Assassin’s Creed Origins is still the best game in the series
With all of its courtly intrigue, geopolitical turmoil, and millennia-spanning time travel, it’s easy to forget that Assassin’s Creed Origins begins with the death of a child. When protagonists Bayek and Aya set off on their interlaced revenge missions across Egypt, Libya, and the Sinai Peninsula, the unimaginable has already happened. The rest is just details as they both do their best to cope with the loss of their son.
Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed Origins in 2017, two years after Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, marking the first break from annual releases since the gap between the original 2007 game and its sequel. Origins was nothing short of a tectonic shift: The series’ urban parkour and social stealth elements were stripped to the bone in favor of a sprawling world, a robust quest system, and a bona fide loot pool. The cynic in me recognizes these new design pillars as an effort to bring the series in line with “modern” open-world games; the optimist in me can’t help but marvel at the result. I returned to Origins recently to play it on Xbox Game Pass, and it’s as astonishing as ever.
Set toward the end of the Ptolemaic period, Origins’ Egypt is massive. I don’t mean massive in terms of scale — more in terms of scope. While most previous Assassin’s Creed games hopped between a handful of cities, the settlements in Origins are connected by an actual nuanced countryside. It’s a portmanteau of deserts, oases, eerie caverns, and azure coastlines. Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag was enormous, yes, and its connective ocean played host to no shortage of exciting sequences. But the Caribbean cities of Havana, Kingston, and Nassau felt like mere stepping stones in service to the central storyline. In Origins, dozens of
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