In Mirage, Basim gives up his life as a street thief and trains as an Assassin to find the faces behind the Abbasid Caliphate’s (which was real) Order of the Ancients (which is fiction), a Templar-like group seeking an ancient memory seal. Because Assassins are the ones in the franchise who stand up against unchecked power, the Investigations you play through will reveal that Baghdad reeks of corruption. That’s expected for any influential empire, but the game doesn’t allow itself to become more personal than that.
The game’s story shows Baghdad’s contribution to astronomy, math, health care, poetry, textiles, and the judicial system, while not shying away from the classism, slavery, extortion, and sexism of the era. The game’s antagonists interestingly fall between it all, but Investigations don’t deal with nuances of morality, and hastily lead to the point where we assassinate them. It’s worsened by Mirage turning its five main targets into personified aspects of the Islamic Golden Age, where there is a scholar, merchant, concubine, businessman, and mercenary.
Arib al-Ma’muniyya is the breakthrough poet, Qabiha is a concubine who rose to power, and Ning is an East Asian immigrant who was sold as a child but now holds the Treasurer’s seat in the Merchant’s Guild. These suspects have interesting backstories but hardly get a chance to show their nuanced personalities. They’re all influential women in an Islamic empire who came from nothing, and that alone made me want to know more about them. It’s a shame that their captivating stories are kept in the Codex—curated in-game information about Mirage’s characters and destinations—and some antagonists are only afforded a brief conversation before they’re assassinated.
Investigations are so fixated on assassinating the Order of the Ancients that it prevents us from connecting with passionate allies who want to make their city better too. Basim receives much-needed help from rebels like Beshi and Ali ibn Muhammad, who show up to make way for an assassination. Also, when we infiltrate strongholds to free rebels and slaves, their story begins the reveal of their captor and ends with the captor’s assassination. It glosses over the Zanj rebellion, making something as powerful as resistance against the Caliphate into a minute part of the story.
