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If there are moments of serenity in the original Assassin's Creed, which turns 10 years old next month, they are surely to be found in the act of scaling towers - a way of pacing consumption of the landscape that has shaped almost every subsequent open world escapade, from Rocksteady's Batman Arkham games to the mighty Breath of the Wild. The city is a fading murmur beneath you, the cries of beggars and traders and the jingle of guard awareness icons whisked away by the wind. The occasional frustrations of shouldering through mobs or scrambling across uneven rooftops are forgotten. There is nothing but the scuffle of toes on masonry and the rattle of Altair's sword in its sheath.Reach the top and you can synchronise with the Animus device, the game-within-a-game that serves as Assassin's Creed's frame narrative, exposing nearby landmarks and activities on your minimap. But the real reward for your labours is eagle-diving from the summit, back into that haystack of threats and distractions. You clamber out of the world, you soak up the view, you plunge back in, you move onto the next tower - a digestible, compulsive little design loop that has come to serve on the one hand as a tacit colonial fantasy, the mapping of "exotic" yet highly regularised terrain, and on the other as a kind of stress release valve. Wherever you are in Assassin's Creed or one of its bigger, noisier descendants, there is always a tower of sorts you can climb, a chance to distance yourself from the hubbub in order to take its measure.
Or at least, that's my reading. Assassin's Creed's estranged creator Patrice Désilets remembers the tower mechanic not as a way of creating distance, but fostering closeness. The beauty of that lonely, often-repeated climb, he tells me, is that player and character are both alike driven simply by the urge to see. "When you can actually put players in the same psychological state as the character, you've won, and that's always my goal. You don't always feel this connection between the character and the player, but [in Assassin's Creed] you're actually there in the world, you are Altair, because you are basically thinking the same thing." Much as the architects of the Tower of Babel sought entrance to heaven, so Désilets and his team saw those towers as gateways between reality and representation. It's an intriguing observation not least because it erases the presence of Desmond Miles, the original Assassin's Creed trilogy's much-despised modern-day protagonist, who is technically "controlling" his ancestor Altair on your behalf via the Animus.
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