Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India

Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India is the second chapter of the side-story trilogy that Ubisoft built alongside its large open-world adventures. Instead of a three-dimensional open world, it offers a 2.5D stealth platformer where the player moves along a fixed axis and treats every room as a puzzle built on hiding, timing and quiet progress. The protagonist is Arbaaz Mir, an assassin operating in India in 1841, who gets entangled in a dispute between the British East India Company, the Sikh Empire and local cults.

The game was developed by Climax Studios, which built the whole project around a stealth-first approach rather than direct combat - the main tool is a grappling rope enabling vertical movement between floors, silent takedowns from cover and distraction gadgets for luring guards away. The level design resembles a puzzle-platformer more than a typical Assassin's Creed game, and compared to the trilogy's other two chapters (China, Russia) it stands out mainly for the colourful, exotic setting of colonial India. The campaign is deliberately shorter than the main series entries - it can be finished in a single evening, which was one of the main selling points at release.

Why play it: For players who want a taste of the Assassin's Creed world without dozens of hours of open world - Chronicles: India offers elegant stealth puzzles, a striking watercolour-style depiction of 19th-century India and a story that stands on its own even without knowledge of the main series.