Gods, VR, and a freedom-loving murder cult: Assassin's Creed has the weirdest mythology in gaming

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, one of the most popular and successful video game franchises running today, is famously about hooded killers sneaking through immaculately recreated historical environments and covertly stabbing bad guys. Actually, no, it’s about people in the present day (or near-future) reliving the adventures of hooded killers in historical environments with state-of-the-art simulation technology so they can stop modern bad guys from uncovering ancient secrets.

Actually, no, it’s about a race of beings who pre-date humanity on Earth and survived a cataclysmic event that wiped out most of life on the planet, and they’re trying to prevent similar future cataclysms by gently guiding humanity onto the right path—which they accomplish by presenting themselves to humans as gods. Actually, no, it’s about all of that. And sometimes none of that. Sometimes it’s about people at a video game company making Assassin’s Creed video games.

In honor of the series’ 15th anniversary, Ubisoft is about to release “The Last Chapter,” the final expansion for 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which will hopefully put a nice bow on decades of completely bizarre storytelling … but that doesn’t mean it will be remotely comprehensible for newcomers. That game ended with people living in 2020 having a conversation with a reincarnated version of the Norse god Loki after initially meeting him in a VR simulation of 9th-century England, and if that doesn’t make any sense to you, you’re in luck: We’re here to unpack as much of Assassin’s Creed’s weird lore as we can in the clearest and most palatable way we can—while still trying to maintain some level of accuracy. Which is tough, because we’re talking about nonsense.

It’s all about Desmond Miles, until it’s not

The thing about all of this nonsense is that the various development studios under Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed umbrella have generally been careful about not overloading the player with too much Mythology in each game. So, for a similar reason, we’re going to do the same thing and take this game by game, explaining how each entry in the series has further developed what may be the most complicated storyline in video game history (which is saying something, because we’re talking about a medium that already has Mortal Kombat and Metal Gear).

The first three games in the series have you play as a guy in the present day named Desmond Miles. In Desmond’s world, a company called Abstergo has invented a device called the Animus that allows people to live through their genetic memories—basically, you can re-experience things that happened to your ancestors, and only your ancestors. Luckily for Abstergo, which is evil, a whole bunch of Desmond’s ancestors were members of a secret guild of freedom fighters known as the Assassin Brotherhood, and they spent their lives trying to undermine the evil schemes of the various evil organizations (the Knights Templar being a big one) that eventually became Abstergo.

That means that, through Desmond, Abstergo can learn the Assassins’ secrets and stop them from trying to promote the general concept of “freedom” (people in power historically hate it when the people without power know about freedom). The Assassins follow a philosophy they call—dramatic pause, get ready—“the Assassin’s Creed,” which is: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” In other words, “you’re not the boss of me.”

In the first game, you play as Desmond as he lives through the life of Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, one of his ancestors who was in the Assassin Brotherhood during the time of the Crusades. As Altaïr, Desmond inadvertently directs Abstergo to a series of mystical artifacts that are still hidden in the present day. In Assassin’s Creed II, Desmond works with modern Assassins to use the Animus to experience the life of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a roguish Italian Assassin living during the Renaissance who tried to resurrect a fractured Assassins Brotherhood while racing against the Catholic Church and the Knights Templar (both of which are evil) to find a mystical object known as the Apple Of Eden.

At the end of the game, you (as Desmond, as Ezio) have to fight THE POPE to retrieve the Apple, which is eventually revealed to be a device that can control the minds of humans. Then Ezio has a vision of Minerva—literally, the Roman god Minerva—who explains that she is part of an ancient race (eventually named the Isu) that created humanity and that Desmond needs to save the world from a cataclysmic solar flare (a similar thing had largely wiped out the Isu a millennia ago). The game effectively breaks the in-game fourth wall to have a character address a different character who is experiencing the events of the game in a simulation and also therefore you, the player. And this is only the second one.

Though there were some spin-offs along the way, Assassin’s Creed III puts Desmond (and you) in the virtual shoes of Ratonhnhaké:ton (a.k.a. “Connor”), a Native American ancestor of Desmond’s who joins up with the American Revolution to stop the British—as a front for the evil Knights Templar—from taking over the world. In the present day, another member of the Isu called Juno (literally the Roman god Juno, a.k.a. Hera to the Greeks, and various other similar deities in other cultures) is trying to help Desmond, but she has ulterior motives. Juno liked things better when the Isu ruled the planet and the grubby little humans were their slaves, but she doesn’t want the planet to be destroyed by the cataclysmic solar flare, so Desmond agrees to work with her and figure out how to stop her scheme later. People do later stop Juno in some side stories and spin-offs, but Desmond dies in the process of saving the world.

Dialing back the weirdness

Desmond’s consciousness is later saved in what is essentially the Isu version of WiFi, and Abstergo swoops in and uses his corpse to create a replica of his genetic memories, allowing anyone to relive the experiences of his ancestors, thereby eliminating the need for one single protagonist in the present day with a genealogical connection to multiple ancient murderers. In one of the great twists of his series, Abstergo uses that technology to make … Assassin’s Creed video games. They’re not called that, because the Assassins are bad guys to Abstergo, but they are absolutely supposed to be Assassin’s Creed games in everything but name.

That brings us to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, which is both a story about Desmond’s pirate ancestor, Edward Kenway, and a story about a random guy in the present day who is essentially a beta tester at Abstergo’s video game division (an evil … or more evil satire of real Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft). At the end of the game, your Abstergo bosses reveal that all of the simulated pirate adventures you had as Edward weren’t really about saving the world or finding mystical artifacts, they were just used to collect footage that could be put into a hacky video game trailer. In other words, despite the millennia of freedom-fighting that the Assassins had been through, the only thing they had tangibly accomplished was allowing themselves to be commodified by their enemies—who, again, evolved from being agents of organized religion, specifically Christianity, to being a major media company that also happens to make Assassin’s Creed games.

