There's a stack of game instruction books in my bathroom—one of a zillion carry-overs from my latent youth. Used to be that game instruction books were an important part of obsessing over a game, filled with art, stories, and clean design. Nowadays, even Nintendo's booklets are a jumbled mess, and most others are puny, thin, and in black-and-white.

This season's Prince of Persia (Xbox 360, PS3, PC) has a wimpy booklet, but its screenshots are peculiar. Actually, they're beautiful. Look at any still shot of the game, even in black and white, and you'll see a sprawling expanse of craggly landscapes and battered architecture that looks worth running through. When this book made it into my bathroom rotation during Xmas break, I didn't recognize any of the shots.

So I put the game back in and took my time looking around. Sure enough, UbiSoft Montreal made the most of their generic, Persian world, mixing grasslands, deserts, and huge castles pretty well. What was I missing?

In Prince of Persia, you are a wall-crawler. Climb them, slide across them, scrape down them, bounce from one to the next. Saying that you're Spiderman without the goo makes it sound like this is an intense, powerful experience, but it's not. That's because all you do is stare at these walls—not the massive, surrounding world. And the walls are all the same, as you can do only a few things on each, sometimes with splashy effects attached, typically not.

With any visual art, the designer will shape an important scene so the eye moves accordingly. Perhaps in a diagonal direction, perhaps focused on the only static thing in the scene. Here, UbiSoft focuses your eye on this task of crawling, which would be more fulfilling if it were more fluid. The same company made the broken game Assassin's Creed, but that title at least gave you a superhuman feeling—that you could climb up anything (the years-old Crackdown did so, as well). Here, you merely look for special marks on walls again and again and again. You do not creatively take on these brown walls. Your cues are too blatant.

(There's a plot, but it revolves around a Caucasian lead hero whose brash idiocy is somehow ignored by every other heavily accented, generically Persian character. Don't let anthropologist friends near this.)

PoP has gotten attention this season for one feature: you never die. If you fall from a great height, or you get “killed” in one of the game's slow, boring fight scenes, you're right back in it. Some purists hate this, wanting old-school challenge. Some reviewers think it's so brilliant, they've tossed the game into their best-of lists.

I don't like games where I'm dying often and being punished arbitrarily for it. You'd think un-death would tickle me, but then, I don't like games where I'm dying and being whisked back into the action every few minutes, either.

If UbiSoft thought it necessary to make un-death the stand-out feature of their game, well... why? Are PoP players dying all the time? Yes, and that's a design flaw. You're asking people to jump across walls and chasms, with very little creative choice in how to get from A to B, and yet death/restarting is a plodding, recurring issue.

Great games make us work toward a goal and feel good about doing so. In World of Goo, you have crazy puzzles that work because of a sense of scale. You learn the game one challenge at a time, cumulatively easing into its system, and restarting/skipping tough stuff is a cinch. Or you have “difficult” games that at least make death scenes intense or visceral—like Left 4 Dead, which ups the ante by making rebirth scenes kinda creative.

Not sure how PoP could've fixed its issues—taken out all of the chasms, since they don't kill, anyway? Given players more creative choices to saving themselves? But that belies a bigger problem. PoP is yet another bloated quest game, so obsessed with competing in the big-budget crowd with “new” features that it didn't even think about how boring it is to stare at walls.

It's a boring game, but its momentous failure to entertain is riveting.