Games Like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

If you want games like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, the ones that come closest are Nine Sols, Hollow Knight, Metroid Dread, Blasphemous, Touhou Luna Nights, and Timespinner. The Lost Crown does three things at once: tight parry-based combat, a dense map that gates itself behind new abilities, and Time Powers that are equal parts puzzle and combat tool. Few games hit all three, so the list below splits by which part you liked most.

If it's specifically the time tricks you're chasing — rewinding, slowing, freezing — skip ahead to the last two picks and the one at the end. If it's the combat and the map, start at the top.

Nine Sols

Nine Sols (2024) is the closest match for how The Lost Crown actually plays. Red Candle Games built it around deflection: enemies telegraph, you read the swing, and you parry on the beat to break their poise instead of just chipping health. That's the same combat language Sargon speaks in The Lost Crown, pushed a little harder toward Sekiro. The world is a connected taopunk ruin with the usual Metroidvania gating, and the bosses are some of the best in the genre right now. If the parry rhythm was your favorite part, this is the one to play next — we wrote up a fuller list of games like Nine Sols if you want more in that exact vein.

Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight is the Metroidvania benchmark The Lost Crown gets measured against, and for good reason. It's a huge hand-drawn world that hides routes behind abilities you earn — a dash, a wall jump, a double jump — so the map slowly opens as you get stronger. The combat is simpler than Sargon's combo strings, but the exploration is deeper and the secrets run further down than you expect. It trades The Lost Crown's pace for atmosphere and scale. If you liked getting lost in Mount Qaf and pinning map markers, this is the bigger version of that feeling.

Metroid Dread

The Lost Crown is, structurally, a Metroid game with a Persian myth coat of paint — so the obvious move is to play the modern Metroid. Dread (2021) is fast, precise, and built around movement: slide, counter, melee-cancel, and flow through a map that keeps rerouting you with one-way drops and locked doors. The EMMI stalker sections add a stealth-and-panic beat the other games here don't have. If what you liked about The Lost Crown was the speed and the clean traversal more than the parries, Dread is the tightest version of that.

Blasphemous

Blasphemous shares The Lost Crown's love of a hand-drawn, lore-heavy world and a 2D map you slowly pry open, but it's grimmer and meaner about it. The combat is heavier and more deliberate, the setting is a nightmare of religious guilt, and the platforming gauntlets can be brutal. It's less about clean combos and more about weight and punishment. If the dense, secret-packed map mattered to you more than the combo system, it's a strong pick — there's a whole list of games like Blasphemous for the soulslike-Metroidvania crowd.

Touhou Luna Nights

Here's where the time angle comes in. Touhou Luna Nights stars Sakuya, who can stop time completely — freeze the room, walk through stalled bullets and frozen enemies, set up a hit, then let everything resume at once. It's a polished side-scrolling Metroidvania with a graze-and-counter combat loop, and time-stop is woven through both the fights and the platforming. The Lost Crown uses its Time Powers in measured doses; Luna Nights hands you the freeze as a core resource and builds the game around it.

Timespinner

Timespinner is the other Metroidvania that makes bending time the whole point. You can freeze enemies in place and slow the room to cross gaps and reposition mid-fight, turning a chaotic screen into a series of moves you take at your own pace. It's a retro-styled, story-driven game in the Symphony of the Night mold, smaller in scope than the others here but built squarely around the idea The Lost Crown only flirts with. If the time puzzles were your favorite part, Timespinner commits to them hardest.

What actually makes a game like The Lost Crown

Three things, and most games only have two of them. There's the parry-first combat, where reading and deflecting an attack matters more than out-damaging it. There's the self-gating map, the Metroidvania backbone where new abilities turn old dead ends into shortcuts. And there's time as a verb — dashing through it, recording an echo and snapping back, splitting a room into parallel versions to solve it. That last piece is the one most Metroidvanias skip, which is why a short list of time-specific picks ends up next to the genre heavyweights. The rewind idea itself goes back to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which made undoing the last few seconds a mechanic two decades before The Lost Crown carried it into 2D. For the wider family of rewind, slow, and freeze, our best time-manipulation games roundup lines them all up.

One to watch: KUTO: The Lock of Time

Most games like The Lost Crown treat time as a single trick. KUTO: The Lock of Time — full disclosure, it's our own upcoming game — turns it into a whole loadout. You play Jokoan Kuto, cast out by the gods and bound to the titan Kronos, fighting forward with the Scythe of Kronos through a falling Rome and every era after it. The Lost Crown's Time Powers map almost one-for-one onto its five keys: Recall rewinds you a few seconds, the way Sargon snaps back to an echo; Dilation drops the world into slow motion; Stillness freezes the room completely while you keep moving, the same freeze Luna Nights and Timespinner are built on.

The twist is that you only carry two keys per run, so the build is a choice, not a checklist. A Recall-and-Dilation run plays careful and precise; Stillness paired with the Leap dash rewards going for broke. We pulled apart how the five time keys work in its own piece, and there's a full everything we know about KUTO: The Lock of Time if you want the rest. Coming soon to Early Access.

If a Metroidvania where time is the whole toolkit sounds like your thing, add KUTO: The Lock of Time to your wishlist on Steam.