This Assassin's Creed: Valhalla Language Means More Than You Realized

At various points in the celebrated Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, players encounter relics and artifacts containing unreadable text in the forgotten language of the long-gone civilization of the Isu. However, dedicated fans have successfully translated the text, decoding hidden messages on the collector's edition of the game and earning praise from Assassin's Creed: Valhalla's narrative director Darby McDevitt.

The Isu civilization has long played an essential role in Assassin's Creed mythology. According to the backstory, the Isu were an advanced proto-human civilization eliminated about 70,000 years before Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, which is chronologically the first title in the series. Throughout the series, each game's plot has, to some degree, revolved around the possession of artifacts left behind by the Isu as the Templars and the Assassins vie for their control.

While the ancient Isu civilization has been a constant presence in the series, the developers of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla took it further by including full, translatable text and a key to do so. Members of the longtime Assassin's Creed fan page Access the Animus posted a detailed video explaining the process of decoding the script. By completing in-game story arcs and side quests in different locations, players can unlock a set of files in the present-day portion of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla featuring Isu texts' full translations. Fans were then able to use these translations to identify not only characters and symbols but also decipher complex grammar rules.

Access The Animus' video gives a thorough explanation of how fans used to piece the foundations of this fictional language together using real-world linguistic methods. Utilizing in-game translations and hints, such as the language's Indo-European language group basis, fans decoded patterns such as verb tenses, conjugation, and Isu sentence construction.

The video also expresses some sincere appreciation for the developer's efforts in crafting this unique language for fans to decipher. Fans note that the critical in-game translations come from files written by "ahenry," which they took to be a direct reference to Antoine Henry, who works for Ubisoft Singapore. Henry confirmed as much in an ecstatic tweet following the release of Access The Animus' video, which reads, "They did it! This language and the puzzle that comes with it is one of the proudest achievements of my career."

While Access The Animus has a lot to be proud of, it seems that there may be even more to discover. Later in the same thread, Henry answered a few questions for fans regarding pronunciation but stopped himself short, stating that he didn't want to spoil any of the Isu language aspects that have yet to be uncovered.