I’m a relative newcomer to the Assassin’s Creed series.  The first one I ever played was Odyssey, and since then Valhalla and Shadows have formed my complete exposure to the franchise.  As I think is many people’s experience, they’re games I always like but never love.  They’re incredible technical achievements, no doubt, but they come out of a kitchen with literal thousands of cooks, and they certainly taste like it.  However, the last couple games have really highlighted something about my personal tastes in gameplay.  Specifically, they made me realize that I don’t like playing games nearly as much as I love breaking them.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla seriously de-emphasized the stealth element that had formerly been the series’ bread-and-butter.  Instead, the game placed a heavy focus on building a team of raiders, assaulting keeps, and generally doing Viking Stuff over Ersatz Christian Ninja Stuff.  Stealth options still existed, feeling largely obligatory for the series, but you were clearly never meant to go that route.  Locations were combat arenas rather than stealth puzzles.  Enemies were standing soldiers rather than patrolling guards.  Very few elements of the game felt designed to be solved with stealth.

And that’s precisely why Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was one of my favorite stealth games ever.

In de-emphasizing stealth, being sneaky suddenly felt less like an option and more like a cheat code.  Sneaking my way to an assassination target, I’d pass by the huge arena-like structures meant to house the epic battles I was bypassing.  I would see the chokepoints, the ambushes, the high-grounds and low-grounds all carefully designed to give battles a satisfying ebb and flow…and just walk on past them.  That locked gate my raiding party could crash through with a battering ram minigame?  I don’t even see it, I’m climbing up the other side of the building.  The elite knights positioned to be my final boss fight on the way to the target?  They don’t even see me up in the rafters.  One stab, one kill, and I’m out a window.  600 man-hours of dev-time ignored.  And god, did it feel good.

Stealth in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla made you genuinely feel like you were getting away with something, which to me, is exactly how a stealth option should feel.  Some of my favorite memories of that game are of me…effectively not playing it at all, seeing how much I can skip over simply by keeping out of sight.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but there was such joy in the possibility to “put one over” on the developers that I always wanted to try.  It was an intoxicating feeling, but one I didn’t give a lot of thought to other than a mild amusement that I’d played Valhalla “wrong” and had such a great time.

But then I played Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and the exact same thing happened…just in reverse.

I found the first ten-or-so hours of Assassin’s Creed Shadows absolutely miserable.  It has some of the worst-designed tutorials I’ve ever encountered in a AAA game, which could honestly be an article unto itself, and just overall nothing felt like it was working right.  I had no confidence in combat as Naoe, yet the stealth was so janky that I could never reliably stay hidden, and resetting alerts was frequently out of the question.  Invariably every attempt at stealth infiltration would devolve into a slapstick clownshow of Naoe getting caught on geometry, spotted from a million yards away or flailing her parry stance when she was supposed to use her grappling hook because they’re mapped to the same button and an enemy within ten paces was thinking about taking a swing at her.

 But then, I unlocked Yasuke.

After suffering through ten hours of some of the most rage-inducing stealth a game has ever put me through, unlocking Yasuke felt like suddenly being able to play as Godzilla.  Immediately, I stomped back into those early castles that had given me so much trouble as Naoe and proceeded to effortlessly decapitate every single human being inside in the span of eight minutes.  Dozens of bandits who’d been pissing me off for the last ten hours charged at me from all angles, and I managed to cut down every of them just by mashing the R1 button while laughing my ass off.

And when that catharsis passed, I decided.  I’m not going back.  I’m only playing Yasuke, and I’m only kicking in front doors.

