Jack The Ripper takes place 20 years after the main plot of Syndicate, and concerns Evie Frye’s efforts to track down the famed serial murderer. By this point in the story, the Templars’ grip on London has long since been eliminated, and the Whitechapel murders are the first disturbance the city has felt in two decades. Called back from India to help investigate the ripper killings after her brother vanishes, Evie’s sleuthing soon reveals something the police have missed: Saucy Jack is an Assassin gone feral. An orphan raised to be a remorseless killer, “Jack The Lad” rejected the ideology foisted on him by the Assassin Brotherhood but retained their methods, beginning a campaign to victimize the people he was meant to protect.
Throughout Jack The Ripper, the killer himself is intermittently playable. These walks in the villain’s shoes reveal that Jack is still very much an Assassin—he uses parkour to get around, he kills with retractable blades, and he relies on the Assassins’ “Eagle Vision” to scan his surroundings for useful information. At first, it seems the only thing that separates Jack from typical Assassins is his use of “fear tactics” like hallucinogenic gas and brutal public executions to terrorize his victims, but once Evie learns that Jack is using these tactics she adopts them herself. After she gains these abilities, the two characters become identical in the way you play them. There is no action Jack can commit that the game—or Evie herself—forbids her from committing as well.
The longer Evie’s investigation into Jack goes on, the more his rise to infamy mirrors the Fryes’ own takeover of London. He seizes control of the Rooks, Jacob’s gang, and uses them to enforce his territory just like the Fryes did. He plies his trade in secret but with assistance from society bigwigs—Evie and Jacob relied on philosophers and scientists, while Jack keeps the company of executioners and madams. The Ripper even chooses his targets like an Assassin, selecting victims who will send the strongest messages to his real opponents. When the Fryes used these exact tactics to liberate London from the Templars, they were depicted as efficient tools in the righteous fight against oppression. Being victimized by them rather than wielding them reveals their inherent brutality, the shotgun approach of gang violence, and the fear-mongering of calculated executions.
Jack The Ripper isn’t just about Jack’s rise, but also Evie’s fall. For the Assassins, killing Templars has always been totally acceptable, but in her campaign against the Ripper, Evie executes only non-Templar targets and, in the case of the Rooks, former allies. Evie eventually loses the blessings of Inspector Abberline and Scotland Yard, not because they’re under the thumb of the Templars, but because Evie is a trespasser, thief, and murderer they can no longer ethically support. When Evie finds Mary Jane Kelly’s body, she denounces Jack as a “monster,” even though Jack has only five canonical victims and Evie has personally killed dozens or even hundreds. For Evie, the savagery of Jack’s methods are not the problem, only that he refuses to use them against the Assassin-mandated acceptable targets. This is the closest Assassin’s Creed has come to openly admitting that, for its heroes, the ends will always justify their means.
Jack The Ripper climaxes with Evie killing the Whitechapel Murderer and roping Abberline into doing her one last favor: burying the identity of the killer. If word got out that an Assassin perpetrated The Autumn Of Terror, it would ruin the reputation of the Brotherhood. Abberline reluctantly agrees, and the persisting mystery surrounding the Ripper’s identity becomes another piece of historical trivia brought into the Assassin’s Creed wheelhouse. If Evie herself learned anything about how fundamentally broken the Assassin lifestyle is, Syndicate never lets on. In fact, the name of the DLC’s story mission—“A Monster’s Creed”—suggests the game might even agree with her hypocritical condemnation of Jack’s rampage. But by holding the faceless Jack up to Evie, by inviting players to inhabit both roles and feel how utterly similar they are, Jack The Ripper exposes the monster at the heart of every Assassin.
