Assassin's Creed II: Discovery

There is a special comedy in finding the Spanish Inquisition repackaged as thumb-candy for a handheld console. Assassin's Creed II: Discovery, a modest side-scrolling offshoot of a far grander franchise, sends its hooded hero Ezio Auditore into 1490s Spain to do battle with Tomás de Torquemada and the machinery of the auto-da-fé. One could hardly invent a more pointed coincidence. The very institution that Voltaire, and every writer who ever begged Europe to crush the infamous thing, spent a lifetime mocking now reappears as a level to be cleared, a boss to be stabbed, a historical evil rendered in pixels and platform-jumping. The question is whether the game understands the monster it has summoned, or whether it has merely borrowed the monster's robes.

Let us be fair to it first. To set a popular entertainment in the Inquisition at all is to admit a truth that polite history often softens: that organized cruelty wears the mask of holiness, and that the bonfire and the prayer can be lit by the same hand. The game does not pretend Torquemada was a misunderstood bureaucrat. He hunts, he tortures, he burns, and the player is invited to despise him. This is a healthier instinct than the modern habit of treating every historical villain as a product of his times, as though "his times" were a weather system rather than a series of choices made by men who could have chosen otherwise. A fanatic is not a victim of the calendar.

And yet the satirist in me cannot help noticing the trap the game falls into, which is the oldest trap of all: it fights fanaticism with a fanaticism of its own. Strip away the costumes and Discovery offers us two secret brotherhoods, each utterly certain it alone understands the destiny of mankind, each willing to kill on the strength of that certainty. The Templars wish to perfect humanity through control; the Assassins wish to free it through the dagger. Both speak the language of cosmic stakes. Both are, in their structure, churches—complete with creeds, martyrs, sacred relics, and the conviction that history is a war between the saved and the damned. The Inquisitor burns a heretic in the name of order; the Assassin opens a throat in the name of liberty. The hooded man is more sympathetic, certainly, and his cause more agreeable to anyone who values freedom. But I have learned to distrust any party that arrives carrying both a noble slogan and a concealed blade. The slogan is for you; the blade is for everyone else.

This is where the game's optimism deserves a gentle skewering. Its moral arithmetic is Panglossian in reverse: it assures us that for every concealed conspiracy of evil there is a concealed conspiracy of good, that the gears of history are turned by secret societies, and that all will be set right if only the correct hooded gentleman reaches the correct rooftop in time. How comforting, and how false. The actual horror of the Inquisition was not that a shadowy cabal manipulated events from behind a curtain. It was that the persecution was public, lawful, popular—blessed by crowds, sanctioned by crowns, cheered in the square. The auto-da-fé was not a hidden crime; it was a civic festival. By relocating evil into a secret order of villains, the game quietly absolves the ordinary people who lit the torches and the institutions that handed them out. It is far more flattering to believe the world is ruined by a conspiracy than to admit it is often ruined by consensus.

Still, I would not have the reader mistake my skepticism for contempt. There is genuine value in a piece of entertainment that names the Inquisition as an abomination and asks a young player, perhaps for the first time, to wonder why men once burned other men for the wrong prayers. If a single teenager, sliding Ezio past Torquemada's pyres, pauses to ask whether such things really happened and how decent people allowed them, then the little game has done more moral work than a shelf of solemn treatises that no one reads. Tolerance is not taught only in academies. Sometimes it sneaks in through the side door of an adventure.

What I would ask of the work—and of the whole sprawling franchise it serves—is a measure of self-suspicion. The most dangerous idea in Discovery is not Torquemada's fire but its own untroubled certainty that the killers in the white hoods are the heroes simply because their cause is liberty. History is overstuffed with men who murdered for liberty, for virtue, for the future, and slept soundly afterward. The Inquisitor at least had the honesty of his theology. The truly enlightened response to fanaticism is not a better-dressed fanatic with a more fashionable creed; it is doubt—the willingness to ask whether one's own certainties might also require a body count. A game that grasped this would be a small masterpiece of moral wit. Discovery, instead, gives us a costume drama in which the dagger changes hands but never changes its nature.

So I will praise it for pointing at the fire and naming it evil, and I will needle it for failing to notice that its own hero carries a torch of a different color. Cultivate your garden, the old advice runs—tend to the small, real, verifiable good in front of you, and beware the grand schemers of every faction who promise paradise and deliver corpses. It is advice the game's Spain desperately needed, and advice its Assassins, for all their charm, never quite learned.