This new version of Prince of Persia reminds me of classic Walt Disney movies. It looks beautiful, and fills you with emotion.

It is not set in the same world as the previous Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake and that game's sequels, but instead has a whole new storyline, characters and environment to explore. The platforming looks great, and jumping around a level is quick, smooth and looks skilful.

Most of it has been kept under wraps so far. What we do know is that you play as a travelling adventurer who comes into a land where darkness has taken over, and you meet a girl named Elika who seems to have the ability to cleanse the land. You decide to help her out (at first trying to figure out how best to get into her pants, of course) and throughout the journey you become the true hero you were meant to be. The developers said Han Solo was a big inspiration for the character of the Prince in this game. I have to admit he does have some pretty good one-liners.

The game world is generally open-ended. Basically, it's broken up into four major parts, and each of those parts are broken up into four smaller sections with one main section that unlocks once you cleanse all the mini levels of darkness. That unlocked section will then lead to the boss fight for the major area. So while it's not as open as, say, the Grand Theft Auto series, you can still choose which areas to go to, in whatever order you like, and there are multiple routes to different areas.

As you cleanse the different lands, you are able to then go and collect light seeds which you use to upgrade Elika with new abilities. Some of these abilities will allow you to get to other places on the map you couldn't before, or find quicker ways of getting around. I am a little concerned that after you cleanse an area of its darkness that the game may turn into a repetitive series of chores consisting of "go through the same area you just played through" and "collect the pretty lights in order to get stronger". It may drastically slow down the pace of the game, and this might have been a design decision to extend the duration, but we will see how it works out when we finally get to play the game. It might be a lot of fun finding ways of getting to the harder to reach places, however before you can do any of this, you have to fight your way through a dark land against dangerous foes.

The combat is totally different from previous Prince of Persia games. Instead of fighting multiple enemies, you will have single one-on-one duels. Well, sort of one-on-one - you're really cheating because Elika will fight with you. Elika follows you around everywhere and helps you traverse the land. The developers have done a great job with her AI, because she's not at all annoying. She never gets in your way, never needs your help or falls behind. You're not on babysitting duty, and it almost reminded me of Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2. It's great having a capable companion character with you that manages to add depth to both the gameplay and story. Unfortunately we weren't given any hands on time, but were shown a pretty lengthy demonstration of the game, and had some time to share the developers with various other journalists for a Q&A session. Ben Mattes, Producer for Prince of Persia, fielded our questions.

GP: Was there any influence from the (1989) original PoP game?

Mattes: I think we sort of wanted to tip our hat to Jordon Mechner and the original Prince of Persia with the duel. Jordan Mechner has always spoken very passionately about swashbuckling. This sort of idea of swinging around the chandelier with nothing but a sword and sort of saving the day. And the original Prince of Persia was nothing but that. So we decided we wanted to do something different, and a distinct departure from the sort of traditional action adventure game where you're a lone hero slaughtering a bunch of low level grunt enemies for fifteen minutes, and then you sort of come across a mini boss and then go back to the grunt enemies who have now increased a little bit in difficulty because you've unlocked some new power. We knew we didn't want to do that because there are a billion other games that do that exact same thing.

So once we made that decision, we came to the idea of doing a duel very quickly. It was sort of a week before we came to the idea of a duel and this idea of this lone swashbuckler or this tag team swashbuckler with the Prince and Elika taking on this single enemy at a time. And I think that was sort of our original influence from the original Prince of Persia.

GP: How much influence or how much involvement did Jordan Mechner have with this game?

Mattes: Other than me showing it to him a few times and him going "Wow this is incredible, I can't wait to play the final one," not much. I mean, he was so busy with the Prince of Persia movie, scripting it, getting it sold, starting on it, working on the re-writes etc. Plus the graphic novel. But due to the relationship between him and Ubisoft it's not a requirement that he be involved. He sort of publicly said quite clearly that he was not involved with Warrior Within, because that was not a direction he would have taken the franchise had he been heavily involved. But when I first showed him this back in June 2006 I think it was, he just looked at it and was floored. He just looked at it and was like "wow, wow, I love it, you guys just really have that sense of majesty, that sense of magic that I've always been pushing for so aggressively in Prince of Persia and you've just nailed it". So he's been very supportive of it and has continued to speak positively about it in his recent engagements. So it's really nice to see him be so supportive of it.

GP: With the new art style, was that decided quite early? Because it's really different.

Mattes: Oh yeah, so we knew from day one that we wanted to do something completely different. Particularly because we knew what Assassin's Creed looked like, and how they were going for hyper realistic. So we didn't want to do the same as that and didn't want to cannibalise each other's sales. So we took the decision very early on to go different, but it did take us a while to figure out what different was. We explored a lot of different art styles and one of the very first ones we did, we showed outside of our production team to the executives at Ubisoft in May 2006. We did that in a meeting with the CEO and head executives to pitch them on this game idea and try and convince them to give us the money to keep making it (laughs). And in that we showed them a vision for the art direction that was quite heavily stylized and more Asian influenced than it is now. And they looked and it and we got great comments about the story and our world structure and our ideas for the gameplay.

Their only negative comment about the art style was that they felt it could do really well in Europe and Asia but they were worried that the American audience might not go for it. So we then had to look at a scale-type thing, where you have like Assassin's Creed on one end for hyper-realistic and you've got Okami on the super stylized end, and you've got us in the middle (but sort of closer to the Okami side).

So we started moving a little bit more towards centre as a result of the feedback, and I'm actually really glad that we did because that old model would have much more easily fitted into the classification of "cell-shaded". The textures were much more simplistic and had a lot less detail. Once we sort of came across this idea of next-gen cell-shaded (or as well call it, "illustrative"), you look at the textures in this world when you're playing the game, you can see the stitching on the Princes clothes, the writing on the walls of the temples, etc. I mean, this is not a simple block of colours in the world.

It's because of that feedback that we managed to create something really unique and different which is this really highly stylized and visual identity with plenty of detail and fidelity in the textures.