It’s like the games are biting the hand that feeds them and then also biting the hand that bit that hand, and for a brief time, it was glorious. Very funny and silly and self-aware. But then people started to demand more Assassin’s Creed in their Assassin’s Creed games and less snotty meta-commentary, so the next three games, Rogue, Unity, and Syndicate, dialed back the present-day nonsense in favor of (in theory) more straightforward stories that were actually about Assassins.

Those three all also happen to be, arguably, a little boring because of that. Nonsense is the glue of Assassin’s Creed, and without it, the games start to feel hollow.

How about fewer Assassins and slightly more nonsense?

The series got a reboot with the action-RPG-flavored Assassin’s Creed Origins, which was set in Egypt many years before anyone decided that a group of people fighting against a conspiracy to rule the world should have some kind of specific guiding principal (or “creed”). Origins launched a new trilogy and introduced a new modern-day protagonist named Layla Hassan, an Abstergo employee who realizes that she’s important to the future and that her bosses are actually evil by living through the memories of a Medjay named Bayek (basically a desert cop) and his wife, Aya.

Layla comes back in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, having been radicalized by the Assassin’s cause, and lives through the life of a Greek woman named Kassandra (or, if you’re basic, you can choose a man named Alexios) who is Aya’s ancestor and is descended from none other than King Leonidas of Sparta—Kassandra even inherits his mighty kick from 300, which is one of the best moves anyone has ever had in a video game. Kassandra’s story is almost completely unrelated to the early days of the Assassins until she discovers Atlantis, learns about the Isu, and obtains a magic artifact known as the Staff Of Hermes Trismegistus—a.k.a. the Caduceus, a.k.a. the thing from the doctor symbol with the snakes wrapped around a staff, but, like, the real one.

The staff is one of those long-lost mystical artifacts we keep talking about, and it makes its owner immortal, so in another one of the series’ best twists, Kassandra then shows up in the present day. She looks just like she did in ancient Greece (aside from wearing a killer suit), having spent the last few centuries covertly helping the Assassins, and she gives Layla the staff and tells her that she needs it in order to prevent another cataclysm. Kassandra then dies, having exhausted her usefulness to the plot.

By the time of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Layla is working with some of Desmond’s old friends from the earlier games to investigate a mysterious archeological discovery: The remains of a legendary Viking warrior named Eivor have been found in North America, even though the historical record says that Eivor fought alongside an early sect of Assassins in Britain, and her death has something to do with the new cataclysm. Layla decides to hop into the Animus to explore Eivor’s life, but prolonged exposure to the staff and the Animus is causing her to have weird visions that make it difficult for her to differentiate her life from Eivor’s life.

Meanwhile, in the past, Eivor is also having weird visions that make it difficult for her to differentiate her life from the life of Odin, the All-Father of Norse Mythology (a.k.a. another Isu guy that ancient humans decided was a god). The reason for that is textbook Assassin’s Creed stuff: Eivor is actually Odin reincarnated, having preserved his genetic memories in the Isu wi-fi (as visualized by a simulation of the eternal Norse warrior paradise Valhalla) with a machine called Yggdrasil.

Unfortunately, the Yggdrasil has also reincarnated classic Norse troublemaker Loki, who has been Eivor’s Assassin buddy Basim this whole time (he was acting really shady for the entire game, to be fair), and he tries to take control of the machine for himself. Eivor beats him up and traps him in the machine, which helps Layla and her friends realize that the machine is now malfunctioning and will trigger this latest planet-destroying cataclysm.

Layla travels to Norway where the machine is hidden and jacks herself into the Isu WiFi to fix it, killing her physical body in the process. She meets a being called The Reader who is actually Desmond’s backed-up consciousness (remember him?), saves the planet for now, and inadvertently frees the 1000-year-old corpse of Basim … whose mind is redownloaded into his body by Yggdrasil and he is fully reborn when he then comes into contact with Layla’s immortality-granting Staff Of Hermes Trismegistus. See? It’s all coming together!

Only sort of, though. Basim, now alive in the present day and aware that he’s basically Loki, meets up with Layla’s friends (he now has a hip modern man-bun and a wolf moon T-shirt) and convinces them to let him use their Animus so they can continue trying to unpack the mystery of Eivor’s death—because still nobody knows how or why she ended up in North America. So, for the remainder of the game, you’re playing as Basim while he’s playing as Eivor, which is kind of weird and unsettling in a way that only Assassin’s Creed, through decades of bizarre lore, could really capture.

The future of Assassin’s Creed

And now you understand all of it! At least until next year, when Ubisoft will release a standalone spin-off game called Assassin’s Creed Mirage that will be about Basim from Valhalla as a young man learning the ways of the Assassins. It’s supposed to be a more traditional Assassin’s Creed game that goes back to the stuff that people like (or the stuff people think they like, at least) from the old games, which might mean a dramatic reduction of weird nonsense.

Or maybe it will mean a more careful introduction to those ideas so the people who aren’t quite up to speed won’t get freaked out or confused by the fact that the man you’re playing as in ancient Baghdad is actually a reincarnation of the Norse god Loki who is still alive in 2020. But now it all at least makes perfect sense to you, and we all completely understand what’s going on in the world of Assassin’s Creed. More or less.