Prince of Persia (2008)

Another really cool thing this game does is progressive difficulty scaling. As you dive further into each area of the game world, the environment puzzles become more complex, which isn't exactly a "new" idea - but as you progress in the game overall (which you can do in a non-linear fashion), combat becomes more difficult as well. Enemies have more health, attack faster, and learn new defensive moves. Where the early combat situations are friendly enough to allow you to experiment, by the final boss fight you're expected to have a solid handle on the game's evasion, parry, and counterattack mechanics, which leads to some really cool boss fights.

Follow up on the magic plates: the Blue ones activate a non-interactive magical grappling hook, carrying you to a new area. It's effectively similar to the Red plates, but used more often in close quarters, as it takes an elliptical path rather than a straight one (not that this matters, since you don't actively control either one).

The game is not without its shortcomings. Combat arenas are walled off, and the quick-time events that occur when you repeatedly run into the edges can become pretty tiresome. The Prince's dialog and manner of speech may or may not be your cup of tea (I actually liked it). The ending is not much of a crowd pleaser, although I thought it was kind of cool. The mostly-seamless graphics are sometimes marred by Elika and/or the Prince clipping into walls. If you're not into the light seed thing, collecting what you need to get through the magic plate obstacles would probably be a pain. I found the light seed collection fun enough to be considered part of the main game, but if you don't, your hour-count will suffer for it.

So, yes, in many cases your mileage will vary; I really, really liked this game, but I can see why someone might not. The new PoP isn't perfect - but that's about the worst I can say about it.

Progress: 1001 light seeds