Encountering the Sacred Past: Religious Experience and Historical Empathy in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

Historical empathy is a key concept in history and social studies education. It involves understanding how people in the past thought, acted, and experienced the world through engagement with historical context, perspective taking, and affective connections to historical actors. While these competencies are often developed through written sources and historical narratives, visual and interactive media may offer additional opportunities for fostering historical empathy. This article examines whether the historical video game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla may provide affordances for historical empathy for players. Set in Viking Age England and Norway, the game’s representations of Norse and Christian religion form the focus of the analysis. The study combines systematic gameplay analysis with qualitative thematic analysis. The empirical material was analyzed for historical empathy and compared with historical sources. The findings suggest that the game may provide opportunities to support historical empathy by helping players understand how people in the past interpreted and navigated the world through religious and cultural frameworks. However, historical simplifications and gameplay-oriented adaptations may limit this potential unless accompanied by teacher scaffolding and critical reflection. Thus, while Assassins Creed Valhalla may be engaging and pedagogically valuable, it should be approached critically as an entertainment product rather than a straightforward representation of the past.