Arno kneels beside a body. Someone suggests he say "rest in peace." His response: "What's it matter? You're gone anyway."
That line crystallizes everything wrong with Assassin's Creed Unity. It's not just Arno being cynical or bitter—it's the game's entire philosophical framework collapsing into nihilism. And once you see it, you can't unsee how hollow the whole experience feels.
Assassin's Creed used to operate within worldviews where things mattered. Not in a preachy way, but in the sense that death, sacrifice, and purpose had weight beyond the immediate and material.
Connor (AC3) had a coherent spiritual framework rooted in Kanien'kehá:ka reverence. Watch how he treats animals, the land, even his enemies—there's a cosmos underneath his actions where things mean something.
Ezio critiqued the corrupt institutional Church throughout AC2 and Brotherhood without rejecting transcendence itself. "Requiescat in pace" wasn't empty ritual—it acknowledged something that transcended politics. He could hold both: the Church is compromised, AND human life is sacred beyond sentiment.
But then the erosion started.
Edward (AC4) begins as pure materialist—gold, status, getting back to Caroline. The Brotherhood is just a means to an end. By the end he gets a redemption arc, but it's shallow. He learns the Creed matters, but we never see him internalize a worldview that would make "rest in peace" mean anything.
Shay (Rogue) doesn't want to harm innocents, but there's no spiritual dimension to it. It's pragmatic ethics at best—don't kill civilians because it's wrong, not because human life is sacred or meaningful in any transcendent sense.
By Unity, Arno's "what's it matter, you're gone anyway" isn't coming from nowhere. The series has been steadily draining the philosophical substance out of both factions, turning Assassins and Templars into rival gangs with different PR rather than worldviews in conflict.
Here's the thing: plenty of games have no spiritual content and don't feel hollow. Remedy's Control and Alan Wake games never touch religion, but they don't feel empty because they never promised transcendence. They're about human psychology, art, and narrative as forces in themselves. There's no void where spirituality should be because spirituality was never the frame.
But Assassin's Creed established that the conflict mattered beyond politics. "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" was supposed to be a philosophical position, not just a tagline. The series trained you to expect weight, then yanked it away without replacement.
When Arno dismisses "rest in peace," you feel the absence. Not because every story needs spirituality, but because this story built its foundation on meaning and then abandoned it.
Unity actually has the perfect setup to explore this tension, but completely ignores it.
The countryside outside Paris—the Vendée region—rises up against the revolutionaries specifically because they're tearing down the Church. These weren't people defending corrupt bishops. They were defending their parishes, their priests, their way of understanding the world. To them, the Revolution wasn't liberation—it was cosmopolitan Parisians destroying the structures that gave rural life meaning.
Imagine if Unity had engaged with that. Arno's nihilism could have been specific to Paris—the enlightened urban revolutionary who thinks "rest in peace" is superstition, contrasted against people for whom it's literally everything. That's dramatic tension. That's the Assassin-Templar conflict with actual stakes: Is the Revolution freeing people from oppressive institutions, or destroying the beliefs that give their lives structure?
Instead, Unity treats religious belief as set dressing. The rural faithful become props for side missions rather than people with a coherent worldview challenging Arno's materialism.
Interestingly, the series doesn't abandon spirituality forever—it just repositions it outside Christianity.
Bayek (Origins) absolutely operates within a spiritual framework. The gods are real presences, death has meaning, there's an afterlife that matters. His motivation isn't just revenge—it's restoring Ma'at, cosmic order. The rituals aren't empty gestures. He believes.
Kassandra/Alexios (Odyssey) interact directly with the Isu-as-gods. The choices have weight because the universe isn't purely material.
Eivor (Valhalla) believes in Valhalla, in the gods watching, in fate and glory beyond death. You can't have "die well" as a cultural value if death is just gone.
So what happened? Ubisoft didn't reject spirituality—they couldn't figure out how to handle Christian spirituality in Revolutionary France without taking a stance. Pagan polytheism is safer. You can have characters believe in Egyptian/Greek/Norse gods without modern religious controversy. But Revolutionary France? The Church is directly involved in the political conflict. Easier to just make Arno an atheist and avoid the whole thing.
The irony is that dodge created the hollowness. Bayek works because he believes. Arno doesn't work because he doesn't.
There's a mechanical problem that compounds the philosophical one: you never actually do anything as Arno.
In the Ezio games, you are Ezio making decisions. You press the button to assassinate the target. You initiate the conversations that move the plot. Even when the story is linear, you have mechanical agency that creates the illusion of authorship.
Arno's story happens to him in cutscenes while you watch. He slides the note. He decides to go after Élise. He chooses to ignore warnings. You're just piloting him between predetermined emotional beats that you had no hand in creating.
When Élise dies at the end, it lands flat because you never pushed the button that could have saved her. You were never given the chance to try. She dies because the writers needed her gone for the post-game gameplay loop and couldn't figure out how else to handle it. There's no thematic weight—just mechanical housekeeping disguised as tragedy.
In a cosmos without meaning, deaths can only matter personally. And when deaths only matter personally, they become cheap—just emotional manipulation with no philosophical weight.
Unity exemplifies a trend in mass-market media: materialist nihilism presenting itself as "neutral" when it's actually a specific metaphysical stance.
It's easier to sell because it offends nobody. You can't accuse a story of getting God wrong if it says there is no God. You can't critique its theology if it has none.
But that creates hollowness. A cosmos without meaning can't generate the kind of weight that makes "rest in peace" land emotionally. It can't make sacrifice matter beyond sentiment. You're left with spectacle and personal drama, but no philosophical stakes.
The cost is exactly what Unity demonstrates: protagonists who can't answer "why does this matter?" except with "it doesn't, really."
Assassin's Creed didn't need to stay religious. But it needed to replace what it removed.
Ezio could critique institutional power without collapsing into nihilism because he still operated within a framework where human dignity meant something beyond politics. Connor honored the dead because death was part of a larger pattern. Even Edward's shallow arc at least moved toward meaning rather than away from it.
Unity just became a revenge plot in pretty Paris. Things happen to Arno. You watch. Nothing matters because everyone's gone anyway.
And once you notice that void, you can't stop seeing it.