Reportedly, the developers of Assassin’s Creed Shadows have referred to Yasuke as “easy mode.”  Presumably he exists as an assist for less experienced players or as a fallback to clear missions that are giving them too much trouble as Naoe.  The design of the game really makes his status as a “backup” clear.  In contrast to the battle arenas of Valhalla, locations in Shadows are densely crafted as stealth puzzle jungle gyms.  Every castle is an intricate web of overhangs, trap doors, climbable vines, waist-high foliage and inexplicable exactly-Naoe-sized boxes for hiding inside.  Guard patrols are a carefully choreographed dance calculated to provide attentive ninjas a number of clever options for unseen navigation.  Candles can be snuffed out to provide a cover of darkness, squeaky nightingale floors must be carefully navigated around in high-security buildings, and explosive red pots can be carefully repositioned into guard patrols to take out enemies with flair.  These are all things that murder-man Yasuke can, but largely does not, interact with.  He just walks up to people and chops their heads off.  And yet, much like with the stealth of the previous game, this is precisely what makes an all-Yasuke run so entertaining for me.

When you play as Yasuke, the game increasingly doesn’t know what to do with you.  Enemies don’t have any better ideas than to just charge forward and hope for the best.  Intricately scripted guard patrols break down into chaos as assassination targets have no real contingency plans for a frontal assault.  Guards run confusedly to and fro as even their basic pathing seems to get jumbled from trying to pivot from being stealth obstacles to beat-em-up stooges.  It feels like you climbed up on stage during a play and started stabbing one of the actors, with everyone around you panickily wondering when they’re allowed to break character.  All these locations, intricately designed to catch and repel ninjas, have no plan for a one-man-army samurai kicking in their door instead.

And yet, I’m loving it for the exact same reason I loved the stealth in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.  I feel like I’m genuinely getting one over on the game by playing this way.  Seeing signs all around me that I’m not playing as intended just makes the way I am playing feel all the more special.  I feel like a kid blasting my way through Doom with an all-weapons cheat, just unloading a BFG 9000 in the face of the first zombie soldier I see for no other reason than that it’s funny.  I’m playing the game completely wrong and it rules.

Now, am I really going against the developers’ intentions by playing this way?  Most certainly not.  I’m using the tools the developers gave me, and those tools are doing the things the developers designed them to do.  But it’s the feeling that I have the power to break the game that’s important, regardless of how much I’m actually breaking.

I’ve often said that I’m not a fan of puzzles in video games.  They don’t make me feel smart, and solving them doesn’t make me feel accomplished.  And the way I’ve always explained it is that “You can’t outsmart a video game puzzle.  You can only equal-smart it.”  That is, you can only pass a puzzle by performing the solution the designer intended, but…that doesn’t make me feel like I’ve done much at all.  I didn’t come up with a solution, someone else came up with it and I just followed their logic to the same conclusion.  A video game puzzle can only ever make me feel slightly less smart than the person who designed it, because even if we both worked through the same thought process, at least they came up with it out of nothing.

Take, for contrast, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.  I’ve seen a lot of people complain that the puzzles in Tears of the Kingdom can be circumvented with clever application of the game’s tools.  With the right mix of Ultrahand, Recall and Ascend, you can get yourself practically anywhere and overcome anything.  And I’ve always been confused by these complaints because…I assumed that was exactly the point.  The game deliberately allows you to get smarter than its own puzzles, to the point where circumventing them becomes a new layer of puzzle unto itself.  But, if you want to do that, it’s a solution you need to invent entirely on your own rather than something a developer came up with for you.  The developer-intended solution exists as a fallback to ensure the puzzle is strictly possible, but the sky’s the limit for using your own brain to solve things your own way.

Like…didn’t you feel smart the first time you used Recall to completely trivialize a puzzle room?  I did.  It’s probably the smartest a video game has ever made me feel.  And then I proved I could do it again, only this time I had to use Ascend to seal the deal, and I felt even smarter.

Playing as Yasuke in Assassin’s Creed Shadows doesn’t make me feel “smart” exactly, but I bring all this up because it tickles a similar part of my brain.  It’s precisely because I’m not solving things the intended way that I feel like I’m actually…DOING something.  Cutting my own path.  Tearing up the script.  I see the clockwork little world the developers have designed for me, and I kick it over to watch the gears fly everywhere.  I see the thoughtfully-crafted battle gauntlets of Valhalla, and instead I cast Recall and Ascend to get myself right to the final target’s rafters.

I’m never going to stop playing Assassin’s Creed wrong, and however the next game in the series wants me to take down its many targets, I look forward to doing the exact opposite once again.