We know quite a lot about what the Ancient Egyptians made of death. Their opinions regarding life, however, often seem more elusive. This could have posed something of a problem for Assassin's Creed: although my first thought of this series is always of death dropping down from on high as darkness suddenly swirls and engulfs, my second, more considered memory, is generally one of life - mad, rickety, often hilarious life. The teeming, thronging cities of civilisation, messy history wobbling forth in the form of crowds, of bystanders, of onlookers, of thieves and killers and victims. This life is sometimes buggy and precarious - in Assassin's Creed, you can sometimes have no face, just a grin and some floating eyeballs and yet you can still be alive - but there's always something of a cheerful miracle to it. These games bustle. They bustle with life.
Perhaps this explains why the developers have been so canny with the dates as they take the series back into the ancient world. There's a moment early on in Origins where Bayek, the new hero, comes across some hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs are an easy shorthand for antiquity when dropped into the 21st century; the interesting thing here is that they're a shorthand for antiquity to Bayek, too - he has to work a bit to remember how to read them. This, then, is Egypt as it was a mere 50 years before the birth of Christ. The rulers are of Greek lineage now. The Pyramids? They're already unfathomably old, limestone facades pockmarked and crumbling away in the corners, good for parkour but also a bit tatty and knackered. The huge statues of pharaohs that we see in museums these days, often missing an arm or a leg, are often already missing an arm and a leg here too. Sometimes Bayek will be the one to de-limb them.
Opting for the reign of Ptolemy XIII means Ubisoft gets to have it both ways, in other words: you get the sheer scale of Egypt, but you also get the melancholy of its specific greatness receding into folk memory. You get the violence and confusion as a declining empire finds itself squeezed between powerful international players (you also get some rather timely stuff on the way a nation in decline will debase itself in bitterness and xenophobia) and you get tart sibling rivalry for the big chair, a brother and sister fighting it out in private and in public. Oh yes, and in the streets you get people worn down and sometimes driven towards darkness by the sheer weight of political, economic, and cultural uncertainty. You get moderns, in other words, and we already know intimately how moderns feel about life.
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