Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is the latest form of media to make me question whether I was even present for the majority of my Ancient History degree.

Ditching a surprising amount of the Assassin’s Creed baggage to the point I sometimes find myself thinking “this actually plays a bit like one of those Assassin’s Creed games”, Odyssey takes you on a wild romp through Ancient Greece, set in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, or at least I think it’s this and I’m too scared to look it up in case I’m wrong and I have to hand my degree back in.

It features running, jumping, assassinating through stealth or in my case attempting to assassinate through stealth and then having to blunder your way through half of the Athenian/Spartan army to run away.

It also apparently includes surprise emotional trauma for me. Spoilers for a minor side quest called “Making Friends” after this paragraph. If you’re not sure if you’ve done this one or not, it’s the one with the little girl in the clay pit. If that doesn’t ring a bell, you haven’t done it yet.

Making Friends is a simple quest you pick up from a small island you find yourself in part way through the story.

You find a young girl digging around in a clay pit and she wants some pearls from a lagoon and shiny stones from an abandoned mine so that she can make some jewellery for her friends.

There’s immediately something off about it that’s difficult to put your finger on. I rolled my eyes and decided that her friends were either:

1. Dead bodies – Assassin’s Creed:Odyssey was trying to trick me into dealing with a child psychopath
2. Athenian soldiers/Spartan soldiers/Mercenaries/Pirates – Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey was trying to trick me into funding some kind of nefarious military plot against my will

The quest is pretty standard. There’s obviously a shark in the lagoon that isn’t keen on you but is even less keen on the spear you stab it with. The abandoned mine is full of snakes that also don’t like spears much. You pick up the pearls, you pick up the shiny stones and you head to where the girl is going to meet you.

You head over to a little hut in the forest ready for the big reveal and her friends are…

…Made of clay.

Making Friends. It’s a pun.

The girl was digging up clay so she could make friends. A nice quirky misunderstanding, a little girl with an imagination, that’s all fine, until you talk to her and it’s clear that she’s a little more confused than that.

It turns out her mother was a pirate who returned home from one of her expeditions dying from having too much of her blood outside of her body and her last words to her daughter were that “she should go and make friends”.

The little girl then gets upset and worried that she’s done the wrong thing and that her mother would be angry with her and…

…then the dialogue options pop up. You have options. Poorly explained options. You can:

1. Tell her to not worry about it and that you can have friends made of clay if you want!
2. Tell her this has to stop and this isn’t healthy.

Being the type of person who generally says “oh I’m sure it will be fine – don’t worry about it” to just about everything, I immediately selected option 1. Girl goes away happy, she gives you some of the gems, but…your character mutters to herself something along the lines of “I’m sorry I couldn’t break your heart, even if it would have been better for you in the long run” which rather robbed me of any feeling of accomplishment here.

I felt compelled to check back in with the little girl after I’d done a few more things and found her as a sobbing wreck because it had rained and made her friends disappear.

Maybe it’s because I have a daughter who I never want to see disappointed and crying or emotionally distressed, maybe this was a genuinely well written and out-of-the-ordinary quest or maybe I’m just tired and a bit emotional myself, but this was all very upsetting.

A quick check on Reddit revealed a whole bunch of other players equally distressed about this quest and outlining the results of the different responses. Clearly the best response was to tell her to stop being friends with lumpen clay shapes and that would lead her to go and find actual real-life friends, but I couldn’t go back and change that now – the damage was done.

Someone in the thread mentioned reloading a previous save.

Now, I’m normally a big fan of living with your choices in these things, but I realised reloading the save that I had started with that evening would give me a second chance at this at the cost of a couple of hours of progress.

I didn’t even hesitate.

Part of me knows that I already made that choice and that on some level that damage is already done, but in the canonical version of my world, I can now say that I helped that little girl out by severing her unhealthy connection to clay friends.

Apparently, the emotional well-being of a block of code is more important to me than my precious spare time that I have chosen to spend playing Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.

Thanks, Ubisoft?