Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Lore & Background

In the Forgotten Sands, the narrative shifts to a desert kingdom long forgotten by the wider world. The Prince of this tale is not the same individual who once sealed the Sands of Time; he is a younger, more impulsive hero who stumbles into a conflict between the kingdom's ruler and the scheming Vizier, a figure whose ambition to harness the power of the Hourglass threatens to unmake the realm entirely. The desert itself is a character—shifting dunes, buried ruins, and sandstorms that reshape the landscape between moments.

The Vizier serves as the central antagonist, a courtly and calculating figure who manipulates the kingdom from within. Unlike the Djinns of earlier entries, his threat is political and personal, rooted in a desire for power that corrupts the very sand the Prince wields. The Hourglass, a recurring artifact in the franchise, is central to the plot, its power both the Prince's greatest tool and the Vizier's ultimate prize.

The game's world is deliberately more colorful and open than the cloistered palaces of Sands of Time, reflecting a kingdom in decline—beautiful but fragile, its people scattered, its history eroding like sand from a crumbling wall. The Forgotten Sands is, in essence, a story about what is lost when a civilization is abandoned to the desert.

In Their Own Story

The wind carries the taste of copper and old stone. The Prince crouches on a half-buried archway, watching the Vizier's soldiers drag a sandstone stele from the dune. Below, the Forgotten City exhales—doors grinding open in the heat, corridors filling with golden grit. He presses his palm to the sand and feels it answer, warm and alive, curling around his fingers like a living thing. Somewhere in the palace beyond the ridge, the Hourglass ticks. One more tick, and the desert will swallow everything that was ever built here. He runs.

Reader's Guide

The Forgotten Sands arrived at a pivotal moment for the franchise. After the critical and commercial success of Sands of Time (2003) and its sequels, Ubisoft Montreal set out to broaden the series' appeal. The most visible change was the addition of a full co-operative campaign, allowing two players to share the Prince's journey through the desert kingdom. This was a first for the series and signaled Ubisoft's intent to court a wider, more casual audience.

Development leaned into a brighter, more saturated visual palette compared to the darker tones of prior entries. The desert setting—open dunes, buried ruins, and a crumbling palace—gave level designers room for more vertical and horizontal traversal variety. Combat retained the sand-based finishing moves that had become a franchise hallmark, but the pacing was tuned to feel slightly more accessible.

Critically, the game received mixed reviews. Praise centered on the co-op mode and the fluid parkour, while criticism focused on a perceived lack of narrative depth and a story that felt lighter than its predecessors. Commercially, it performed well and paved the way for The Two Crowns (2013), which doubled down on the co-op formula.

For fans, Forgotten Sands occupies a bittersweet place: it expanded the franchise's reach while sacrificing some of the mythic weight that made the original trilogy resonate. It is the entry where Prince of Persia stopped being a fable and started being a product—and the tension between those two impulses has shaped the series ever since.

Did You Know?

• The Forgotten Sands was the first Prince of Persia title to feature a full co-operative two-player campaign, a mode that carried over into The Two Crowns.
• The Prince in Forgotten Sands is a different character from the Sands of Time Prince, making the game a narrative prequel rather than a direct sequel.
• The game's desert setting was a deliberate departure from the palace-and-jungle environments of the earlier trilogy, giving level designers a new visual and mechanical vocabulary.
• The Vizier, the game's main antagonist, is a new character not seen in the Sands of Time trilogy, expanding the franchise's roster of villains.