Honestly, I wasn’t particularly excited to play Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Part of this had to do with the year-long racist smear campaign directed against it by deeply cynical people that is simply hard to put out of mind. The larger factor, however, was general series fatigue: It’s Assassin’s Creed, and I’ve played more than a dozen of those at this point. I have now devoted more than 15 hours to the newest entry, and I’m pleased to report that it is the most fun I have had with one of these games in years, in part because it just gets nature right.
Before I start complimenting AC Shadows, it’s worth noting that it takes its sweet time to get off the ground – former bossman Stephen Totillo noted as much in his review of the game. The first hours are highly tutorialized and serve to set up the stories of both Naoe and Yasuke, the latter of which takes far longer than you’d expect to actually kick into effect. I have taken my time with the story and he has not shown up again. However, once you are free to explore and get a feel for Sengoku-era Japan, the sheer care and attention to detail is startling.
That immense care has been taken to accurately depict any era is not shocking for this series: At its best Assassin’s Creed is a big-budget fantastical history simulator. What’s more, depictions of Japanese culture from western developers, Ghost of Tsushima excluded, have historically not been thorough. Assassin’s Creed Shadows excels here. Though vaguely fantastical, I have never had a game that nails Japan, at least in a rural setting, quite like it. From Bunraku puppet shows on the street to Biwa players to the countless beautiful shrines, there is a density and care here that is rarely seen in games. The setting and story of warring states Japan is so immediately conducive to an Assassin’s Creed game that it is shocking that they did not attempt it before, although I am glad they took their time to do it.
But aside from the overall worldbuilding, Assassin’s Creed Shadows gets something right about Japan that other games simply don’t: It’s hilly as fuck, and the brush can be thick. In Shadows nature is, for lack of a better word, dense. This is not just a problem that games set in Japan have; it’s a problem that open world games set in nature have on the whole. Forests do not feel like forests, they feel like video game forests.
“Video games are normally either ‘this is lightly wooded, you can go here’ or ‘This is a dense forest, this is impassable,’” fellow Aftermath writer Luke Plunkett summed up aptly in chat. “Shadows is one of the only games I have ever played where it says ‘this is a dense forest, you can try and get through here, but not on your horse, and you're gonna have a bad time.’”
In addition to just getting hills and shrubs right, Shadows does weather right, particularly bad weather. Outside of driving simulators I have never seen an open world game so accurately nail the feeling of a sunny day getting tremendously shitty in a matter of minutes: wind that sounds like it’s going to knock you sideways, blizzards that come on suddenly, and rain storms that make you want to stay indoors. On top of this, Shadows has a seasonal weather system akin to my favorite Forza game, Forza Horizon 4. These shifts in the weather have meaningful consequences, as I was quick to find out when I tried to infiltrate a castle and found that the moat had frozen. Add on beautifully simulated wildlife that you do not need to hunt or kill, as Zack Zwizen pointed out, and the natural world starts to sing.
As much as I respect Ghost of Tsushima, at no point when I played it did the world ever feel like Japan to me. The elevation was incorrect, and the rendering was so cartoonishly saturated and alien that I may as well have been playing a game set in Narnia. I think there is validity and even beauty to creating something impressionistic like that, and this is not an impulse that Shadows fully shies away from. But what Shadows is doing with environmental design is more interesting to me, and more complicated than sheer fidelity. There is a power and a beauty to just making a forest feel like a forest and a hill feel like a hill.
