Back to the feudal: Assassin's Creed Shadows is the most beautiful game I've ever seen
I have played many Assassin's Creed games over the years, but I've rarely loved them. Ubisoft's historical fiction is perennially almost-great. A lot of players would say it reached its peak in the late 2000s, with the trio of renaissance Italy games beginning with Assassin's Creed 2, and their charismatic hero, Ezio Auditore. Since then, the series has become bloated, offering hundreds of hours of repetitive open-world exploration and assassination in ancient Greece, Egypt and even Viking Britain. Odyssey (the Greek one) was the last I played seriously; I found the setting exquisite, the gameplay somewhat irritating and the scale completely overwhelming.
The Assassin's Creed games are extraordinary works of historical fiction, fastidiously recreating lost periods of history and letting you walk around in them. They're the closest thing to time travel. I play them for the virtual tourism, and find myself vaguely disappointed that 80% of what you do in these painstakingly realised worlds boils down to parkouring around killing people.
Assassin's Creed Shadows was released this week after a couple of last-minute delays, and I was surprised to find that it makes running around and killing people more fun and interesting than it has been in many years. This is partly down to the setting: 16th-century Japan, the era of warlord Oda Nobunaga, of samurai and shinobi and endless complex, fascinating conflicts. Japan was changing fast, having reluctantly opened up contact with the rest of the world. Shadows' two protagonists are at the centre of all this change and tumult: Yasuke, a slave turned samurai under Nobunaga, and Naoe, a peasant shinobi building her own resistance movement as her home is torn apart.
Two protagonists, two playstyles: Naoe is fast and quiet, and makes playing stealthily a viable and enjoyable way to experience the game for the first time in ages. Yasuke is strong and skilled, and can cut through enemies when a situation suddenly explodes into conflict. This adds variety and choice to the gameplay. Both characters are genuinely interesting, and I care about their stories. Yasuke appeared right at the beginning of the game and then was absent for about 12 hours; when he showed up again, I was beginning to get bored by Naoe's quest for revenge, and having someone new with whom to explore this extraordinary setting kept me interested.
And truly: what a setting. I've been playing Shadows on a PS5 Pro and it is the most beautiful video game I have ever seen. You know how you just get used to how gorgeous modern games look after a few hours, and forget to admire the scenery? That hasn't happened to me yet after 15 hours with Shadows. The light, the architecture, the natural beauty of Japan's mountains, the way you can see the roofs of shrines poking out from the treetops, the delicate beauty of Kyoto's winding streets … It helps that the seasons change every few hours, letting you quite literally see your surroundings in a new light. I cannot begin to imagine the hours of human effort that have gone into creating this environment. The detail is exceptional.
One example of this is in the multilingual script. You can play the whole thing with English voice-acting, or you can play in period-appropriate Japanese and Portuguese with subtitles, which the games calls 'immersive mode'. With the provisos that I am by no means an expert in Japanese history and that my own Japanese is extremely rusty, playing like this was astonishingly good. Every conversation feels like a series of delicate and dangerous manoeuvres; much is left unsaid, implied by tone and careful choice of words. You can choose Naoe or Yasuke's responses at times, and saying the wrong thing sometimes results in an infinitesimal change in your interlocutor's expression – just enough to let you know that you've screwed up. It is, for a game about a ninja on an assassination revenge quest, surprisingly subtle.
If you watched FX's exceptional TV adaptation of Shōgun, you'll probably be thinking that a lot of what I describe sounds familiar. And though Shadows isn't as tense and brilliant as that show, it approaches its setting and story with equal care and respect. Assassin's Creed's approach to historical authenticity has always been playful – remember doing quests for Socrates in Odyssey, and getting Leonardo da Vinci to make gadgets for you in renaissance Italy? – but here there's a more serious tone. Many of Shadows' characters have real historical analogues. There's no silliness in the side quests, no japes or banter in the dialogue. It feels … realistic, for want of a better word. Perhaps naturalistic is more apt. There's nothing realistic about a samurai-shinobi pair running around killing all of Kansai's powerful daimyo between them, but the world they inhabit sticks close to the historical reality. It's believable.
