The official announcement of 1666: Amsterdam at this year’s Summer Game Fest was the culmination of years of complicated history. Patrice Désilets, who was a creative lead on the first and second Assassin’s Creed games, originally conceived of this project during his time at THQ Montreal, but it’s been caught in a legal limbo since 2013.
After finally regaining the rights, development resumed at Panache Digital Games, known for Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, with it launching in Early Access last week after several years of development from their relatively small team.
It’s an admittedly ambitious project, trying to deliver a AAA level experience with a story that spans several time periods separated by hundreds of years. The beginning introduces you to the three protagonists: Clio, who lives in the present day, her father Aaron, who we see in 1999, and Noa, a Collector of the Zaindaris coven in the year 1666. Clio’s story is the framing story, showing her going through Aaron’s documents describing his strange relationship with Noa that transcends time itself.
Through a strange ritual performed by Clio’s mother in 1999, Aaron’s consciousness is sent back in time to 1666 where he inhabits the feline familiar of Noa, helping her on her quest to deal with Originals, people who made pacts for power and became corrupted by it.
Investigation Over Combat
Admittedly, it’s a lot going on, but there’s a boldness to it that I appreciate. You can definitely see echoes of Assassin’s Creed, with multiple timelines and secret societies of power hungry individuals, but the setting and witchy focus set it apart. While Clio and Aaron’s timelines don’t have quite as much going on, they provide backstory and setup to make the main focus, Noa’s story, richer and more well-rounded.
As a Collector, she only has access to her powers during a full moon, and she uses that day to investigate the Original assigned to her by the Zaindaris, sneaking around to find their seal and discover their true name before being able to confront them to strip them of their powers, and their lives.
This setup allows for a more interesting gameplay premise than I was anticipating. A lot of the game is spent trying to gather information, talking to people or rifling through offices, to give yourself all the tools to confront your foe. You have access to your witch powers, but doing them in public will alert the authorities, so you need to use them wisely. Much like Hitman, you also need to be careful entering restricted areas, but you can control Aaron’s cat form to help you sneak through places that humans wouldn’t be able to reach.
Additionally, he can also possess people who are afraid of cats by hissing at them and clawing their faces, adding another layer of options to your arsenal.
There’s a lot to love with this structure, but in the state this Early Access release is in, you might have trouble getting to the good parts. Right off the bat, there are pretty huge technical issues with this game. While I don’t have the most beefy gaming PC, I haven’t had trouble running recent releases like Mortal Shell II or Star Wars: Zero Company, but 1666: Amsterdam had several performance issues. Even dropping the game down to low graphics setting, I was seeing substantial frame rate drops, notably any time I went onto a city street full of people. The world of Amsterdam is lovingly recreated, but it was hard for me to appreciate the detail given all the stuttering I was experiencing.
The AI Controversy Still Looms
One pretty big disappointing element of 1666: Amsterdam came out when they released a prologue demo earlier this summer. Despite not disclosing it on their Steam page, they later admitted that they used generative AI art assets in the demo, but they promised they would be removed by the time the game was released. This statement was further confused with a later interview where Désilets said they were using so much AI art in the game that things slipped past them because they had forgotten what was AI and what wasn’t.
It’s hard to say whether they actually removed all the AI like they promised, but based on what I played, I would say that some of the voice performances sound a bit like AI text-to-speech, which put a damper on the delivery of a lot of narrative. Obviously, different people have different thoughts on the use of gen AI in the games space, and this will bother some people more than others. Frankly, I hope they stick to their promise and wish they never used generative AI in the first place.
Even aside from the technical issues, it seems like there are a lot of design problems that will still need to be worked out throughout the year they plan to be in Early Access. The investigation portion of the game felt the strongest to me, but there was plenty of friction that got in the way of my fun there. Once an investigation begins, you’re not given any direction for where to start, forcing you to explore in order to even figure out a single clue.
The portion of the city you have access to isn’t overly large, so I was initially excited by the openness of it, but I found myself hoping for a little more guidance. It felt like I was stumbling on information rather than actually working for it, making it feel unearned and disappointing. Even when I did find clues, they sometimes weren’t really enough to helpfully point me in the right direction, often confusing me more.
