Assassin's Creed Mirage: Valley of Memory is a sleek DLC for die-hard fans, but it just might transform the whole game

Assassin's Creed Mirage was never supposed to get an expansion. Conceived as an antidote to the sprawling worlds of Odyssey and Valhalla, as well as a love letter to the denser stealth experiences of the series' earliest entries, it was supposed to be a standalone experience. But two years on, Ubisoft is returning to Basim's story with Valley of Memory, an expansion in all but name that adds another chapter to his story and a whole new country to his world.

Valley of Memory sits within Basim's narrative as something of a capstone to his coming-of-age arc in Mirage. It's an entirely new chapter, positioned near the end of the main quest but largely removed from much of the rest of the story of Basim or the Hidden Ones. Instead, it's a personal narrative, focused on a rumor that Basim's long-lost father might be in the city of AlUla.

Set in modern-day Saudi Arabia (which helped fund the development of Valley of Memory), AlUla was already ancient by the time of Mirage's 9th-century setting. Once the southern border of the Roman Empire, it was a key stopping point on the trade routes that spanned Europe and Asia, and has been occupied by humanity for 7,000 years. Ubisoft has worked directly with archaeologists to bring its new region, which contains both a substantial town and a sprawling desert area to life.

Desert rose

When Basim arrives, however, this civilizational cradle is suffering at the hands of a destructive band of robbers. Camps of bandits lurk between the towering rock structures of the desert and the dense streets of AlUla itself. Valley of Memory's map is around the same size as the base game's Baghdad and its outskirts, but it's hugely diverse. Built around an oasis, AlUla was shaped by its agriculture, meaning that close-packed houses give way to wide fields shielded from the worst of the desert sun by date palms, which in turn gives way to the rolling sand, geological features, and ancient structures of the desert itself.

That's where Valley of Memory's biggest dangers lie. As the land becomes less hospitable, bands of robbers lie in wait to ambush caravans, leaving traps that unsuspecting players can blunder into. Thankfully, Basim is well-prepared to deal with those bandits. As well as all his standard late-game tools, Ubisoft's handed out several extra upgrades to make this a meaningful challenge for experienced players. The blow dart can now penetrate armor, smoke bombs dissolve the bodies of those caught in the cloud, and the noisemaker distraction now puts enemies to sleep as well as attracting more distant foes to make it easy for Basim to mop up groups of bad guys.

If that sounds like a lot of new toys, it's only because Valley of Memory is still supposed to be a challenge. Ubisoft says it's worked with the community to build and replicate the best bits of the main game, and as an endgame-adjacent expansion this is intended to be a little harder than what you've played before, with those aforementioned traps and a new enemy type to take on. And while the main focus of the update is on AlUla, there's plenty more to seek your teeth into.

The tool upgrades can be carried into the main game, where there's also enhanced parkour. Both of those should come in extremely helpful with the new challenge system, which allows players to replay old missions with specific rulesets, rewarding them for remaining entirely unseen, only killing their actual target, or completing every aim within a certain time limit. There are new skills, new outfits, and quality of life changes that all look to make Valley of Memory an update far larger than its main story's six-hour runtime would suggest.

It might be an expansion nobody entirely expected, but Valley of Memory manages to fit within the mold that was carved for Assassin's Creed Mirage. Settled just outside the bounds of the original story, its sprawling desert environments do little to detract from the fact that this is a well-contained addition to the base game, a far cry from the massive expansions that Ubisoft stitched to the already massive games that came before it. Its focus on speaking directly to the end-game players, dialling up difficulty and offering Basim enhanced tools to counter that, should allow this not-quite-DLC to nestle far more neatly into the existing Mirage ecosystem than many of Assassin's Creed's more recent add-ons.

In a different place in a different time, Assassin's Creed Shadows Claws of Awaji offers a more traditional AC expansion.