even the clearest glass distorts the view.
honestly, I wonder whether I have anything to say about this game, even as I find myself gnawing on words that have been threatening to make themselves a project in my life for seven years.
assassin's creed has been a series that has intrigued me from its inception, a longer-form narrative that, even before it spanned multiple games with a continuous story, toyed with the blind spots of history (or mainstream awareness of it) in ways that fascinated me. when it expanded to be more than just the tale of altaïr ibn-la'ahad as told through the framing device of desmond miles, it captivated me. assassin's creed ii is probably still my favorite entry thus far for myriad reasons, but it was really compelling in the way it pulled out and broadened the scope of what the narrative encompassed.
I was very fond of desmond miles as a character. I feel like that's weird as far as assassin's creed fans go, or at least it was back when I was talking to more people about this series. he is, unfortunately, killed at the end of assassin's creed iii, sacrificed to a machine to keep the prophesied 2012 apocalypse from ending society as we know it.
in black flag, you're not desmond miles. you're an as of yet unnamed employee of abstergo industries. the entertainment development sector, specifically. you're tasked with exploring the history of the genes from one "generous donor", the corpse of the character you had previously inhabited. to dissect the man who, one game prior, insisted he existed too. the player, assumed to be more interested in the historical layer of the narrative, peered past this framing device, this tool, this ostensible cipher as he begged to be taken seriously as a person, not a pawn, by the precursor race, by his team, by his father. by the player.
the narrative nonetheless crowds in behind him peering through his fourth wall into the past. our own fourth wall crushes him flat as we follow suit. "we" don't notice as a new fourth wall springs up behind us.
history is an ever-thickening wall of glass. what gets caught between each layer, as "the truth", struggles to be seen as time goes on. we carve paths into the future, to try and ensure the important things don't get lost, but we all have to learn some things the hard way, either because they haven't happened before, or because the view back is impenetrable.
the familiar pawn of both assassin and templar died in the last game. but their legacy, their form, are pressed between these walls. we pull back to see a workplace environment that echoes what ideas one might have about working in a game development studio with the sort of funding that ubisoft has. market analyses about protagonists in the series, people on break talking about their work, email chains about what lunch is going to be for the day, worries about their jobs and safety while the plot happens around them.
the historical macguffin of the entry is the Observatory, a treasure that would let you monitor whoever you wanted with just a bit of their blood. a small but generous donation, trapped in glass, and you could see through their eyes. the work of abstergo mirrors this, now, with no insistence that you need be the descendant of someone to see through their DNA into their history.
I feel ill at ease about what metaphorical blood was spilled to get this glimpse into the ubisoft workplace.
but this is a pretty old game. old enough to make me feel old by reminding me (with crossover promotional material) when watch_dogs, another game about a technological panopticon, came out. (the answer is 2014, by the by.)
I'm back on this bullshit, though. the game is fun, even if it's disquieting working for definitely-not-ubisoft and wondering what layer of irony they're on by equating themselves to the bad guys.