Assassin’s Creed: The Essential Guide is an updated edition of the 2016 large-format hardback written by Arin Murphy-Hiscock and published by Titan Books. Running to 256 fully illustrated pages, it’s a weighty tome that digs deep into the lore of Ubisoft’s long-running video game series.
I love big hardback books like this. Video games, especially big open-world video games, take time to revisit, and official guides and art books are useful aid-memoirs. They give readers a chance to revisit their favourite games over a mug of coffee, rather than committing to a full playthrough.
Most game-related books focus on a particular title. Titan has released some stunning books based on individual Assassin’s Creed games in the past, but Assassin’s Creed: The Essential Guide has a much larger task on its hands. It attempts to piece together 14 years of mythological spaghetti from Ubisoft’s sprawling action-adventure series. And to the book’s credit, it absolutely manages to pull it off.
The Essential Guide charts the history Assassin’s Creed, from the time of the First Civilisation, through to the formation of the Assassins Brotherhood, the rise of the Templars, and the influence of Abstergo on modern-day life. It’s a comprehensive review of the franchise’s many time-periods, locations, characters, and technology.
The overarching narrative – and some handy timeline charts – helps make sense of a series in which storytelling is often non-linear, oblique, or just plain muddled. Through the games and its spin-offs, Ubisoft has created an intriguing but complex tapestry that combines real-life history, secret wars, advanced technology, and ancient alien races. To see the dots connected so clearly is informative and illuminating.
As you can probably gather, Assassin’s Creed: The Essential Guide is very much focussed on the fictional aspects of the series. And that is its biggest flaw.
If you’re enough of an Assassin’s Creed’s fan to bury your nose in its fictional history, you’d likely appreciate some content covering its global development effort. Across 22 video games, a movie, and a plethora of comics and books, there’s a wealth of production content to be explored. It’s a real shame that this aspect is completely ignored. Indeed, the book never refers to the games by title, and you won’t find a single screenshot. This is fiction presented as history.
Instead, there is a smorgasbord of illustrations and art to pore over. The level of research and detail in big-budget video games often goes unnoticed. Assassin’s Creed: The Essential Guide offers a welcome opportunity to see some of that work beautifully printed on the page. The Assassin’s Creed games have always been beautiful games, and this is a beautiful, well-produced book.
Given the task at hand, the quality of the text is also worth noting. It’s unfussy and economical, clear and informative. The events of the games, film, novels, and comics are all referred to, and all treated as canon. Given the tangle of ancient races, mysterious artefacts, and malignant mega-corporations the book covers, it’s quite an accomplishment.
I’ve recently been playing the Assassin’s Creed remasters on Nintendo Switch, and this book has become a constant companion. It provides historical context for my adventures, it helps me decipher the meaning behind cryptic Abstergo emails, and it fleshes out the expansive cast of characters I encounter. Yup, Assassin’s Creed: The Essential Guide is pretty much essential.
