This new stealth spin-off might evoke the original Assassin’s Creed, but Ubisoft is smart enough to be selective about the inspiration it pulls from Altaïr’s adventures.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a series reset. That’s what its key art suggests, at least – depicting an assassin dropping from a ledge, wrist-blade drawn, into a crowd of unsuspecting pedestrians. The killer’s linens are whiter than white, fit for a detergent commercial, and bring to mind Altaïr – the titular murderer in the very first Assassin’s Creed. Then there’s the backdrop: a mosque and minarets bordered by thick, stone fortifications, an evocation of the Holy Land Altaïr once prowled.
Yet this hazy image on the horizon is no remake: rumors, from the time this new project was codenamed Rift, suggest that this new assassin is in fact Basim, a supporting character in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – while the landscape is Baghdad, rather than Masyaf, Jerusalem, Acre, or Damascus, the cities that Altaïr haunted.
It’s just as well. You can never go home again, and in this case, you likely wouldn’t want to. The first Assassin’s Creed may have originated the fantasy of the blade in the crowd, but didn’t deliver on it. Today, it stands up like a crusader general with a shiv slipped between his ribs: that is, unsteadily.