Strong Ideas Hampered by Frustrating Design
Navigating these spaces isn’t as exciting as it can be either. The level design of interior spaces isn’t super compelling, often becoming confusing to get around due to the sameness of many rooms. The idea of getting around in cat form is neat, but I was having a lot of issues lining myself up to jump from place to place like you’re supposed to. When you look at a surface you can leap to, a button prompt comes up, but there was a bug causing it to not appear when it should have, making me waste tons of time trying to jump to surfaces I couldn’t.
Most of the time, the trick with the cat gameplay is you just find a window, climb to the other side of a door, and unlock it to let Noa through, but I got stuck in one place for a long time because I saw an open window that looked like I could get to, but I couldn’t actually reach. I ended up giving up and found a much easier way to get to the other side of the door, which was a pretty frustrating experience overall that could have been easily remedied by making sure the environment didn’t have any false positives for that type of access. Or maybe I was supposed to get up there, but technical issues were preventing me from jumping properly. Based on my time with the game, either seem plausible.
Combat could also use another pass. It’s currently very melee-focused, with Noa using the same three-hit broom combo over and over again. You do have access to some witch abilities, but for the most part I didn’t run into any that really changed the way I fought. The most useful one was a skill that destroyed items in the environment, which when timed well could also take out enemies, but for the most part it was just swinging your broom over and over.
When a fight starts after you get spotted, there’s a zoom-in on the enemy that gives you information about the threat they provide. It also surrounds them with various words like “surrender” or “blaggard” in order to emphasize how that enemy feels towards you, but it ends up feeling out of place. I also had trouble figuring out how exactly I was supposed to get out of combat situations, as enemies just kept coming wave after wave until I got overwhelmed and arrested.
It’s very possible that I didn’t see all the combat options, because there’s a roguelike element to the game that could be interesting if developed further. Each time you take a contract, you’ll choose between three artifacts that give you modifiers or abilities, which reset each cycle. As you explore, you’ll find more of these along the way, theoretically allowing for a power curve to emerge. I’m always interested when developers find ways to incorporate roguelike elements into more mainstream games, like Deathloop or Saros, so hopefully they figure out a way to make this an impactful system, because at the moment it didn’t really seem to do much for me.
Creative Presentation Amid Uneven Polish
Graphics issues aside, there were some neat presentation flourishes that elevated the game from your standard AAA fare. My favorite was the way they handled the voiceover narration that Aaron and Noa deliver as you explore. Instead of just working off of an invisible trigger like most games, you actually see the words they are going to speak floating in the air in your path, and they break around you as they start reading them aloud. There’s also some neat editing, with lots of jump cuts and flash frames to make you feel off-kilter as you dive into the strange world they’re presenting.
But the nice presentation also comes with other polish issues. Some parts of the game just feel woefully underbaked, with weird shortcuts that hamper the feeling. In Clio’s opening, there’s a part where she’s talking to a professor at a library, and when he joins you to walk beside you, his character model snaps right to yours, glued to your side at a fixed distance as you move. If you walk the optimal path, it looks fine, but any time you take a turn, it looks extremely awkward, and ends up looking hilarious if you spin in place. I also came across several collision issues in the game where I would get stuck on objects that I shouldn’t have, making exploration occasionally irritating.
At a certain point in the game, you flash back to Aaron’s timeline for an investigative scene in a hotel. He leaves his room to try to find a statue, navigating through the halls and using a cat to help unlock doors. But the scene is made stranger by the fact that he’s in his underwear the whole time, and no one is commenting on it. On top of that, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” is playing as you do it, which absolutely does not feel like it fits. There’s not really much you do here aside from get a tutorial about possessing people, so I can’t for the life of me figure out why they decided to put the song in there, which must have cost them a pretty penny.
This sequence encapsulated the experience of 1666: Amsterdam for me. It’s clear they are trying to make something bold and interesting, but don’t seem to fully know what stylistic choices to make to get there. There’s definitely something here. The core idea of the game is great, even if it might have one too many time periods that it’s juggling, but it’s going to take a lot of technical and design polish to get it to reach its full potential.
Looking at their Steam page, they’ve got a roadmap of content planned out, with new missions being released over the next year, but I think they need to focus on their core design and technical issues before working on any new content.
Early Access code provided by publisher. 1666: Amsterdam is currently available on Steam and the Epic Games Store.