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“It is natural to fear change,” he says, to a chamber full of gathered countrymen. He comes bearing peace, an end to the infighting via the cooling balm of unification. We soon meet King Harald, who rocks up under a creamy waterfall of hair and gives off the vaguely distracted vibes of someone who would be a lot happier in Southern California, with a surfboard under his feet. For a while now the polar-white hoods have been ditched in favour of period chic, and the most we tend to get, by way of tradition, are oblique nods to the rituals of old. At this point, the notion of an assassin in an Assassin’s Creed game feels novel. And-get this-you actually meet a couple of assassins! Real ones, robed in white and red, with their ring fingers lopped off, and their conversational manner thoroughly aloof. You can partake in minigames of drinking and dice, bouts of combat, or just sail around, taking in the tundra. This early sandbox-or, rather, ice box-is a blast. The first act of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is set in Norway, where the night sky is restless with aurora, and numerous clans itch with the desire for conflict. Then again, it isn’t as though Eivor were arriving from a land of warmth and peace. One look at Eivor trudging up from a river bank, wrapped in a soaking cloak, and you think, Why bother? To the victor go the toils. Their relationship is one of invasion and retaliation: just as Eivor, who journeys to England with notions of violently settling down, raids a local encampment, so, too, does England strike back, plunging the foreign pillager into a maelstrom of rain, mud, and Germanic accents. The year is 873 A.D., and the pair do not get along. Now meet England, variously composed of stone, thicket, hillside, and churl, caressed by freezing fogs and bright-yellow mornings, as if an egg yolk had broken and bled all over the clouds.
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Meet Eivor, an ice-blonde Viking with a spring-loaded blade wrapped around one wrist, a longboat, thronged with loyal brutes, and a pet raven, called Sýnin, who likes to keep a low cruising altitude, like a feathered UAV.