Our review of Assassin’s Creed Mirage – a wonderful city and a great sense of focus.
Reader, I am in love with the House of Wisdom. Who wouldn’t be? A vast palace of books with thick walls, beautiful ceramic window inlays and plenty of what the Californian real estate industry would refer to as an enviable indoor/outdoor flow. In the 9th Century, when Assassin’s Creed Mirage is set, the House of Wisdom was one of the biggest libraries that had ever existed, mounted like a jewel inside a ringed city, Baghdad, that was on its way to being the largest city in the world. All of the Golden Age is visible here: the love of learning, of curating the lessons of the past but also looking to the future. Criers invite people for what amounts to TED Talks on astronomy, on the use of the astrolabe. Celebrity poets argue in the courtyards. Political intrigue is everywhere you look. Everybody has heard a rumour about something or other. There’s a whole hierarchy of learning, both academic and, hmm, more illicit, to be navigated.
I love it. But what I think I love more is the immediate environment the House of Wisdom lies within. Surrounding the House is a lovely scholarly part of town, leafy climbing vines and cool honeyed brick, all lit by a clear morning sun. The shops scattered around the House, all angled lines and blind turns, are filled with stacks of books, shelves of books, books lying splayed on tables next to fruit and bowls of spices. I wandered here, mid-mission, for an hour yesterday, with no aims other than drawing it all in, all this detail and character. And I was rewarded, of course, as Assassin’s will always reward the distracted. I found a bookcase with a secret behind it. I found a tall building with astronomical contraptions on the roof.
So. After the wild RPG sprawl of the previous few entries, Mirage is set in Baghdad at the height of the Golden Age. It’s a more compact focus, and the city itself is more than deserving of the miniaturist’s eye which the smaller Assassin’s games can turn on their subjects. A great library is always a pleasure, but scattering the streets around it with books and scientific doodads is a real delight. It speaks to the city itself, coursing with intellectual curiosity and richness.
Mirage gives you a surprisingly large chunk of desert and countryside around the city too – someone’s digging something up in the rocks, someone’s doing something nasty at a distant farm, and by an oasis in the middle of nowhere you can linger for a few hours and be attacked by deer – but the city itself is the heart of the game in every way. It’s the city where the game’s hero, plucky street thief Basim – charming, sad eyes, horrifying dreams – works his way through the ranks of the Hidden Ones. And it’s the place where Basim must take on a whole infrastructure of intrigue and corruption, moving around the stations of the clock, as it were, and then, mixing metaphors and heading for the bull’s eye in the center of the ringed city.
I never tired of Baghdad. At its most basic level, the city is built around a series of set-piece buildings, like the House of Wisdom, all of these surrounded by streets to explore, pick pockets, lose yourself in after a murder. Ubisoft’s designers are wonderful at the quiet stuff – streets that always lead you somewhere interesting, and spots where the detailing changes from book shops, say, to rich flower beds and piles of spices.
