One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

To be honest, I thought I’d burned out on the Assassin’s Creed games. For a long time, they were a staple in my gaming diet: a series of Dan Brownesque stores in which global conspiracies rub shoulders with ancient civilisations – and where you run around stabbing people. A lot. Mind you, while I kinda enjoy the ludicrousness of the setting, that’s not why I kept playing every single instalment in the series for the longest time. No, what kept bringing me back to the Assassin’s Creed well was that each game is mostly set at a specific place and time in history: I’ve climbed cathedrals in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade as well as in revolutionary Paris and late Victorian London. I’ve scaled Venetian palazzi and Egyptian pyramids. I’ve hobnobbed with the likes of Cleopatra, Blackbeard, the Marquis de Sade, half the Medici family, Dickens, Darwin and Marx. In short: I enjoyed the Assassin’s Creed games because they let me be a tourist, travelling less to distant countries than into the past.

Continue reading →