Desynchronized

The stupid word that’s always summed up everything that’s wrong with Assassin’s Creed. The word that, when you die, be it through a botched stealth sequence, a bloody duel or just leaping off the side of a building in the wrong direction, appears on screen like a slap in the face. ‘Hey, idiot, don’t forget you’re playing a game and none of this is real.’

Desynchronized

It’s now the word that appears after a truly spectacular 45 minutes or so in ancient Egypt, in Assassin’s Creed Origins. And even though it’s still a baffling conceit, deliberately shattering the illusion of historical immersion these games work so hard to craft in the first place, this time I don’t mind, because I am just so thrilled at what had preceded it.

Some 20 or so hours into Origins- itself an entirely pleasant redefinition of a series that has never sat well with me (and in one case, nearly lost me my job, but that’s a story for another time) — a comfortable rhythm had set in. This is now a game of RPG systems, of coloured loot and crafting. A stealth game that’s not really about stealth. An Assassin’s Creed game that’s not really about the assassins. Not yet, anyway.

And so Bayek, our hero who shares a name with an exclamation from Emmerdale, tackles quests, kills bad guys, helps random folk with terrible voice acting, and levels himself up enough to continue the story. Enjoyable, if a little tepid.

Then something struck me. I’ve been in this sandy wonderland for nearly an entire human day and I’ve still not seen the pyramids. An inherent tendency to delay gratification means I typically never rush to that sort of thing, plus the fact the story would likely take me there eventually, but why would I let the studio that once expected me to collect 9 million feathers, the studio that equated sitting on a bench listening to people having a chat as an engaging and compelling use of players’ time, why would I let those guys dictate when I see those giant 3D triangles?

So off I went. On my trusty camel, with a waypoint marker set for Giza and the open desert in front of me.

And then the whole game changed, truly. Assassin’s Creed has always been about the bustle. Social stealth. Hiding in crowds. Noise. Repeated dialogue. A map with more clutter than my desk (actually that’s not true). At the pyramids, though, these truly enormous, wondrous and weird monoliths jutting out into the piercing blue sky are accompanied by… well, almost nothing. The sound of wind blowing hot air around all the stone and sand. An ethereal, almost ghostly ambient tune plays quietly in the background. There’s a stillness here that’s absolutely deliberate, a real and genuine understanding that this is a destination in this world, and not just a theatre set for an in-game action sequence (it may well be that also, later on).

There’s even a touch of the ‘Breath Of The Wilds’ about Assassin’s Creed Origins, and you’d never know that from just ploughing through the prescripted quests and story. The world has room to breathe, to exist on its own merits. There’s space and distance, sight lines and horizons, reasons to travel beyond quest markers and collectibles. The series has technically always been ‘open’, but never really like this (outside of Black Flag, anyway), and the most recent entries were urban adventures in London and an utterly broken Paris.

After climbing to the top of a pyramid and sliding back down (of course) and taking a few in-game photos like the digital tourist I’d unwittingly become, I tried to find the Sphinx. Way smaller than I realised (Bayek makes the same comment, amusingly). Just around the corner from the Sphinx, though, is life once again. Teeming commercialism, in fact. Merchants selling all manner of crap, trinkets and souvenirs for tourists. After the eerie near-silence of the pyramids, what a brilliant reminder that not only are these things weird for me, they’re weird for the inhabitants of this time — thousands of years old, even then. And where there’s weird stuff for people to look at, there are people selling them little versions of that weird stuff.

Now hypnotised by this Ptolemaic wanderlust, I see the glistening green nile in the distance as the sun begins to set. What better way to finish my session than to take a barge out onto the water and watch the HDR show off as day turns to night?

My 30 minutes of peaceful contemplation are rudely and abruptly disturbed within seconds of setting sail. Ubisoft Montreal, it seems, are pretty well schooled on the Hippo, and the fact it’s an absolute bastard of the tallest and widest-mouthed order. My pad vibrates as I’m ‘spotted’ by one of these FAT guardians of the Nile, seconds later my boat is in smithereens and I’m swimming like a madman to shore, desperately trying to stay away from that giant mouth and t hose weird tree-stump teeth.

I scramble onto land, and for the splittest of split seconds think I’m free, before remembering that hippos are mammals, and even though Bayek is an Assassin’s Creed protagonist and therefore about as fleet-footed as humans get, he’s about a quarter of the speed of a hippo. Jaws wide. Horror incoming. Brutal, unrepentant mauling.

Desynchronized

Only this time, I couldn’t have been happier.