I realized quite late in Assassin’s Creed Shadows that being this version of a shinobi is hard — but it was precisely the precision the game demanded that made it all the more rewarding.

With Shadows, the Assassin’s Creed franchise has achieved both its most impressive stealth and assassination mechanics. At its best, Shadows evokes games like Arkane’s Dishonored series, mixing emergent action with an artful blend of skills and scenarios. While not nearly at the level of sophistication as those games, I nevertheless had moments that left me breathless from what I could achieve. These put me more in the space of immersive simulated assassination games than the most recent, chest-thumping Assassin’s Creed games.

Here’s an example. In Ubisoft’s open-world third-person action game, I was faced with a group of about 10 men in a dark cave, all of whom turned out to be targets I’d been hunting for ages. They were all part of one group, who I’d been carefully taking down individually — one leading me to the next. Now, after tracking one, it turned out he and his remaining colleagues had decided to hold a meeting. Together. With their guards. I hadn’t planned this, bu …

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