The future of Prince of Persia has never seemed more fraught, as Ubisoft’s money men announce a major reshuffling at the company. Jobs have been lost and multiple games have been cancelled, including the long-delayed and much-wanted remake of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
While the fate of Ubisoft’s many studios is the more pressing concern (including staff already going on strike), along with the threat of a pivot towards even more live service games and generative AI, a gamer-level problem is that one of Ubi’s most iconic adventures exists in a surprisingly sorry state.
Where to buy Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
If you don’t already own a modern digital copy of Sands Of Time, you’ve got a few options. The first and most convenient is Steam, where the game goes for around $12 (£9). At the time of writing, the Ubisoft Store has the game discounted down to under $3 (£2), although, yes, you’ll have to download it through their app. You can launch it through Steam after doing so.
The third option is GOG, but you might want to wait just to buy there: At the time of writing, GOG has just announced that Sands of Time will soon be part of the Preservation Program, likely bringing a suite of tweaks and improvements to make it play a bit more gracefully on modern hardware ‘out of the box’.
As with many PS2-era games, Sands of Time doesn’t run great on modern machines, with poor controller support plus wonky post-processing and anti-aliasing. While there are plenty of granular tweaks you can pick up on Nexus Mods or ModDB, there are two more comprehensive options available that I recommend.
Modding Sands of Time the easy way
The fastest way to buff out the ravages of time is the humbly titled Fix Compilation, assembled by game preservation enthusiast Vinícius Medeiros, who has done similar work on many games from that awkward time before good PC ports. The pack is designed to be as simple and seamless as possible:
Just download and unpack the ZIP file to your Prince Of Persia directory, overwriting files as required.
Fix Compilation contains a new launcher, some DirectX wrapper fixes, restored EAX audio (for reverb and echo effects), full widescreen support (although ultrawide resolutions will show you more than you should see, especially in menus), and—most importantly—modern controller support.
On top of all that, if you’ve got the Steam or Ubisoft versions, it strips out the old DRM, allowing for you to pack it up and transfer it to your handheld PC of choice, where it works perfectly. See the section below for more details on how to do that.
There’s minimal work needed on your end to use this compilation. Just unpack and launch the game through PrinceOfPersia.EXE (not POP.EXE). You’ll need to manually bind your controls before you can use a controller, but you should be able to map everything onto a modern Xbox, PlayStation or Steam pad with relative ease.
Modding Sands of Time the fancy way
Image 1 of 4
If you’re willing to put in a bit more time and effort, the Sands of Time Remastered Mod by borisskyman, loloikabo & vargatomi is the way to go. It was just released in August 2025. This one includes some real goodies:
- A high-res texture pack
- Upscaled FMVs
- Fixes/enhancements for many graphical effects used.
- Higher refresh rate support
By default, this pack lacks a widescreen patch, so you’ll need to grab the one from the PC Gaming Wiki, which you just unzip to your Prince Of Persia directory as well.
Be prepared: Sands of Time Remastered is a lot more effort to use than Fix Compilation.
Download and unpack the mod (and widescreen patch if wanted) to your Prince Of Persia directory. You run the mod through a patcher app, launched through ‘Peixoto.bat’ located in the Prince Of Persia\Peixoto directory.
Navigate to ‘Prince Of Persia – SOT’ in the games list, and you’ll be presented with a huge screen of options. While you’re free to tinker, the two big things to do are applying the Fog Fix (see the in-app instructions), and putting the replacement textures in the right folder.
The patcher app has a link to the right place, but otherwise, you’ll want to navigate to:
C:\Users\Yourname\Documents\Games\Prince of Persia\Sands of Time\Textures\VOKSI on your PC. Then transfer the contents of the VOKSI folder (from where you unpacked the mod to your Prince Of Persia directory) into the target destination.
If all done right, all of the characters and recurring key items in the game should be a bit sharper and more detailed, along with some common environment textures.
Once done, hit Play within the Peixoto’s Patcher panel, and point it towards your PrinceOfPersia.EXE file. It’ll apply all of its fixes, tweaks and hacks and then launch the game. There’s also an option to create a desktop shortcut to launch the enhanced game more easily.
From here you can fiddle with the options to improve anti-aliasing, force VSync on or off, use post-processing upscaling effects and more, but I’d recommend just trying the game first before fiddling around with the knobs and sliders.
One final irritation with this mod is that it doesn’t strip out any DRM, and requires launching through a third-party app. Thus, it isn’t easily compatible with Steam Deck. For that you’ll want to go with the easier option above.
Playing on Steam Deck
I have a confession: Until writing this article, I had never used my Steam Deck to do anything but play games from my Steam library. But this process is so easy that in half an hour I still managed to get my Ubisoft Store copy of the game running, unofficial fix pack and all, on the handheld. Here’s how:
- Download the game to your PC and apply Vinícius Medeiros’ Fix Compilation.
- Right-click on your Prince of Persia directory in Windows, select Send To\Compressed Zip Folder.
- Unless you’ve got your own way to transfer files set up, follow this quick and easy guide to setting up KDE Connect. It’s a small app that will let you wirelessly transfer files to your Steam Deck so long as it’s in Desktop mode.
- Once connected, select Share File from your PC-side KDE Connect app (see screenshot) and pick your zipped up, pre-patched Prince Of Persia.
- Once transferred, right-click on the ZIP file on your Deck desktop view and pick somewhere to unpack it to.
- Navigate to where you unzipped it, locate PrinceOfPersia.EXE, right-click it and select Add To Steam.
- Go to the Properties page for Sands of Time in Steam to change its display name, and select Force Specific Compatibility Tool > Proton Experimental from the Compatibility tab.
- You may now return to your regular Steam Deck interface and launch the game. It may take a few seconds on first launch, but plays perfectly on my machine.
While an official remaster would greatly simplify this process (and let’s hope that GOG give Sands of Time a thorough polishing), that should hopefully tide you over until such time as another game comes to fill that Prince of Persia-shaped hole in your life.
Apropos of nothing… you could do worse than wishlisting Motorslice.
.png?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp&w=360&resize=360,270&ssl=1 "Cronos: The New Dawn too hard for you? An easy mode is finally on the way")
