Assassin’s Creed Mirage is unique amidst the big game releases this fall.
In a sea of dark fantasies, superhero sagas, and cyberpunk dystopias, Mirage continues the Assassin’s Creed series with a dense, wonderfully realized bit of historical fiction set in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age.
It’s a game full of running across rooftops and striking fear into a mysterious secret society from the shadows, sure. But the history here is the real star, and it sets Assassin’s Creed Mirage apart from just about everything else in 2023.
What’s Assassin’s Creed?
Assassin’s Creed is a series of open-world games that marry two seemingly disparate ideas: historical fiction and parkour gameplay. The Assassin’s Creed games have always featured historical settings with stories that fictionalize elements of real-world events. You run up walls, dash across rooftops, and hide in plain sight in an effort to spy on and (generally) assassinate members of a menacing secret society bent on world domination.
The Assassin’s Creed games have been wildly popular for more than 15 years and across more than a dozen main entries, and developer Ubisoft has mined and explored the historical-fiction premise in almost every conceivable direction. Each game’s setting is the result of meticulous research and full of actual period-appropriate figures: For example, 2009’s Assassin’s Creed 2 featured Caterina Sforza, the Medicis, and the Borgias, Assassin’s Creed 3 took place amidst the American Revolutionary War, and 2015’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate included Queen Victoria and Karl Marx in London.
Throughout, Assassin’s Creed has established a convoluted modern-day narrative involving genetic memory, a hyper-advanced extinct society, predictions of an apocalypse, and a history of conspiracy. Thankfully, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is largely self-contained, though players who made their way through 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will find many answers to story threads in that game in Mirage.
An adventure through Abbasid Baghdad
Assassin’s Creed Mirageset in Abbasid Baghdad in the late 9th century, stars Basim, a member of one secret order in the middle of a secret war that has spanned hundreds of years. As you guide Basim in his quest for answers and revenge against the mysterious Order of the Ancients, you learn more about the city and the people who populate it.
The result is a space that feels truly different from those in other contemporary games, and it adds a fun bit of thriller-style intrigue and conspiracy against the backdrop of a flourishing, politically complicated Islamic state. Like other Assassin’s Creed titles, Mirage isn’t content to just tell: The city of Baghdad and the surrounding areas are full of sparkling icons that reveal information about the real history of a person, place, or cultural element, often with carefully curated artifacts featured in their descriptions.
For much of my 20-hour playthrough, I sat with my phone or laptop open, ready to Google various figures and places to learn whether they were actual figures, and almost always, the answer was yes. Much of the fun of Assassin’s Creed lies in the ways in which it builds its conspiracies and mysteries around the historical record, adding clever twists and turns to historical events and figures that may or may not be familiar to the player. Assassin’s Creed Mirage often served as my jumping-off point into deep wiki rabbit holes regarding the history of Baghdad and the Abbasid Caliphate. This fictionalized historical tour is by far Mirage’s best feature, and the series hasn’t so successfully captured a bustling, urban space in years. Just as important, it serves as a well-designed playground in which to parkour.
Who is Assassin’s Creed Mirage for?
Ubisoft has done a decent job of making Assassin’s Creed Mirage the most approachable of the series, with controls that let you more easily climb, run, and hide around the city of Baghdad. The game also features new mechanics, such as the ability to store up instant-kill sequences, making it feel somewhat more strategic than previous titles. I found it fun as a veteran of the series, but more-casual players are likely to tread carefully at first and maybe even bump the difficulty down; that will make combat easier but leave the running and jumping gameplay intact. It’s a simple thing to hide within crowds in plain sight or to watch from a rooftop as your prey reveal themselves.
Mirage also addresses a rather large elephant in the room. The past several Assassin’s Creed games have been increasingly long games requiring dozens and eventually hundreds of hours to complete and explore, which many players (myself included) have complained about. Assassin’s Creed Mirage rolls that back a bit, with a smaller world and a more manageable main story lasting 20 hours or so. That’s still long, but it’s manageable, and unlike the past few games in the series, it doesn’t feel like too little game spread over too much world. Mirage is a largely satisfying, always interesting adventure in a fascinating world with real historical implications.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage doesn’t hit the highest highs of spectacle and adventure that the series’s brightest entries have achieved, but it does draw all of its best moments much closer together, and it references the sprawling cities that made the series a hit in the first place. I’m still left wondering where the series goes from here, but for now, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a comparatively fresh breath of air and a historically interesting entry among all the big games out this fall.
This article was edited by Jason Chen.
