Finished Assassin’s Creed: Mirage tonight, which is embarrassingly-enough the first “real game” I have completed all year.  I’ve spent entirely too many hours in soulless gacha waifu cash grabs, and I shall do penance appropriately.

I mean, after I do my dailies.

But, setting that aside: AC:M was quite good!  It utterly failed to stick the landing – seriously, if I need to do a web search of “meaning of ending of <game>” while the credits are still rolling, my thought is that the narrative needed some extra time in the oven – but it did give me 27-and-a-bit hours of running around Baghdad stabbing people that generally needed to be stabbed.

And, really, that’s the baseline you expect from an Assassin’s Creed game.  Well, that and occasionally making fun of guard AI that lets you lure a steady stream of hapless soldiers into standing next to the same, increasingly-full haystack.   And I was playing on the default difficulty!  The description for easy mode implies that the guard AI can be made even more brain-dead, if desired.

Look, if the guards were smart then the game wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining.

Playing through Luna also continued to generally be a good experience.  I did move over to playing it locally as I DO have a nice gaming PC and it DOES look much nicer when you can crank the graphics sliders to 11, but I could happily have gone either way.

I rarely sink to the depths of social commentary, but I did notice one omission in the game’s settings that I will mention without further comment: While you can happily sack monasteries in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, and I am told that you can 100% shank people in Shinto shrines in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and then destroy the contents of the shrines, there was absolutely no stabbing of ANYONE in a mosque, or really any way to go into a mosque at all.

Well, maybe that was just left out.  It is a much smaller game than any of the massive open world RPG-style Assassin’s Creed games we’ve been getting since Origins came out, back in 2017.

…and typing that out makes me realize that it really HAS been nearly a decade since that came out.  Oh, dear.  I’ll just set a broom and dustpan next to my computer chair so my wife can more easily clean things up when I crumble into dust.

Anyway, that’s not a criticism!  I really appreciated the reduced scope and stuff like a simplified skill tree and gearing system.  Odyssey, in particular, had me spending far too much time in menus trying to decide whether 3% more of THIS skill was worth giving up 2% of THIS OTHER skill and so on.

The smaller map and more focused storyline also made me feel like I could do side content without it absolutely consuming my life, so I did most of the optional contracts and chest finding and collectables collecting.  Not all of it – I wasn’t trying for any trophies – but enough to feel like I’d fully engaged with the game and gotten my money’s worth.

Next up, I dunno.  I had a weird flashback to my misspent youth earlier today that has me wondering about the state of Apple II emulation.  Maybe I’ll find some 40-year-old game I never finished and bump it to the top of my stack instead of playing something more recent that I actually spent money on.

We’ll just have to see.