1666: Amsterdam Preview — New Game by One of the Minds Behind Assassin's Creed

The game is being made by Patrice Désilets — one of the creators of Assassin's Creed. After leaving Ubisoft, he began working on the project at THQ Montreal. THQ then went bankrupt, and Ubisoft bought the studio along with the rights to the game. What followed was a years-long dispute between Désilets and the publisher over control of the project, which only ended in 2016, when the rights to 1666: Amsterdam returned to the developer. That backstory alone is already decent promotion. If someone fought for a game for that many years, surely something truly special awaits us?

But then you launch the prologue, and the game greets you with a dead goat (literally), whispering, and jerky, unpleasant controls. Right from the start, in the library location, small rough edges start showing up with the camera, movement, and the logic of the hints. You're not so much solving a puzzle as obediently moving between yellow markers while the game walks you from one required spot to the next. For a prologue meant to "sell the game," that's a fairly effective way to kill interest right from the get-go.

The biggest chunk of the demo is the present-day storyline with a girl named Clio. She comes to the library, talks to a professor, looks for information about her father's letter, walks between sections, shelves, staircases, the table by the fireplace, and all this museum-like set dressing. The scene could have worked on its own if it carried a sense of genuine searching. But the game grabs you by the hand and drags you along far too often. Even where it could have let the player quietly figure things out, it has already circled, highlighted, and practically whispered the answer in your ear ahead of time. If you're more into adventures that grab you not just with their premise but with their execution too, we have 120 best adventure games on PC, PS5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.

And then there's this odd movement: when characters walk side by side, when they link arms, when they simply need to walk from point A to point B — everything looks like the bodies in the scene don't have enough room. It looks clumsy, and downright funny in places. There's a moment where, instead of listening to the dialogue, you find yourself staring at two people awkwardly merged into a single animation, spinning in place. That kind of thing kills immersion instantly.

That said, 1666: Amsterdam does have some solid texture in individual scenes. Not the overall concept, but specific pieces that stick with you. There's a letter that can't be read. There's ancient protected script. There's a conversation about a special object meant to help unlock the text. And there's a strange cube hanging around the heroine's neck, a childhood gift from her father. Granted, she barely connects one thing to the other, which lends the whole scene the right dose of everyday absurdity. Sure, of course, the mysterious cube is just there for no reason...

Then a note turns up, hinting at a sacred instrument and blood from the hand. Clio, without much ceremony, cuts her palm with scissors, activates the thing, and the letter is finally decoded. The moment itself doesn't work because of subtlety or plausibility — it grabs you with its sheer abruptness. Five minutes earlier you were poking around library sections looking for Rembrandt, and now you're feeding your own blood to an ancient artifact. That kind of shift, honestly, appeals to me more than everything that came before it. And if all this ritual business has you craving something genuinely unsettling, we have a TOP-15 psychological horror games guaranteed to break your mind.

Next up is the father's recording, and the game livens up a bit. He talks about 1999, about Amsterdam, about a hotel, someone named Agnes, and about how an ordinary evening very quickly turns... toward a ritual. This is where the prologue finally gets a proper hook. The scene holds together well on contrast. The man walks into the room with fairly obvious expectations, but relics are already laid out inside, mirrors are arranged around the bed, and the whole setting practically screams: an occult ritual is about to begin.

The funniest part is that the guy stays weirdly calm about it for a while. He's told to lay out ancient items, to check the mirrors, and he keeps going along with all of it without a shred of doubt. It comes across as pretty strange.

Then the guy wakes up... as a cat. Not figuratively. Literally a cat, with all these new sensations, with fur, with heightened senses, with an animal urge to run, jump, and sniff the world with a wet nose. Everything around him is swimming: a frozen Agnes, some kind of forest, a call from the other side, a woman named Noa who knows his name and calls him her cat. The game suddenly veers into absurdity, and honestly, that's one of the few things in the prologue that actually sparks any interest.

That said, another problem immediately shows up here. You've technically reached the wildest part of the concept, but you're still barely allowed to actually play any of it. There's no combat in the prologue, no real payoff from your actions. You just walk around, listen, watch cutscenes, hop around as a cat between marked points, and wait for the game to stop talking about how deep its concept is and start proving it through actual gameplay. Craving more progression, choice, and rich gameplay? Then check out TOP with best RPGs for Low-End PCs and laptops.

I'm not at all bothered by the concept itself — a game about witches, the year 1666, mirrors, rituals, and a man from 1999 who gets turned into a cat. That's at least strange — and these days, strangeness has value in itself, since too many games are afraid of looking ridiculous and end up dying of sterility. The problem with 1666: Amsterdam lies elsewhere: it bets on an interesting concept but fails to deliver it through actual gameplay. And if your computer struggles to run new releases like this, check out the best games for Low-End PCs and laptops.

Bad camera work, awkward movement, padded pacing, and a constant feeling of being led down a hallway lined with signposts — and all of that in a demo that's supposed to hook you. We wanted to see a game about witches in medieval Amsterdam, and instead got a long introduction featuring the present day, a library, a diary, and a talking cat. The first half hour does nothing to prove that things get better and more interesting from here.

After finishing the demo, there's no sense that we're looking at the big game its creator fought for over the years. Rather, it feels like I brushed up against a genuinely strange idea that never quite made the leap into a proper game format.