Assassin's Creed fans have decoded its fictional Isu language

From the wall of cryptic messages that greets you at the end of the first game to more recent mysteries, ciphers and hidden codes have been a part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise since the very start. But as Eurogamer points out, its dedicated fans may have just solved one of its most complex riddles yet.

Access the Animus, I never doubted you.

The Isu language has been cracked!https://t.co/PiHj3FBA40

— Darby McDevitt (@DarbyMcDevitt) January 13, 2021

In a video that’s almost 30-minutes long, Access the Animus, a community dedicated to the lore of Assassin’s Creed, detail how they went about deciphering Isu. If you haven’t followed the series in recent years or tuned out of its modern-day storyline sometime around Assassin’s Creed III, Isu is the language of the franchise’s infamous precursor race. Behind the Assassins and Templars, the Isu are seemingly behind every major twist in Assassin’s Creed story, including the creation of the Piece of Eden.

Fragments of the Isu language have appeared in the games for over a decade. However, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the latest entry in the series, includes several translated documents players can read in the game’s modern-day segments. These allowed fans to start deciphering the language. What they found is a complex language that has its set of rules on verb tenses, grammar and conjugation, and it has more in common with Latin and Ancient Greek than any modern language. The video goes into almost exhaustive detail, and shows what the community learned from those documents can be applied to other sections of Isu text found throughout the game. Darby McDevitt, Valhalla’s narrative director, praised the team for what must have been a monumental effort.

And there’s more on the way. The above video is only the first of several clips the community plans to upload in the near future on subject. They’ll have another clip detailing the language’s numerical structure, as well as one on the Canterbury file, a long cursive text within the game that hadn’t been translated yet. You can follow along by subscribing to the Access the Animus YouTube channel.