The question of whether the Animus still belongs in the Assassin’s Creed series comes up with the release of each new game, but Assassin’s Creed Odyssey makes me even more sure that Ubisoft should take a simple, but obvious, step: Remove the Animus from future games completely and pretend it never existed.

People play Assassin’s Creed games to travel through time and kill a bunch of people; the framing device that explains how and why characters in our own time are themselves taking that journey has never felt so archaic and vestigial.

I don’t want to relitigate the past of the series or guess about the future, but the lore of the franchise itself is a mess, as you’d expect from any pop culture property that stretches across 20 games and 11 years. The easiest way to clean it all up would be to simply cut the line that holds all the games together, and that line is the Animus.