There have been so many Assassin’s Creed games and so many Assassin’s Creed-inspired games that it’s easy to forget that Assassin’s Creed was once weird. Or weird for a game of this scale, anyway. I remember when Ubisoft revealed it, with a timeless of a trailer showing Altaïr lunging at upstart Templars. And then, that flicker of code on the masonry, that first clue that the setting of the medieval Crusades is a predatory digital façade.
The other thing I remember is the shock of the game’s control system, in which you play as an Animus user “puppeting” a simulation of their ancestor via controller buttons corresponding to the limbs. It seemed both futuristic and shocking, a confusion with Dualshock’s usual symbolism at a time when third-person control conventions were still a bit crude and undecided.
I feel a similar sense of shaky estrangement from the prologue to 1666: Amsterdam, the recently resurrected supernatural fantasy from original Assassin’s Creed director Patrice Désilets. In a way, it’s a retelling – another tale of conspiracies spanning centuries, with the Animus genetic diving machinery replaced by sexy, confusing sorcery.
For 30 minutes, the prologue to 1666: Amsterdam divides you between three characters from different eras, linked by the spilling of bodily fluids. First, you play as a 17th-century Crimson Witch (no, not a “Scarlet Witch” – do you want to get sued?), channeling corpse energy through her staff to light the way to a twisted tree. The tree is full of gnarly and unsavory felines, with titles like The Page and The Knight. You are here to choose one as familiar it seems. Comparing the prologue to the SGF trailerI suspect you’ll spend most of the completed game as the lady in red.
Second, you play as a young woman, Clio, visiting an occult library today. She’s here to get answers from a giggling professor about a strange tome left behind by her father, Aaron. This part of the prologue strongly reminded me of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, with its cheesy puzzle solutions based on references to Rembrandt. Clio eventually deciphers the book by bleeding over it and quickly returns to her father’s body on New Year’s Eve 1999. This appears to be the night of her own conception. So you know, it’s definitely a real hoot and a shout for Clio. No scar at all.
After a luxurious tour of an Amsterdam hotel – an exercise in seductive foreplay, if you put aside all the paintings of demonic old idiots in wigs – Aaron (the third playable character, try to keep up) goes to bed with Clio’s mother, Agnes. Turns out Agnes is into kinky runes and stuff. Aaron might be a little too relaxed about it.
During a dry, mindless fuck, he is magically removed from his own body and into the body of a cat. Playing as Aaron the Cat, you navigate a seedy reimagining of the hotel and somehow find yourself back in the 17th century, jumping into the arms of the Witch in Red. The dialogue doesn’t explain it, but I bet the witch is, in fact, Aaron and Clio’s distant ancestor.
Needless to say, conveying all of this requires a lot of HUD prompts. The integration elements are more complicated because they’re partly scribbled in runes, but even if they were completely simple, this would still be a game where you play as a group of characters pumping into each other, each with slightly different controls. The convoluted instructions are part of the drama; the game seems uncomfortable in its own flesh, creating a crazy conspiracy of its own workings. Again, it reminded me of the original “puppeteer” of Assassin’s Creed and Animus, a framing that AC abandoned as the series became its own success.
This is all doubly fascinating because, as many gamers have pointed out, Ubisoft is currently working on an Assassin’s Creed game about witches, set during the height of the Holy Roman Empire. In a different timeline, perhaps one spawned by deeply misguided reverse engineering, Désilets could have created this game for Ubisoft, adapting ideas from 1666: Amsterdam. He began working on the latter more than 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 therefore set for a confrontation between the giant and the disgruntled old master, as tortuous as any confrontation between rival occult organizations. As a Ubisoft production, Hexe will benefit from a much larger development team. But what can Hexe do to top a game where you fuck your own mother in order to ejaculate your own father into the body of a cat owned by your great-great-grandmother? I’m not sure there’s an Animus issue that encompasses all of this. Read more and try the 1666 Prologue for yourself: Amsterdam via Steam.
