This thrilling trip through Japan is the best the series has given us in years

I have played many Assassin’s Creed games over the years, but I’ve rarely loved them. Ubisoft’s historical fiction is perennially almost-great. A lot of players would say it reached its peak in the late 2000s, with the trio of renaissance Italy games beginning with Assassin’s Creed 2, and their charismatic hero, Ezio Auditore. Since then, the series has become bloated, offering hundreds of hours of repetitive open-world exploration and assassination in ancient Greece, Egypt and even Viking Britain. Odyssey (the Greek one) was the last I played seriously; I found the setting exquisite, the gameplay somewhat irritating and the scale completely overwhelming.

The Assassin’s Creed games are extraordinary works of historical fiction, fastidiously recreating lost periods of history and letting you walk around in them. They’re the closest thing to time travel. I play them for the virtual tourism, and find myself vaguely disappointed that 80% of what you do in these painstakingly realised worlds boils down to parkouring around killing people.