There are, on balance, a couple of things I am always ready to read about. One of these things is to do with anytime some academic type puts an oil painting in an X-ray machine or something like that and discovers all these mysteries in the underpainting. Paths not taken or half taken. Forgotten faces suddenly looming out of the streaked grey murk, black eyes burning.
The other thing tickles the exact same part of my brain. We’re in Egypt, at Giza, and some academic type has used some kind of ground-penetrating imaging to reveal a hint of undiscovered passages within the Great Pyramid. They speak of chambers and causeways that we cannot reach, and ponder why they might be there and what they might contain. Again, I’m in that magical, electrical landscape of streaked grey murk, black eyes, burning, and some ancient figure turns towards us.
All of which is to say, the thing I most like about the Pyramids of Egypt – and I really, really like the Pyramids of Egypt – is not that I suspect that they were built by Atlanteans or visitors from beyond the Kuiper Belt, but that they’re so old, so dizzyingly, incomprehensibly old, that we don’t know how the Egyptians who did build them actually did it. We have theories, and probably excellent theories, but there’s still a vapour of mystery to it. How? Why? What else? These are questions I almost hope we never solve, because they are so exciting to just ponder.
And this is the world in which Assassin’s Creed Origins takes place. Is Origins the best Assassin’s? I couldn’t tell you. It’s my favourite though, partly because of the lead character – although the series is not short of great leads, and Kassandra from Odyssey is right up there – but mainly because of the setting. Egypt! Finally this series has arrived at the Pyramids, where it always belonged.
Here’s the thing, though. Origins is not set in Egypt at the time that the Pyramids were freshly built, and this might, in fact, be the single greatest decision the developers made. This is Egypt in 49 BC. It’s Ptolemaic Egypt. The Greeks are in charge, in some complex manner I don’t fully understand, and the Romans are threatening incursions. Bayek, the game’s brilliant, personable lead, can read hieroglyphics but has to remind himself how to do it. And the Pyramids are already old – dizzyling, incomprehensibly old.
There are a lot of wonderful things about Origins. Bayek is great, a kind of local Egyptian sheriff drawn into the heart of something big and terrifying. His wife Aya is even better, sheer charisma, warmth and danger combined. It’s a pleasure, in among video games and all their battles and ruins, to find a couple who really love each other – that’s Bayek and Aya. It’s a pleasure – spoilers – to play as Aya for a little bit, and it’s a genuine thrill in a later game (though possibly in Odyssey, it all blurs with this series) to enter a room deep underground somewhere and see a statue of a figure who I took to be Aya, already misted and grained by the passage of time. The past of the past and all that.
Beyond that, there’s Egypt itself, a huge stretch of terrain. It’s filled with stuff that history enthusiasts will love. I gasped when I first reached Alexandria and its library, and gasped again when I learned the design team had based their building on a real ancient library. I loved a mission which took me out into places where natron salt is being worked with, because natron salt was used in mummification and that gives it a kind of star power. More than anything, I loved the sense of human life the game conjured. It’s easy to see the empty tombs and temples of Egypt and picture a chilly culture where life was all about death. But these tombs and temples always come with workmen graffiti, the markings and signs of every day people who had their own lives and their own concerns. Assassin’s Creed is the kind of series where Ubisoft spends a Pharaoh’s fortune on each installment, yet it spends it not just on the kind of buildings and monuments that Pharaohs loved, but on the muddle and chatter of people who made these worlds feel alive. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to see this stuff.
I say all that – and I mean it! – but on my first playthrough of the game I was absolutely focused on the Pyramids. I was locked in. I could not be shaken. And so, of course, Origins holds them back a bit. A preamble on Bayek’s home turf. A bit of tragedy and revenge to sort out, and a glimpse, inevitably, of one of the game’s many ancient ancient artefacts – an apple, I think? The deadly clutter left behind by the Atlanteans or the people from beyond the Kuiper Belt or whoever they are in this particular universe.
