The Assassin's Creed Brotherhood novel doesn't understand how books work
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers, and we’re also surfacing entries of Text Adventure, their video game book club.
This was the first book in the Text Adventure series, chosen according to the rigorous selection criteria of “what books do I own already,” and having completed the first season I am confident it is the worst. Its almost mesmerising awfulness is derived from a baffling commitment to including the entire plot of the game, which means it has to cram in five years of Ezio’s rebuilding the Guild of Assassins along with significant chunks of Rome. Nothing is excised, everything is present, including the clumsily staged tutorial VO.
This is comically antithetical to good storytelling: quite apart from the fact there’s enough plot here to support a five-part series, key parts of the narrative machinery are missing entirely. Characters are introduced and then murdered immediately, people take time out from plot beats to recount stealth mechanics
