Assassin's Creed's Glyphs and Templar Ciphers: Real or Fiction?

Assassin's Creed has been hiding glyphs and cipher puzzles in its games since 2009. The series, developed by Ubisoft, frames its puzzles as leftovers from the Isu, a precursor civilization that the games call "Those Who Came Before." Some of these puzzles use real cryptographic techniques. Others are environmental riddles dressed up as ciphers. The 2025 entry, Assassin's Creed Shadows, added a 13-glyph hunt that is pure riddle, not cryptanalysis.

This post separates the real cryptography from the fiction. We cover the Isu and their glyphs, the "Truth" puzzles from Assassin's Creed II, the A Puzzlement quest from AC Shadows, and the Templar connection to actual medieval history. If you want to try identifying a real cipher yourself, the Cipher Identifier is the place to start.

The Isu are the precursor species in Assassin's Creed lore. They predate humanity, they built the Pieces of Eden, and they left behind glyphs and script on their technology and architecture. The Isu script is a fictional writing system. It has not been formally decoded into a full alphabet by the community or by Ubisoft. Unlike, say, the Standard Galactic Alphabet from Commander Keen, which is a clean one-to-one substitution for English, the Isu script does not have a published key.

This matters for anyone who likes to solve fictional alphabets. A fictional alphabet is solvable only if it is a substitution cipher with enough ciphertext to attack. The Isu script appears in fragments, on walls and artifacts, without enough running text for frequency analysis. Ubisoft has never released a full mapping. The glyphs in the games are therefore closer to decorative symbols than to a decodable language. You can compare this with a real substitution script using our Standard Galactic Alphabet translator, which is fully reversible because the key is public.

Assassin's Creed II, released in 2009, introduced "The Truth" puzzles. There are 20 hidden glyph puzzles placed by Subject 16, whose real name is Clay Kaczmarek, on landmarks across the game's map. Solving all 20 unlocks a hidden video showing Adam and Eve escaping the Garden of Eden, which in the AC universe is an Isu facility.

The puzzles are a mix. Some involve genuine code-breaking. You get substitution ciphers where symbols map to letters, and you have to find the mapping by pattern matching. Some involve symbol matching, where you rotate rings or pick the right symbol from a set. Some are pattern recognition, where you identify the right painting or photograph based on a clue. The Assassin's Creed series on Wikipedia covers the franchise overview, and the Truth puzzles are documented in detail on fan wikis.

The substitution elements are real cryptography in the mechanical sense. A symbol-to-letter substitution with a fixed key is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, the same family as the Caesar and Atbash ciphers. The difference is that AC II gives you enough context (images, historical hints) to narrow the search space, which a real cipher analyst rarely gets. The puzzles are designed to be solved by a single player in an afternoon, not to resist cryptanalysis.

Assassin's Creed Shadows, released in March 2025, added the "A Puzzlement" quest in Title Update 1.1.6 on November 25, 2025. The quest centers on a mysterious Isu door with 13 glyphs etched on it, hidden in the Genbu Highlands of the Yamashiro region. Players must find all 13 glyphs scattered across the map using the Riddle Scroll trinket, which highlights nearby glyph locations. Each glyph is located by solving a haiku-style riddle. Completing the quest unlocks the "Descent" follow-up quest.

The 13 riddles are: Riddle of the Vault, Riddle of the Arch, Riddle of the River, Riddle of the Waterfall, Riddle of the Tide, Riddle of the Sky, Riddle of the Stone, Riddle of the Ship, Riddle of the Sakura, Riddle of the Watchtower, Riddle of the Mists, Riddle of the Lost, and Riddle of the Silence. Guides on IGN and GameRant walk through each location.

These are not ciphers. They are environmental riddles. Each haiku points to a specific location on the map, and finding the glyph is a matter of interpreting the poetic clue and navigating to the spot. There is no substitution, no transposition, no key to recover. The glyphs themselves are collectible symbols, not ciphertext. If you enjoy this kind of puzzle, it is closer to a treasure hunt than to cryptanalysis. The Neoseeker AC Shadows guide also covers the quest step by step.

The Templar Knights are a recurring faction in Assassin's Creed. The games reframe them as a shadow organization that seeks control through Isu artifacts, operating across centuries under various names. The real history is different but no less specific.

The Knights Templar were a medieval Catholic military order founded in 1119, after the First Crusade, to protect pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem. They were officially endorsed by the Catholic Church at the Council of Troyes in 1129, and their rule was written by Bernard of Clairvaux. The order grew wealthy through banking and landholding across Europe and the Holy Land. On Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered the mass arrest of Templars in France, on charges of heresy, idolatry, and financial corruption. Pope Clement V formally dissolved the order in 1312 with the papal bull Vox in Excelso. The last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314.

The Knights Templar article on Wikipedia covers this in detail, citing primary sources including the Chinon Parchment, a 1308 papal document that was rediscovered in the Vatican Secret Archives in 2001 by historian Barbara Frale. The Chinon Parchment shows that Clement V secretly absolved the Templars of heresy, which complicates the popular narrative that the order was simply guilty.

Assassin's Creed borrows the dates and the names but inverts the morality. In the games, the Templars survive their dissolution and continue as a hidden power. The real order did not survive as an institution after 1312, though myths about their continuation fuel conspiracy theories to this day. The games are honest about being fiction. They do not claim historical accuracy for the conspiracy layer.

The answer depends on which puzzle you mean. The substitution elements in AC II's Truth puzzles are real monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, mechanically. They use fixed symbol-to-letter mappings, and they are breakable with the same techniques as any Caesar or Atbash cipher. You could feed the ciphertext into a substitution solver and recover the plaintext if you had enough text.

The Isu script itself is not a real cipher. There is no published key, and there is not enough running text to attack it. It is a decorative conlang script, not a cryptographic system. The AC Shadows glyph hunt is a riddle hunt, not a cipher. The Templar ciphers referenced in various AC games are usually plot devices, not solvable puzzles.

For comparison, a genuinely solvable fictional cipher is one where the developer publishes or implies a full key. The Standard Galactic Alphabet in Commander Keen is a clean example. So is the Fez alphabet. So is the Bill Cipher symbol set from Gravity Falls, which you can experiment with using tools in our catalog. The AC series has not committed to that level of decodability for its Isu script, which means the community cannot "solve" it in the way it solved Fez or the Standard Galactic Alphabet.

If you are a player who enjoys codebreaking, the AC II Truth puzzles are the high point of the series for you. They are the closest the franchise has come to real cryptographic content. The later games lean more toward environmental riddles and collectible hunts, which are fun but do not scratch the cryptanalysis itch.

If you are building a puzzle inspired by Assassin's Creed, the cleanest approach is to separate your layers. Use a real substitution cipher for the text-based content, with a published or discoverable key. Use environmental riddles for the navigation and discovery content. Do not try to make a decorative script double as a cipher unless you provide enough ciphertext and a path to the key. Players will forgive a riddle. They will not forgive a cipher that is impossible to verify.

A good model is the two-layer approach. Hide a substitution-encrypted message in the environment, and let the key be discovered through exploration. That gives players both the cryptanalysis satisfaction and the discovery satisfaction. Our Cipher Identifier can help players figure out which cipher they are looking at once they have the ciphertext.