"Assassin's Creed Origins", death on the Nile.

The last episode of the saga is available since Friday. The most educational in the series. It offers a convincing dive into ancient Egypt.

Note to readers. I have been diving in the game for 14 hours so far. Those are my first impression and I will probably update this review once I am done and finish with the game :) 

Who are you, Bayek?

The hero of the new episode of the Assassin's Creed saga, which takes place in ancient Egypt, is in some ways more mysterious than its predecessors. Well, of course, Bayek is a murderer. As the adventure unfolds throughout Egypt, he kills. A lot. Out of revenge. For justice. To get out of a difficult situation. To loot a treasure, solve a puzzle, free a prisoner, protect a village, save the widow, orphan or Egypt.

But Bayek is also and above all - all the characters he encounters on his way remind him - a Medjaÿ. For players with little experience in Egyptian history, this is a lot like the role of the serving knight and the samurai. In ancient Egypt, the Medjaÿ is a little bit like that - the word means a people of Sudan who provided battalions of soldiers to the Egyptian army. Before appointing a policeman in the Middle Ages. You didn't know that? We all didn't know that. Welcome to Assassin's Creed, the most educational teacher's dream, which teaches you incredible things without you noticing.
Assassin's Creed: Origins starts off rather classically with an investigation, which leads the hero and his wife Aya, also a formidable warrior, on the trail of those responsible for the death of their son. A quest that will lead them to discover conspiracies within plots, nestling like Russian dolls, and to cross the lowly people of the Nile Delta as to meet Cleopatra.

Assassin's Creed regulars won't be surprised: despite some changes (including the presence of a falcon that allows you to spot your targets), the game keeps all the classic elements of the series. We run on the rooftops, we execute more or less discreetly guards and enemies, and each mission or almost leaves you the choice between the stealth option (usually recommended) or the aggressive option (when you are sure to have the advantage). Bayek runs, jumps, hides with ease, like a champion parkour who would train daily on pyramids.

Open and hostile world

More than a policeman, your hero is a sort of Robin Hood of the Sand: if you are free to refuse or accept all requests for help outside of the main quest, it is almost impossible to gain enough experience to continue your mission without accepting a whole bunch of secondary missions. From the noblest - saving an old man tortured by bandits - to the most... strange, like this investigation among sellers of embalmed dead fake cats. Sometimes repetitive, these secondary quests are also the ones that offer the best opportunities to explore in detail the towns and villages of the game.

In "Origins", hunting is not entirely an optional activity.

The plunge into antiquity has some consequences, especially with a little less strange gadgets than in the last episodes. And above all, the ubiquitous presence of animals, from cobra to crocodile, whose skins will provide essential ingredients to improve your inventory. In Origins, hunting is not totally optional... It reminds you of another Ubisoft license, namely Far Cry? That's normal. Just like the falcon that accompanies you, it works on the same model as the Watch Dogs 2 or Ghost Recon: Wildlands drones. Assassin's Creed: Origins makes a kind of synthesis - rather successful, and despite some slight bugs - of elements introduced in other games of the editor.

But it's also one of the main flaws of the game: Assassin's Creed lost some of its singularity, as its innovations were taken up by others, and that it in turn integrated the elements of other licenses. A feeling reinforced by an unnecessarily convoluted interface, filled with different options and resources to manage, and which one must visit far too often. This somewhat breaks the immersion of Bayek's dazzling movements when he discreetly slips into a tower filled with guards to assassinate a tyrannical military leader with a single sword. Just like some strange ergonomic choices : driving an ox cart or war chariot, which is mandatory for certain missions, quickly becomes a nightmare if you have the misfortune of entering a narrow alley.

Small quests and great history

On the other hand, the game's reconstitution of ancient Egypt is splendid.
Enter like any other onlooker in the Alexandria library, climb a pyramid, visit the public baths, admire the sphinx of Giza, get lost at sunset in the reeds of the Nile, or find in the middle of the desert the ruins of a lost temple... It's almost as if you were there, especially because the gallery of secondary characters offered by the game is particularly successful. Embalmers, street kids, greedy merchants, greedy priests, more or less crazy, the game offers a vast panorama of the Egyptian society of the time.
Memphis's library is reconstructed in the game but the game manages not to become a masterclass in history. And that's where, above all, Assassin's creed: Origins reveals its true originality. By immersing his players in a period and civilization totally unknown to most of them, he manages not to transform himself into a master class of history, without falling into the opposite excess of oversimplification. When Bayek travels to Alexandria, the city with both Greek and Egyptian heritage, it is its environment that shows him how perennial anti-Egypt racism was among the Greek elites. No tutorials, no great speeches explain to the player the chaos that took place under the reigns of Ptolemy XII and XIII: it is by speaking with peasants ransomed by soldiers or merchants abandoned to bandits that one understands how much Egypt of the time is at the edge of anarchy.

Eventually, one finds oneself hating Pompey, distrusting Cleopatra, seeing everywhere the shadow of Rome, and passionate about an ancient conflict of powers that one had never heard of before playing the game. Even if it does not bring a fundamental revolution in the way it is played, Assassin's Creed: Origins succeeds to go a little further than the clichés about ancient Egypt. Of course, there are pyramids, crocodiles, and funerary rites (forcibly) - but also a lot of history.

Final verdict

Pros
It's really beautiful.
It's a real change of scenery.
A successful dive into an unknown place and time

Cons
The annoying interface
A somewhat generic game system
It's more for you, though:

This game is for you if :
you love infiltration games and open worlds (and Ubisoft games in general)
Giza is at the top of your list of places to visit on the day you have a time machine
You know nothing about ancient Egypt, but this period titillates your curiosity
It's not for you, though:

It is not so much for you if :
you were hoping for a fundamentally different direction for the series
You were absolutely counting on a multiplayer mode, absent from this episode
Reading this test has already put Cleopatra's lion song in your head.

Visited by a ghost...