There's a playable version of the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake somewhere - because someone is unlocking its trophies

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time — (Image credit: Ubisoft)

The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake is shrouded in mystery, but perhaps the most puzzling element of the game right now is the fact someone has been unlocking its trophies - despite it never actually being released.

Ubisoft has been working on a Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake for quite some time now. Initially announced back in 2020, the game was originally in development with Ubisoft Pune and Ubisoft Mumbai and was set to release in January 2021. Unfortunately, this obviously didn't happen and as of June 2022, the game was moved to Ubisoft Montréal and delayed indefinitely.

Flash forward to just yesterday (November 9), it announced that - although the game is "not canceled" and still very much in development at Ubisoft Montréal - customer's pre-orders for the game have been canceled due to the game not having a fixed release date at the moment.

This brings us to the new trophy mystery. As pointed out by What If Gaming, someone, somewhere has a build of the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake and has been spending their time unlocking its trophies. If you take a look at PSNProfiles, you can see that 57.1% of players have unlocked the Platinum trophy for Sands of Time - with the highest percentage of trophies (71.4%) being the 'Sand Bearer' achievement which can apparently be obtained around the 30 minute mark of the game.

To make things even more interesting, Twitter user and well-known dataminer Lance McDonald has chimed in on the subject and shared a potential insight into the game's development. "This was actually finished," McDonald's tweet reads, "[it] went gold, went through Sony certification and was uploaded to the PlayStation network servers, where some people clever were able to preserve it and even decrypt it using their pre-order encryption keys."

The whole thing is weird, and for now, remains a complete mystery. If you'd like to know what games are definitely coming out this year though, take a look at our new games 2022 list.

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After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.