When I first started this website, some of my early essays looked at how different games might expand on their themes. For example, I wrote a little about Beyond Eyes, a 2015 game about a blind girl where the world becomes visible only after it’s perceived by her other senses. You ‘see’ a bird only after it’s heard. I talked in that essay about some of the opportunities that might be available to take those themes and ideas further – you know, as a way of pushing at the genre, exploring the limits of the game by talking about what it didn’t reach for. I don’t really write like that any more. It’s fine, but it’s not always compelling to read, and it doesn’t tell you all that much about what the game actually does. It’s negative, in the sense that it’s only about what isn’t present. I think it’s better to discuss what the game is rather than what it could have been. That said, it’s very hard not to talk about Assassin’s Creed: Unity in terms of what it’s missing. I’m revisiting this game after a few years – I played it back in 2019, and had a mixed reaction. It’s actually – this is kinda funny – I wrote one essay in June of that year about how much I enjoyed the game, and then another in September called AC Unity Has A Shit Plot. Clearly my feelings changed. Now, some four years later, I’m back for a second round.

The Assassin’s Creed series is nominally about the age-old conflict between Assassins, who embody freedom, and Templars, who embody control. It’s about the agency of the people in the face of power, oppression and violence. Assassin’s Creed: Unity, the eighth game in the series, is set in the French Revolution – which is really the ur-moment for that type of narrative framework. The Revolution embodies all of those ideals: it’s about the impoverished masses rising up to claim their rights over the top of the indulgences of the French aristocracy. It’s about resource distribution, about wealth inequality, about masked balls and peasants pleading for bread. That seems like the most obvious direction for the story: Assassins supporting the people to rise up against Templar aristocrats. That’s what we might expect the game to be. It’s also the direction indicated by the game’s marketing. Consider, for instance, the E3 trailer, which has the Assassins take part in the storming of the Bastille. The Assassins fight alongside the militia, alongside bakers and millers, to overcome sharply uniformed soldiers with waxed moustaches. The regimented lines of the military represent state power. They are organised, disciplined, controlled. They are contrasted against the irregular hordes of the people, who run, undisciplined, in motley outfits with homemade flags of independence – for freedom. That sense of agency and empowerment reaches a crescendo at the trailer’s end: the Assassins disarm the military leader, but they don’t kill him. They hand him over to face the people’s judgement. Freedom for the people includes the freedom to make their own decisions.

All of that – the existing themes, the marketing – it all says something about where the story is going to go. It suggests how the themes of freedom and tyranny will play out. In practice, that’s not what happens. Unity‘s story centers around a Romeo and Juliet romance-tragedy. An Assassin boy falls in love with a Templar girl, and they try to build a life together in spite of the conflicts ripping through France. All the conspiracies and political conflicts are backdrop: for the most part, the Revolution only really features in Unity insofar as it intersects with our heroes’ personal drama. That’s flabbergasting. As a critic, the impulse is to say, you know, this is how it should have gone. These are the themes, these are the ideas, and it’s criminal that they’re so absent. Why set a game about freedom and tyranny in the French Revolution if you don’t care what the Revolution says about those things? It’s hard to judge the game except according to what’s not there. It’s very difficult to discuss what this game is trying to be, because doing so requires you to overlook a monumental failure to engage with the basic questions raised by the setting.

So – you know, I’m still fairly fired up about it, but I think we can recognise the scope of the necessary question. It’s one thing to talk about what the game should have been – how its core ideas are mostly absent – but we still need to know what we’re left with. What is Assassin’s Creed: Unity trying to do? How has this game been put together? Let’s start with the big picture. The Assassin’s Creed games involve a sort of historical hacking. The conflict between Assassins and Templars is a moral and interpretive framework that can be superimposed over historical events as a way of explaining them. It’s a syncretic approach, flattening everything along one axis. There are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys stand for freedom, and the bad guys stand for coercive control. History is nothing more than the conflict between these groups, which are organised, self-aware, and actively working against each other. Every historical person and event can be press-ganged into the shadowy battle between good and evil. Da Vinci? Assassin. Charles Lee? Templar. That framework serves as a type of commentary, as a sense-making exercise, creating continuity between unrelated people and events. The fight against papal corruption in 15th century Italy is the same as the fight for American independence, and they’re both the same as the fight for peace during the Third Crusade. It all boils down to Assassins and Templars.

A key difficulty in interpreting Unity, then, is its unusual refusal to take sides. The game has little ideological clarity. There are villains and angels in every camp – most notably in the key romance between our Assassin and Templar leads, but also even just in how the game reuses character models. Early on, Unity introduces your main enemies, robed in red, as ‘Extremists’. A text box tells you that they’re affiliated with the Templars, and in the main they seem to be for the revolution. In combat, they have little battle quips – they shout at you that you’re a moderate, or that you’re anti-revolutionary. They’ll also sometimes shout ‘Bloody Royalist!’ It’s not entirely clear what we’re meant to take from this. Are the Assassins for the monarchy? Are the Templars for the Revolution? Possibly it’s a reference to inter-faction strife within revolutionary parties. Perhaps they’re calling you anti-revolutionary because you’re not doing revolution the right way – the Templar way. It’s hard to be sure.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Unity uses the Extremist character models to fill in for every type of opponent other than the French military. Sometimes they are revolutionaries. Sometimes they are Templar agents. Sometimes they are random criminals and sometimes they are asylum guards. In some missions, the models are used to represent members of the Chouans, a counter-revolutionary group that actually supported the monarchy. In the multiplayer mission Infernal Machine, the Extremist character models are even used for Royalists attempting to murder Napoleon. They have access to the same dialogue pool, meaning that these Royalist enemies, on spotting you, can shout ‘Bloody Royalist!’ and leap to the attack. The same character models who accuse you of being counter-revolutionary also steal the parts of the guillotine and try to murder its inventor, for some reason, and they also try to kill Théroigne de Méricourt as she’s leading the Women’s March on Versailles, one of the key moments in the Revolution. Why would they do that? Why would they try and stop that from happening?

Really the point is that Extremists aren’t meant to represent a stable ideological position. They are opponents, conceived as generic category rather than grounded in any historical faction. They are there because you need someone to kill. In this regard, Assassin’s Creed: Unity largely abandons the interpretive function that characterised the early games. It steps back from sorting out the heroes and villains and simply reports events – maybe not quite as they happened, but with scarce reference to the moral binary. Théroigne de Méricourt is introduced because she was a key part of the Revolution. You help her because she succeeded, and you encounter opposition (unbranded, generic, disconnected from ideology or historical presence) because the game needs a little bit of gameplay to pad out what is otherwise straightforward educational material. The same can be said for many other missions in the game. You retrieve the looted crown jewels, not because looting royal jewelry is good or bad but because it happened and because historically the thieves were caught. You murder Jacques Roux in a prison in 1794 because that’s where he died in 1794. You fly in a hot air balloon because hot air balloon flights happened.

The Assassin’s Creed games have always repurposed historical fact through the lens of the conflict between Assassins and Templars. Unity I think is interesting for the degree to which it abandons that interpretive thread, in line with its protagonist’s disregard for the conflict that surrounds him. It’s not really best understood as an Assassin’s Creed game. It’s a Parisian walking simulator where you can learn about the world of the French Revolution. The incoherence around characters like the Extremists really just emphasises the point. Unity doesn’t care to distinguish between Royalists, revolutionaries, and counter-revolutionaries. From the perspective of its main character, they may as well all be the same thing.