(If the enemy somehow does manage get one over on you, all that happens is that he regains a bit of health.) It barely scales up in difficulty, and it's easy to defeat them because – remember – you can't die. The same goes for the combat, which has you fighting four different monsters six times each. Every level is by and large a remix of things you've already done, with very few new twists. By the time you've played the first two or three of Prince of Persia's 25 levels, you've seen the near entirety of what the game has to offer in terms of challenge. Having learned the ropes, I was faced with another eight hours of repetitive, challenge-free gameplay. And if you press any other buttons during this sequence, nothing happens – until a second later, because the game queues up the button press and executes the action whether you still want it to happen – or not. He pauses a moment, jumps up, pauses again, then jumps up a little bit more. If you press X to scale a wall, he doesn't leap up it instantly.
One, every button press put in motion some sort of lengthy canned animation that I couldn't cancel out of. It was not long before I realized that I didn't have a lot of direct control over the Prince's actions, for two reasons. He'll jump straight off a wall when you wanted to run on it, or flip to the opposite side of a column, then jump off it into nothing. At first I began to notice that the majority of the times the Prince fell to his death, it was because he did something I wasn't expecting. It is an overwhelmingly impressive world, but when you begin attempting to interact with it, some of the glimmer fades. You'll see one loading screen when you start the game, and never again thereafter (unless you use the handy teleport feature to zip around).
It's a series of rigidly linear levels connected seamlessly via short pathways. Some have called this Prince of Persia an "open world" game. And all of this is tied together with some impressive stuff under the hood.