How To Beat Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown’s Hardest Platforming Challenge

by Alex Van Aken on Jan 18, 2024 at 09:00 AM

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is now available, and if you’re a fan of games like Metroid, Castlevania, or Hollow Knight, and you don’t have it on your radar, that’s probably a mistake. The game is a thrilling adventure, with plenty of excellent combat, puzzle, and traversal challenges. Once you get far enough in the game, you’ll likely encounter one of the most challenging of them all; The Impossible Climb is a late-game platforming/traversal sidequest that demands careful timing, patience, and the use of nearly all the powers you’ve earned up to that point in the story. If you want to prove your mastery of The Lost Crown, it’s the sequence you’ll want to tackle.

How To Beat The Impossible Climb In Prince of Persia:

The video above is the result of dozens of earlier failed attempts, but it should give you an idea of at least one path through which you can beat the sequence.

For a bit more guidance, the following tips may be helpful:

The Impossible Climb sidequest is located entirely inside a single large chamber in the central-eastern part of the Upper City zone on the map. On the map, look for the fast travel point called “The Clockwork” and look directly left from there; that’s where you’ll find the room.
You’ll require most of the major powers that can be acquired in the game just to reach the room, including the late-game acquisition of the Fabric of Time, which acts like a grapple. You’ll also extensively use jumps, Gravity Wings (the double jump), and Rush of the Simurgh (dash). Finally, while it’s not strictly required, we strongly recommend using Shadow of the Simurgh for an easier completion of the challenge.
You’ll meet a character named The Hermit, who does surface some in-game lore that should be considered a spoiler, so we won’t discuss it here.
From the Hermit’s location, you need to climb an extensive sequence of moving spiked platforms and retrieve three bells along the way. Dying resets your access to the bells, but if necessary, you can return to the ground with one or more bells during your attempt (though we think that makes it harder).
As you’ll observe in the video, the traversal challenge demands a number of tricky ascents, combining jumps and dashes to stay on moving vertical surfaces.
Before starting each attempt (it’s likely to take several), tap the button to deploy a Shadow on the ground right next to the Hermit to which you can teleport back after retrieving the bells – this saves you from having to descend – which is just as hard as the ascent.
As you climb, one of the biggest challenges is timing when you complete your jumps from one platform to the next. In most cases, you need to wait until the vertical platform you’re jumping to is descending on its chain. If the platform you’re trying to reach is actively going up, it’s much harder to nail the landing and not be killed by spikes. Be patient!
It doesn’t matter which order you collect the bells, or if you go left or right first, though we strongly recommend collecting the left and right bells first before moving up to collect the top center bell.
The moment you collect the third bell, tap the button to return to your Shadow on the ground.