what this reboot is all about.

Laid out like a fantastical jungle gym, environments take a series of timed button presses to traverse. And at first it seems like an extended quick time event, though it becomes clear that the series of swings and jumps, correlating to key buttons, are placed mindfully.

A typical quick time event denotes a blazingly fast series committed to random buttons, and when you fail it’s then committed to memory. Perhaps it can be said that the visual cues tied to their particular presses – such as the deeply worn walls in which it seems a thousand princes ran before you, and the large rings which appear as blatant handholds – are simply extensions of that dreaded mash attached to a cinema. And in a sense, that’s true. But there is true tempo to become lost in, and this Prince has one foot clearly set in the pool of the rhythm genre, while the other is touching the more typical, structural aspects of platforming.

And while this newfound, semi-genre fusion is clear at about an hour of taking in the gorgeously lonely environments and grasping the feel, the new leading man is at odds in a game that banks everything on the power of showing, rather than telling. With harmonized movement and interaction between the Prince and Elika, it has more than little semblance to Ico. However, instead of keeping with the quiet, unuttered tone of that which it clearly evokes, the Prince is a witty, womanizing thief and adventurer – the same voice actor of Uncharted fame is used, no less. Their banter is rich and entertaining, though it always exists as something oddly separate and belonging to a different narrative mood.

On the side of pairing together two separate genres, rhythm and platforming, the corresponding language has put forth a successfully rebooted tune. Elika, too, carries on the series legacy as the context that informs the unbroken tempo of platforming, as well as personifies and leeches player death of much hindrance. But in Ico if the title character wittingly told the delicate Yorda not to look at his butt, his sly banter would be strikingly odd. Although the pair in Prince of Persia are adults, the fantastical and deserted world just doesn’t smack of talkative chatter, and neither does it work in contrast.