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APRIL FOOLS!
Ubisoft has finally answered the question nobody asked: What if you had to work a 9-to-5 job and still be a deadly assassin? Enter Assassin’s Creed: Corporate Ladder, the newest—and weirdest—entry in the long-running franchise. It trades in hidden blades and rooftop leaps for ergonomic chairs, passive-aggressive emails, and stapler-based subterfuge. And honestly? It’s kind of brilliant.
The Setup: Death by a Thousand Spreadsheets
You play as Elliot Flint, a mild-mannered office drone with a tucked-in polo shirt and a soul slowly crushed by fluorescent lighting. He works at NuMirth Industries, a soulless megacorp that manufactures synthetic meat substitute byproduct lubricant—or SmeatLube™—used in everything from vending machine sliders to aerospace-grade engine coolant. It’s greasy, it’s pink, and it’s slowly poisoning anyone who breathes or touches it.
That includes the innocent factory workers who are mysteriously dying from “acute synthetic meat inhalation.” Naturally, upper management is fully aware—and fully complicit.
Elliot stumbles upon this horrifying truth when he is accidentally forwarded an internal memo to titled “RE: How to Hide the Smeat Death Toll,” and what follows is a cubicle-to-boardroom journey of deadly vengeance.
A Killer Office Culture
Unlike previous entries in the series, Corporate Ladder doesn’t rely on parkour or swordplay. Here, stealth means hiding behind rolling whiteboards, eavesdropping on bathroom stall conversations, and leaving cryptic sticky notes.
Elliot’s signature weapon? A pencil. Not a fancy hidden blade disguised as a pen. Just a #2 Dixon Ticonderoga. The game leans hard into this absurdity, offering a full skill tree around pencil and office supply-based takedowns:
- The Final Draft – a quick, silent stab to the neck.
- Eraser Smother – asphyxiation via white board eraser down the throat.
- The Printer Jam – when Elliot tosses a pencil across the room to trigger a printer jam and lure the target in.
- Stapler Silencer – used to staple shut enemy mouths to keep them quiet.
Other take downs include: Graphite Guillotine, Lead Poisoning, No. 2 Submission, The Margin Eraser, Point Taken, The Underliner, Sticky Note of Death, CTRL+ALT+DEAD, and Hard Point Press.
You can even upgrade your pencils to different models, from mechanical ones with infinite lead to novelty jumbo pencils that do “blunt force trauma damage.”
Climbing the Corporate Tower
The game’s progression system is as tongue-in-cheek as its premise. Each level represents a higher floor of NuMirth’s towering office skyscraper. You start in the mailroom, where you have to eliminate passive-aggressive middle managers who abuse interns and drink $9 lattes while blaming everyone else for “synergy problems.”
By the time you reach the C-suite, things get weirder. One executive has a panic room filled with framed photos of motivational cats. Another rides a Segway indoors and wears a Bluetooth headset 24/7. The final boss is Thaddeus Grint, the sociopathic CEO with a man bun and a penchant for TED Talks titled “Disruption Through Indifference.”
Grint’s office is located in a secret rooftop biodome, where he hosts microdosing retreats and experiments with turning SmeatLube into a “sustainable mind fuel for tech bros.” Your final showdown involves ziplining across a koi pond, dodging weaponized drones shaped like flying staplers, and finally jamming a pencil through his VR headset.
A Satirical Leap of Faith
What makes Assassin’s Creed: Corporate Ladder so fresh isn’t just its absurd setting—it’s how self-aware it is. Every NPC mutters actual office jargon like “circle back,” “let’s table that,” and “I’ll ping you.” There’s even a side quest called “Q4 Deliverables” where you have to infiltrate a team-building ropes course to eliminate a micromanaging scrum master.
The game pokes fun at both corporate culture and the Assassin’s Creed formula. You still synchronize by standing on the edge of cubicle partitions and leaping into beanbag chairs below. You still gather intel—but now it’s via snooping in Slack channels and decoding whiteboard scribbles.
Final Thoughts
Assassin’s Creed: Corporate Ladder might seem like a parody, but it’s also a breath of fresh, recycled office air. It’s ridiculous, it’s sharp, and it dares to ask: What if the real Templars were just middle managers who schedule meetings that could have been emails?
Whether you’re a longtime fan of the series or just someone who’s ever fantasized about quitting your job in a blaze of glory, Corporate Ladder might just be your favorite entry yet.
Pencils up, assassins. The revolution starts in the break room.