Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s protagonist is one of the series’ best, pulling inspiration from several that have come in previous games.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is something of an amalgamation of everything in the blockbuster stealth series that came before it. Not quite classic Assassin’s Creed, not quite the bloated open-world RPGs of recent times, instead it’s a greatest-hits collection that pulls from the best parts of the long-running stealth-action series.
This magpie-esque curation extends to its protagonist, Basim Ibn Is’haq, first introduced to us in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. In Mirage, he’s an intriguing, slightly strange, but carefully crafted blend of past assassins, embodying the tenets and values that have served as the core focus of Assassin’s Creed ever since Desmond first sat down in the Animus in the first game back in 2007.
To be frank, I wasn’t expecting all that much from Basim as a character when I loaded up Assassin’s Creed Mirage. His story arc in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was as convoluted as it was inconsequential. Sparing you the specifics, it broadly involved the reincarnation of Norse Gods, among other ropey high sci-fi ideas relating to the Isu (the civilization that inhabited the earth millennia before humans in the series’ lore).
While I was certainly optimistic about Mirage’s leaner, more traditional experience offered by earlier Assassin’s Creed games, I had pretty much accepted that Basim was never going to reach the very high bar established by iconic characters like Assassin’s Creed II’s Ezio Auditore da Firenze and the first game’s Altaïr Ibn-LaʼAhad. However, after only Mirage’s opening section, I had been completely won over. Adventure is out there
Rather smartly, Assassin’s Creed Mirage keeps the Isu narrative to a minimum, saving it for brief dream sequences and a section towards the end of the game. Because of this, Mirage’s protagonist is indeed Basim, not some watered-down blend hampered by reborn Gods and giant leaps of logic found in his previous outing. From the beginning, Mirage establishes Basim as a young man living through hard times as a street thief, before sending him on an investigation for the Hidden Ones (the early name for the Assassin’s brotherhood) and ultimately a quest to search for his true identity.
