I am willing to hold my hands up and say I was only partially right with my prediction that The Forgotten Saga will be a, “bad idea executed badly”. I still think it’s a bad idea (for reasons I will get into later) but as far as the “executing” of it goes, this was probably the best possible way Ubisoft could have handled it with the tools they had, so bravo to the dev team that work on this.

Rogue-lites and Rogue-likes are personally anxiety-inducing for me but The Forgotten Saga is a rogue-lite for gamers who don’t like rogue-likes. The difficulty balance here is just right and it actively encourages you to think about the perks, armour and skills you are going to take into the next run, rather than just brute-forcing your way through the four areas. Knowing what you’re up against makes you prioritise goals in what equipment to search for which, in turn, makes later runs much faster. Essentially, I had the luxury of being less thorough in subsequent runs due to the knowledge I had acquired before. That is, until the final area where the game cheekily thwarts any plans you have to rush to the final boss by demanding that you clear rooms in a linear fashion in order to progress. This, sadly, ended my third run with a well placed arrow to Odin’s chest during one of the rooms. I was gutted.

Still, I pressed on, and the permanent skill tree upgrades helped massively to offset any potential feelings of deflation, as I could use the huge amounts of memory currency I had accumulated in that failed run to invest even further into them.  It was particularly brave of the creators here to relocate some of the skill tree abilities from the main game DLCs to the armour upgrades in order to make the player consciously consider what armour we’re taking into the next run. For a moment there, Valhalla actually felt like an RPG…

The boss fights, while largely cinematic set pieces, were fun and I don’t think I ever died to them more than once (in the case of Hel I didn’t die to her at all). The dragon was perhaps my favourite (from a gameplay perspective, NOT in the context of Assassin’s Creed) and it was a fun challenge to do the trophy where you had to beat him without using any of the elk shrines along the way. It forced me to weigh up the risk and rewards of each enemy encounter beforehand, with every theft of my health points increasing the stakes. I used the gear that regenerates health for this trophy but, even then, I had to go out of my way to find that gear in the world beforehand and then work out how to unlock the chest. 

This leads to yet another thing I appreciated about The Forgotten Saga - it doesn’t hold your hand at all.  You’re not given markers unless you’re near the objective and the only marker that is on your map from the start is the boss location.  I loved that each of the three side quests I discovered (there may have been more) could only be completed in their entirety with multiple runs and that these quest givers, having remembered you from your previous run, would task you with different objectives to complete. Most importantly, the permanent “Favours” you get from them are more than worth it - one of which you could easily miss by making the assumption that there’s no need to fight this particular NPC more than once, and it’s arguably the most crucial Favour! The Forgotten Saga really trusts the player in a way I haven't seen since the Ezio days. And not to take away from the devs' accomplishments here but it's in these moments where the Fromsoftware influence is very obvious…

This mode isn't perfect though. One of the reasons being that the very concept is incompatible with stealth gameplay.  A rogue-lite inherently has to have a degree of challenge so, predictably, guaranteed assassination is turned off by default until you find the gear set that allows you to assassinate higher level enemies in a (dumb looking) quick time event.  Consequently, this gear set really doesn’t matter because enemy placements and level design still clearly favour open combat. No matter where you approach an enemy base from there are always designated lookouts, and all the enemies in the middle are actively watching each others’ sixes.  

Equally problematic is that your tools for A.I. manipulation is limited in stealth mode, and anything in the environment that is remotely suspicious to the A.I. makes the NPC auto detect the source, i.e. the player. I will say that the A.I. detection is far less broken here than in the base game - the devs probably went through these particular NPCs with a fine comb - but it’s still bad and doesn’t adhere to the three-level detection that it’s supposed to. In short, you can only stealth The Forgotten Sagar up to a certain point, but eventually you will find yourself brawling. Plus the stealth gear is useless against bosses so it’s really not worth it for full runs.

In the end, I managed to beat The Forgotten Saga on my fourth run and even fought Hel an additional time since (incidentally, during my ‘no Elk shrines’ run). With all that said , though, I don’t ever want a rogue-lite mode in Assassin’s Creed ever again because I still think that it doesn’t fit with the essence of Assassin’s Creed. For one, this mode was only possible because of the narrative context it takes place in which was just as dull as ever. I cannot emphasise enough how much I do not give a flaming [censored] about Odin trying to retrieve his doomed son, and I was skipping dialogue all over the place whenever I could. While I praise the story continuity from Dawn of Ragnarok, that continuity would be better suited to an actual Assassin’s Creed story, and not this Norse gods epic that has no place in this franchise. So yeah, in short, The Forgotten Saga is a bad idea executed rather well, but still a bad idea regardless.