The Circle You Solve

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla shrinks southern England into an open world you can cross on horseback in an afternoon, and somewhere on a fog-damp hilltop in its fictional shire of Hamtunscire, it drops you in front of a circle of standing stones. It isn’t dressed up with a new name or moved somewhere convenient — it sits where Salisbury Plain sits, doing what Stonehenge has always done to visitors: making them stop and look for a pattern.

The game turns that instinct into a mechanic. Each monolith in the circle carries a glowing sigil, and the “Standing Stones” Mystery only resolves once you’ve read them in the right order, Eivor circling the ring like a tourist working out an audio-guide route. Solve it and you get a skill point; get it wrong and the stones stay silent, exactly as unhelpful as the real ones have been to archaeologists for centuries.

There’s an accidental honesty in that framing. Eivor is a ninth-century Viking, arriving at a monument that was already twenty-five hundred years old when the first Norse ship beached in Britain — older to her than she is to us. The game can’t explain what the stones meant any more than we can; it just lets you feel the same pull toward the circle that seems to have worked on everyone who has ever found it, real or rendered.

Eight years earlier, the same monument had a considerably sillier job. The Nintendo 3DS version of Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games — a different game from its Wii namesake, with an exclusive Story Mode of its own — has Bowser and Dr. Eggman smothering London in a rainbow “Phantasmal Fog”, and when the heroes go looking for the source, the trail leads out of the city to Stonehenge. Magikoopa is already standing in the circle, using the site’s energy to break the seal on the urn the fog is pouring out of. In a bonus episode, Bowser Jr. drops in by Bullet Bill, mistakes the stones for London, and has to be corrected by a Shy Guy.

Two studios, eight years apart, reached for the same shorthand: if your plot needs power nobody can account for, put it at Stonehenge. One made you decode the circle for a skill point; the other used it to uncork a fog machine. Neither could tell you what the stones are for — which, four and a half thousand years in, still puts them level with everyone else who has stood there.