There have been so many Assassin’s Creed games, and so many games inspired by Assassin’s Creed, that it’s easy to forget that Assassin’s Creed used to be Weird. Or Weird for a game of its scale, anyway. I remember when Ubisoft revealed it, with an all-timer of an trailer showing Altaïr pouncing on some upstart Templars. And then, that flicker of code over masonry, that first hint that the medieval Crusades setting is a predatory digital facade.
The other thing I remember is the shock of the game’s control scheme, in which you play an Animus user “puppeteering” a simulation of his ancestor via controller buttons corresponding to limbs. It felt both futuristic and jarring, a confounding of regular Dualshock symbolism at a time when third-person control conventions were still a little raw and undecided.
I get a similar feeling of wonky estrangement from the prologue for 1666: Amsterdam, the recently resurrected supernatural fantasy from original Assassin’s Creed director Patrice Désilets. In some ways, it’s a retelling – another story of conspiracies stretching across centuries, with the Animus gene-diving machinery swapped for some sexy, bewildering witchcraft.
Over the course of 30 minutes, the 1666: Amsterdam prologue warps you between three people in different eras, linked by the spillage of bodily fluids. Firstly, you play a 17th century crimson sorceress (no, not a ‘scarlet witch’ – do you want to get sued?), channelling corpse energy through her staff to light the path to a twisted tree. The tree is full of gnarled and unsavoury felines, with titles like The Page and The Knight. You’re here to choose one as your familiar, it seems. Comparing the prologue to the SGF trailer, I’m guessing you’ll spend most of the finished game as the lady in red.
Secondly, you play a young woman, Clio, visiting an occult library in the present day. She’s here to get answers from a chortling professor about a strange tome left behind by her dad, Aaron. This part of the prologue reminded me heavily of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, with its slapping together of cheesy puzzle solutions from drive-by references to Rembrandt. Clio eventually deciphers the book by bleeding on it, and promptly flashes back into the body of her father on New Year’s Eve 1999. This appears to be the night of her own conception. So you know, that’s a real hoot and a holler for Clio. Not scarring at all.
Following a luxurious tour of an Amsterdam hotel – an exercise in seductively dragged-out foreplay, if you discount all the paintings of demonic old duffers in wigs – Aaron (the third playable character, do try to keep up) goes to bed with Clio’s mum, Agnes. It turns out that Agnes is into kinky runes and stuff. Aaron is perhaps a little too relaxed about this.
In the course of some woozy dry humping, he is magically fucked out of his own body and into the body of a cat. Playing Aaron the cat, you navigate a grotty reimagining of the hotel and somehow find yourself in the 17th century, leaping into the arms of the sorceress in red. The dialogue doesn’t spell it out, but I’m betting that the sorceress is, in fact, Aaron and Clio’s distant ancestor.
Conveying all this requires a lot of HUD prompting, needless to say. The on-boarding elements are chewier for being partly scrawled in runes, but even if they were utterly plain, this would still be a game in which you play a bunch of characters pumping themselves into each other’s bodies, each with slightly different controls. The convoluted instructions are part of the drama; the game seems uneasy in its own flesh, making a janky conspiracy of its own workings. Again, it reminded me of the original Assassin’s Creed and Animus “puppeteering”, a framing AC has discarded as the series has grown into its own success.
All of this is doubly fascinating because, as many players have pointed out, Ubisoft are currently making an Assassin’s Creed game about witches, set at the height of the Holy Roman Empire. In a different timeline, possibly a timeline spawned by deeply ill-advised hag-boning, Désilets might have made that game for Ubisoft, adapting ideas from 1666: Amsterdam. He began working on the latter over a decade ago at THQ Montreal, shortly before Ubisoft acquired the studio, fired Désilets, and almost took the project away from him.
The stage is thus set for a showdown between the behemoth and the disgruntled old master, as tortuous as any clash between rival occult organisations. As an Ubisoft production, Hexe will benefit from a much larger development team. But what can Hexe possibly do to outshoot a game in which you shag your own mother in order to ejaculate your own father into the body of a cat owned by your great-great-etc grandmother? I’m not sure there’s an Animus glitch that encompasses all of that. Read more and try the 1666: Amsterdam prologue yourself via Steam.