Then we get the Pyramids. And I remember thinking that Ubisoft had really done it. The big conceit had really worked. Because the Pyramids are ancient to us, it’s completely harmonious that they’re also ancient to Bayek. We are doubled with him as he explores them, we are right in there with him, in terms of what we’re both thinking and feeling. He loves the grandeur of this place, the unknowable nature of these buildings, the sense of deep time they radiate. He is surprised that the Sphinx isn’t bigger. He makes his way in to the Great Pyramid, I believe, through a tunnel hacked into it – maybe not the same tunnel visitors use today, but the sense of illicitness, the imposition of contemporary human desire on these vast, strangely voiceless buildings remains the same.
I have been to the Great Pyramid. Give me a few hours and I think I even have a few pictures in a box somewhere: me in a terrible shirt in one of the upward-leading tunnels where you have to bend down just to proceed, and an awful, useless snapshot of the Grand Gallery taken without a flash – not that a flash would have helped.
This was the late 1990s while I was a student. My memories are already starting to fray – they already feel ancient to me – but what I can remember very clearly was reaching the Grand Gallery and feeling this distinct pang, a sense of both delight and wonder and sadness. This stuff is incredible – the Grand Gallery itself, a path to the King’s Chamber which opens out and seems to fairly scream a sense of vital meaning that it’s very tricky to guess at, is probably the most thrilling space I have ever been in. But I thought at the time: I’m not Egyptian. I live nowhere near this incredible place most of the time. I can never really get a proper idea of this place. I will always be passing through. For a building that can feel made of time, if that makes sense, I knew I had at best at hour. I was nineteen, and I would possibly never make it back here. (Not, of course, that I had any great purpose in being there at the time, behind holding up the queue and taking 35mm photos that had no chance of coming out properly.)
And so it’s safe to say that I came to Origins with my own preoccupations. Here was a Grand Gallery I could have in my home in East Sussex, and without having to steal anything or commit an international art crime. And this too is what I love about Origins’ treatment of the Pyramids. They play it very straight – up to a point. And so Bayek walks through low chambers where he has to crouch. I tell myself I can remember the sense of rock looking like that, the walls feeling that rough, or with those sudden patches of smoothness. He emerges into the Grand Gallery and I can try to triangulate his journey there with my own fading memories of the route I once took. Ahead lies – surely – the King’s chamber. Or does it? Did I get turned around? Did he?
Inevitably, Origins has its own designs, and it needs to use the Pyramids in part of its grand overarching storyline. Now even the game itself is starting to fade in my memory, but I do remember at one point heading down with Bayek and finding a great improbable space deep under the Pyramid filled with magical stuff and ancient computers and maybe – of course – a boss fight. But the crucial element of all this is memory. And not just memory but my own memory, an addled, fading, tourist memory of this place. Which means that I can never quite tell where Ubisoft’s research ends with these spaces and where Ubisoft’s imagination takes over.
This is, bizarrely, and by a circuitous route, exactly what it was like to visit the Pyramids in the 1990s as a youthful idiot from England. I knew these places were special. I knew they were intricate and I’d seen cutaway maps, but I hadn’t remembered the maps in great detail, and so when I went inside I genuinely didn’t know what awaited me. A certain kind of tourist claims to be disappointed by the Pyramids – no hieroglyphics for one thing, but also a cramped, scattered kind of emptiness. Empty rooms. No easy indications of why or what for. For me, this was what I loved about the Pyramids. This was so much better than discovering riches, of having a panel slide away at the grace of some ancient mechanism to find myself staring at uncounted gold.
Untangling all this now, I can see that I loved it, and that it was better than all this other stuff, for the very same reason I felt that pang of sadness in the Grand Gallery. Because the Pyramids are wildly, improbably old, and the people that built them are dust, and the reasons they built them are scattered on the wind. Ane yet we know that the people who built them were people, so we have that innate connection with them at least, that hint of a causeway towards understanding.
But for us today, and for Bayek, back in 49 BC, there was no way of knowing too much more. Origins comes up with its own answers to the mysteries of the past – partial answers, obv, as there’s always another game to make – but it doesn’t seem as convinced by these answers as it does by its conjuring of the people in the streets of its ancient cities, the political intrigue around Cleopatra, the scholars milling in the great library.
To put it another way, the Pyramids are where us humans confront some of the strangest mysteries of being human. And that is a wonderful thing to explore in a video game.
