In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Animus Anomalies are one of its most alluring secrets. Unlike most activities in the open world, they aren’t pinned on your map until you come close to one, and because there’s only ten of them, locating them all isn’t easy. It’s well worth it, though. Animus Anomalies are key to understanding Assassin’s Creed’s modern-day meta narrative and useful for helping unpack its surprisingly dense ending. Each time you complete one, you’ll be rewarded with a short snippet of a video that won’t make much sense until you complete them all. At that point, you’ll be treated to a longer cutscene that helps fill in some crucial details about Valhalla’s story.
Getting to that point will take some work, though. Each Animus Anomaly is a platformer challenge where you swap out of Eivor’s body and become Layla Hassan (the protagonist in the modern day timeline). Here you’ll have to navigate some basic obstacle courses to reach a memory fragment at the end, unlocking the video.
Below you’ll find the location of every Animus Anomaly along with some tips for completing them. Don’t worry, they’re really not that challenging and are easy to solve with a little trial and error. And if you’d rather just skip them and see the secret video right away, we have that too.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Animus Anomaly locations
These screenshots will show you where each Animus Anomaly is located in England and Norway. If you’ve arrived in the specific area and are having trouble finding one, get to high ground and look for glitching blue environmental features, like rocks, trees, or buildings. As you get close, a new Mysteries icon should appear on your compass, which will lead you to the object you have to interact with to trigger the anomaly.
The Animus Anomaly is circled in white on each map.
Tips for completing Animus Anomalies
Though some of these obstacle courses might look daunting, none of them are really that challenging. Helpful tooltips will also appear in-game to explain different concepts as you need them, but it’s all rather self explanatory. Here’s some basic things to keep in mind:
- The goal of each Animus Anomaly is to reach the end. You can tell where that is by the glowing pillar of light.
- If you fall or touch certain objects, you’ll be desynchronized and will respawn at a checkpoint a few feet away.
- Grey blocks that shimmer cannot be climbed on until they’ve been hit with a beam of light. Look for nearby pedestals which emit these beams so you can point them at these blocks and open up new sections of each course.
- Red blocks will desynchronize you if you touch them, so move carefully around them.
- You’ll know you’re close to completing the Animus Anomaly when two disembodied voices begin talking. Typically that means you’re a few seconds away from grabbing the memory fragment.
- If you’re really stuck, YouTuber Gaming with Abyss has a full walkthrough of each Animus Anomaly you can follow.
Spoilers: Animus Anomalies secret cutscene
Completing the Animus Anomalies will unlock a secret cutscene with some fascinating insights into the ending of Valhalla, but because they also don’t award any experience points or loot you might just want to skip them. If that’s the case, the video below will show you the full cutscene. Keep in mind that it probably won’t make much sense unless you’ve beaten the main story.