There are still some things about Assassin's Creed that belong in the bin. The Animus is one of the all-time great video game framing devices. All Assassin's Creed games take place inside a machine that lets you relive the memories of your ancestors, but with all the useful info and overlays of a video game. But that's all it needs to be: a framing device. We can surely get rid of the modern-day subplots about the Animus and who's controlling it. Don't interrupt my fun adventures in historical Japan by making me hunt down glitches and anomalies in the machine. And over the series' 18-year history, it has acquired altogether too many systems. It's fiddly and unfocused – there are too many menus for collecting and upgrading equipment, too many different skill trees for your characters' abilities.
Shadows may be sometimes confusing and overwhelming, but for the first time in a while, I was willing to forgive all that if I got to see more of Japan. If, like me, you've skipped the last few Assassin's Creed games, you might be pleased to find that this is as streamlined and enjoyable as the series has been for a long time.
If you do not have the 30 to 50 hours required for Assassin's Creed Shadows right now, here's a much more manageable treat: Expelled! Made by one of my favourite studios, Inkle, it is the story of a working-class scholarship girl trying to avoid getting kicked out of a posh English boarding school in the 1920s. It's full of intelligent and funny digs at the British class system and its poisonous social norms. As you get to know more about the teachers and students at this school on each playthrough, you soon learn that if you want to beat 'em, you kind of have to join 'em.
Available on: iPhone/iPad, Switch, PC, Mac
Estimated playtime: 4 hours
Our writer Rick Lane put together an obituary of sorts for Monolith Games, the developer that Warner Bros closed last month after 30 years.
The Game Developers Conference is in San Francisco this week. A billboard in the city's Union Square takes aim at corporate mismanagement of game studios: 'Has a Harrison fired you lately?' it reads, evidently referring to ex-Sony/Microsoft/EA/Google Stadia executive Phil Harrison.
FuturLab has announced Powerwash Simulator 2, a sequel to one of the most surprising gaming hits of the decade. This time you can hose down gunk in split-screen as well as online co-op. I look forward to cleaning virtual things alongside my eldest son on the couch while my partner complains that we do not have similar enthusiasm for cleaning the actual things in our house.
Actor Seth Rogen shared an amusing anecdote about the making of Superbad last week: apparently Sony was so appalled by Jonah Hill's character that they forbid him from touching a PlayStation.
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'It's been a challenge': Assassin's Creed Shadows and the quest to bring feudal Japan to life
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A timely question today from reader Rick:
'During the pandemic, I played a lot of peaceful/passive games, largely avoiding games with conflict or too much stressful action. But I love a good open world and decided to start on Assassin's Creed Origins. When I got to the menu, I noticed an educational/discovery option: combat-free walkthroughs of the historical places and people that were heavily researched and included in the game. It was amazing. Does Shadows have this mode? And can you recommend any other games that employ these passive, but immersive educational modes?'
Assassin's Creed's Discovery Tour mode is brilliant – as you said in your email, Valhalla and Odyssey also gave players the option to walk around in their worlds and learn cool facts about the time period depicted. Ubisoft made a fuss about this feature back when it was first created, offering it to schools as an educational tool, but not a lot of people talk about it. I love this mode – I had a big interest in ancient Egypt when I was a kid, and I would have eaten this up. There's no Discovery Tour mode in Shadows at launch, but I've asked Ubisoft one is forthcoming. I'll report back when I get a response.
In the meantime, here are a couple of other games with similar pacifist modes: in GTA Online, is not educational but you can turn on 'passive mode' to simply enjoy and explore Los Santos without getting grief from other players; and in strategy game Humankind you can turn off war and just build your civilisation. Does anyone know of any more?
If you've got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
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