Mechanics

Three things in Mirage are never properly explained, and all three are the sort of thing you find out too late. One is the combat rule that decides whether you survive being spotted. The other two are achievements: one you can pick up whenever you like, and one that can quietly slip out of reach on a completion run.

Parrying is now the whole of combat

The change Mirage makes to its fights is that enemies no longer queue up to take turns. A group comes at you together, which means a straight trade of blows loses, and the only reliable way to hold a crowd is to read incoming attacks. There are two steps to that and the first is not timing at all, it is knowing which attacks are even parryable.

The colour tells you. A yellow glow means you can parry it. A red glow means you cannot, and your only option is to move. There is a second tell for anyone who would rather watch the weapons than the outline: a swing that comes from the enemy's left side can be countered, and anything arriving from their right cannot be parried or blocked. Parry lands on L1 on PlayStation, LB on Xbox and Q on PC, and the window is generous enough that late is usually better than early. Wait until the blade is close enough to be alarming.

Two payoffs are worth knowing. Parrying an armoured or shielded enemy stuns them for long enough to kill them outright or take a large bite out of their health, which is otherwise a slow job. And parrying is not only for melee: time it against a thrown knife or an arrow and you deflect it, which is how you close distance on the archers rather than eating shots the whole way. If you own the deluxe edition, the Dagger of Time slows time down and removes the timing problem altogether. Full detail is on the parry and counter page.

Gifted Escapist: twenty pieces of scenery

This one asks you to collapse twenty scaffolding structures around Baghdad, and the reason people miss it is that the scaffolds look like set dressing. Look for a wooden shelf leaning on a wall, weighted with sandbags and trailing a rope, and walking up to one gives you a Collapse prompt and a short finisher animation.

The trick that turns it from a chore into ten minutes is that a collapsed scaffold comes back when you fast travel, so you do not need twenty different ones. Pick a couple near travel points, break them, travel away, travel back, repeat. Do watch the street below first: dropping one on civilians repeatedly is a good way to desync. Locations near convenient viewpoints are listed on the Gifted Escapist page.

You Snooze, You Lose: the one that can get away

The description makes this sound trivial, and it nearly is, except for a condition the game never states. Knocking a guard out with a Blowdart and robbing him is not enough. The sleeping target has to be carrying something: either an orange key icon or a Mysterious Shard. Sleeping civilians do not count at all.

That is what makes it missable. There are only around ten Mysterious Shards in the entire game, and guards carrying keys mostly appear during missions built around stealing that key. The State Official contract is the reliable setup, since it has an optional objective to lift a key and free some prisoners, but the guard in question is heavily armoured and a tier 1 Blowdart will not put him under, so upgrade first. The main mission Follow the Fiery Trail offers a second chance at a guard captain. Turning on Guaranteed Pickpocket in the settings skips the minigame and makes the grab quicker. See the You Snooze, You Lose page for the full setup.

The shards tie back into the wardrobe, since five of them open a locked door for one of the better outfits, and both achievements sit alongside the collectibles in our items guide. Where each of them fits into the campaign is covered by the walkthrough guide. For everything else, start at our Assassin's Creed Mirage guide.