Playing Freedom

Freedom Cry shifts Assassin's Creed's usual perspective onto Adéwalé, a formerly enslaved man, and structures its world to communicate labour, control, violence, and resistance through environment as much as narration. This documentary looks at how that environmental and narrative design represents slavery specifically, and what happens to historical trauma when it gets reshaped into a playable, commercially distributed format. The same historical setting can carry a completely different meaning depending on the design choices made around it, and that's the actual subject here: not whether the game is good, but what its design does to the history it's depicting.

The analysis draws on maps, official artwork, in-game screenshots, and original gameplay recordings, cross-referenced against academic writing on video games and colonialism, environmental storytelling, and cultural heritage representation in games.

A written essay can describe environmental storytelling. It can't actually show you the thing it's describing happening in real time, the way the game's pacing, camera, and spatial design work together to communicate something the dialogue never says outright. A video documentary lets the analysis sit directly next to the footage it's analysing, which matters specifically for a project about how a game's environment does its communicating.

This sits inside a growing body of work on what happens when colonial history and chattel slavery get adapted into mainstream, commercially driven game design. Williams writes on the experience of representing Black history through play. Harrer frames mainstream game design as a kind of neocolonial practice in its own right, regardless of authorial intent. Mukherjee's work on coded colonialism asks who actually gets agency in these narratives versus who remains a backdrop for someone else's story. Balela and Mundy, alongside more applied writing on environmental storytelling, gave me the design vocabulary to actually name what Freedom Cry's spaces are doing, beyond just describing them as "atmospheric."