An immersive story, fun puzzles and great characterisation are let down only by buggy controls and a poor camera.
You play as the unnamed Prince who has unleashed the sands of time, and has to go fix it. A palace with an 'interesting' defence system, and lots of sand creatures, lie in your way. To help you, you have a princess companion and a dagger that lets you rewind time.
The platforming element of this game is mostly great. The puzzles are fun to solve, offer a reasonable level of difficulty that slowly ramps up, and there's a good amount of variety. You'll spend an entertaining few minutes per puzzle, but not longer - each one is quite short, and once you know what to do, trivial to solve. That is, it would be trivial if it wasn't for a poorly implemented camera and controls that are, on the PC version, very buggy indeed. The prince will often do totally the wrong thing, and you'll find yourself shouting at the computer as he leaps (yet again) to an unnecessary death. Perhaps this would be better with a gamepad, but if you don't have one, keep this in mind. The camera is also terrible, regularly getting stuck both while in combat and while platforming.
The combat part of the game is a slight letdown. The enemies are either trivial to beat, or almost indestructible, resulting in a poor variety. The combat also takes far, far, far too long - the designers used large numbers of enemies rather than trying to make them more intelligent, and it doesn't really work. However, initially, you'll have fun hack and slashing your way through the marauding hordes of infinitely respawning sand creatures. Yes, they don't die unless you use a special move from your dagger on them. Unfortunately, this move uses the same key as several other dagger features, and you'll often use the wrong one, which is extremely irritating.
Regardless of these problems, however, the game is so compelling that you'll want to blast through it in one go - which could easily be done, because it's very short. This game is an old-school classic that's lost none of its magic and is still fun today.