Following up my play through of the original Assassin’s Creed game a few weeks back by downloading the free expansion for Assassin’s Creed Mirage made perfect sense.  Basim may not have the charisma of an Ezio, Kassandra or Bayek, but he’s a generally pleasant character (unless you are currently being stabbed by him) and I really appreciated the streamlined back-to-basics nature of Mirage compared to some of the huge open world RPG titles that the series has become known for lately.

Seriously.  I tried playing Valhalla and got like 8 hours in and I still wasn’t an assassin yet.  I feel this should happen in the first two hours, three TOPS.

The DLC, “Valley of Memory” is also different because of the dynamic between Basim and his foster father.  I’m having some trouble thinking of ANY Assassin’s Creed game where the main character has a solid, positive relationship with his dad.  In fact, I can’t think of any other than III where the dad is alive.  And III is just a BIT of a special case.

It isn’t terribly long, and it kinda gave off the vibe of being sponsored by a tourism bureau, but one of my favorite things to do in any Assassin’s Creed game is to take a big camp full of enemies and treat it like a little puzzle to be solved.

With knives.

Valley of Memory has two really standout camps that scratched that itch good and hard, and a long sequence in a prison that hit almost all of the same notes, so I’m going to give it a solid thumbs up.

Oh, and it was free.  That helps.  Thanks, Ubisoft!

I had originally played through Mirage via Ubisoft Connect under Linux, so I was very happy to boot it up on a PS5 and found that it had imported my save.  That’s pretty new for Ubisoft, I think.  I know Valhalla DOES support this as well, but Odyssey does not so there’s a breakpoint right around 2020.

A side effect of this was that, while just the act of loading up my save and playing the game didn’t itself trigger any Playstation trophies, I kept hitting situations where I’d do something that would trigger like a half dozen to pop at the same time.  By the time I wrapped up Valley of Memory, I was sitting at like 70% trophy completion without even really trying…

…and then, because I’d been having a good time and because none of the remaining trophies felt TOO grind, I decided to keep playing.  For another three nights worth of stabbing mans and parkour and actually engaging with some of the systems I had ignored on my original run.

For the record?  If you are just starting Asssassin’s Creed Mirage DO NOT sleep on the smoke bombs.  I hadn’t bothered to use them at all until I suddenly had to chase a trophy involving throwing them at guards and they are basically God Mode for those situations where you get surrounded.

Anyway, end result:

This is my 23rd Platinum trophy.  I get one or two a year.  Usually they’re for games that fit three criteria:

First, I have to like the game a lot.  I think this goes without saying.

Second, the act of finishing the game’s main story should get you between 60% and 80% of all trophies.  Like, a platinum trophy should say “I liked this enough to keep going after the end credits” without being an expression of masochism.

I realize, having said this, that I have platinum trophies in Dark Souls, Nioh, Dark Souls II and Bloodborne.  And those are pretty masochistic games.

Third, if there are ANY multiplayer trophies they had better be very simple to get.  Like “I played a round with one stranger and I was done” levels of simple to get.  No “Fight Online 100 times” trophies.

Dead or Alive 5: Last Round, I am looking directly at you.  As an example.

If it was bankrolled in the interest of hyping up tourism in the Middle East, that failed.  I still have zero interest in visiting ANY of the locations that the game’s NPCs kept telling me I should really see before I die.  But as a game – ok, ok, an expansion for a game – I think it succeeded pretty nicely.