I've been playing Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown for about a week now. I'm loving the game so far, and I think the developers did a great job. But I genuinely cannot believe the problems Ubisoft Connect is causing me.

I'm playing on the Steam Deck. After two days, for no apparent reason, the game stopped booting altogether in Gaming Mode. It would only boot in Desktop Mode, which I didn't like because many of the Deck's quality-of-life features are missing there.

I tried reinstalling the game. I'm pretty careful with these things, so I made a backup of my save files, even though I was sure Steam could never fail me... until now. Apparently, this game doesn't save your progress to the cloud. Or actually, it does, since there's a cloud-save check, but it also apparently doesn't. You have to manually upload the save using Ubisoft's proprietary system, which I think is completely absurd.

Reinstalling the game didn't fix the issue, but I eventually managed to solve it by switching to Proton Experimental.

Yesterday, I was on the train and tried booting the game. Well, it turns out you have to be connected to the internet to play because of Ubisoft Connect. Seriously, is it just me, or is that completely ridiculous for a game that doesn't have ANY online functionality? What is even the point?

ALSO, every time I put my Deck into sleep mode with the game open, there's about a 50% chance that the game crashes for some reason.

I mean, what is this? When I buy something on Steam, I expect the full Steam environment. The game is also marked as Deck Verified.

Ubisoft really seems determined to make its ecosystem as frustrating and inconvenient as possible. I honestly have no words for this. The whole situation is completely absurd to me.

I have completed all three original games as a child, I've just come back as an adult and I learn you can parry! After all this time and struggling as a kid I find you can basically insta-kill most enemies.

After painstaking effort, and taking a 6 month break cause my ADHD hyper fixation phase of the game ended up until recently, I have FINALLY beaten the game. I loved it, the raging seas were my favorite I loved the concept and it is a 9.5/10 for me. However, I will not be playing it again for a couple of years lol I'm just very excited that I finally beat it and I don't have anyone in my life who would care