As all the gaming business rearranges its calendar to keep away from Rockstar’s impending juggernaut, one other long-gestating title has quietly emerged from the shadows – 1666: Amsterdam.
Hitting Steam Early Entry in August this 12 months after 13 years of growth hell, this story of kittens and covens is the brainchild of Murderer’s Creed 1 & 2 and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time director Patrice Désilets.
Revealed throughout 2026’s Summer time Video games Fest, this story of sorcery and witchcraft instantly turned heads. As a hooded wiccan soared throughout thatched rooftops and ducked and weaved her approach between soldier-ridden canals, crimson curses and speaking cats teased an thrilling, thematically unique-looking journey. But regardless of its refreshing spin on open-world traversal, this time-bending story took its first steps into existence all the way in which again in 2011.
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“It’s been a protracted journey,” displays Désilets with a heat however weary smile, sitting reverse me in a brightly-lit cardboard workplace, erected within the enterprise space at Gamescom. Choosing up the controller to proudly showcase his gothic journey, he takes one of many sport’s twin protagonists for a covert stroll down a packed Amsterdam canal road, earlier than shaking off her civilian disguise and raining hex-induced havoc on the screaming populace.
As soon as championed as THQ’s Murderer’s Creed beater, the inspiration for 1666 first took maintain on a 2011 vacation to the Dutch capital. “Strolling round, seeing the homes in Amsterdam. It’s actually a degree design metropolis,” remembers Désilets, ”I may image an Murderer’s Creed there…there is a facade, and all of the thriller. Then I handed a constructing inscribed with ‘Anno 1666.’ and instantly I believed, ‘What if I do a sport concerning the Satan set in Amsterdam?'”
The Satan’s within the particulars
Initially envisioned as a cinematic Devil simulator, 1666: Amsterdam was meant to be the extra gothic-feeling religious successor to Désilets’ 2010 smash hit sport, Murderer’s Creed: Brotherhood.
Because of his earlier pedigree, writer THQ was in, and so he spent the subsequent two years crafting what we’ll affectionately name ‘The Satan’s Creed’. But like many offers made involving the satan, it quickly appeared that Désilets Lucifer-staring epic was stricken with a thematically becoming curse. “I began engaged on it for 2 years, then THQ went bankrupt.” Désilets remembers.
With THQ then all of a sudden snapped up by his previous employers, Ubisoft, Désilets discovered himself briefly again on the Murderer’s Creed writer, who virtually instantly let him go – leaving poor previous Lucifer trapped in growth hell. Fiercely combating his former employers for the rights again, Désilets ultimately regained custody of his demonic child in 2016. “…we obtained all the pieces again…the 3D, all of the idea artwork, and a few animation,” Désilets grins. But within the years that had handed, one thing had modified for Désilets.
Regardless of having grafted to reacquire his IP, as time handed, Désilets not discovered himself enthusiastic about writing a sport starring the satan’s apprentice. The explanation? He was postpone by a sure hit 2016 TV present. “Lucifer, the TV sequence, got here out, and in the meantime, I am like, ‘Is it actually the subject material I wish to assault?” shrugged Désilets. Whereas Désilets had fallen out of affection with the satan, he nonetheless discovered himself drawn to the thought of an evil-infested Seventeenth-century Amsterdam. “What if there was a witch hunt occurring in Amsterdam in 1666?” Désilets posited, as a brand new story unfolded earlier than his eyes, “The one factor that I actually stored was this concept of additionally doing 1999 [a dual time period alongside 1666], enjoying off two sides of the identical coin: reflection and duality. That is after I pitched it to my workforce in January 2020, and [I] rewrote virtually all the pieces.”
Processing phobias by way of polygons
Because of being compelled into distant work through the pandemic, retooling 1666 took the workforce at Panache six lengthy years. Whereas the preliminary Devil Sim was a Désilets-led venture by way of and thru, together with his latest studio having beforehand made the 2011 survival sport Ancestors, he’d grown to belief his workforce at Panache, letting their concepts assist remould his 2011 unique prototype in sudden methods. “It’s humorous, as a result of it’s actually a workforce sport, but in some methods, if we return to my unique PowerPoint, it is loopy how related it’s.”
But for all its violence, hexes and historical past, there’s a familiarly agile, gravity-defying protagonist on the centre of Panache’s newest. “… I really feel like I am all the time doing the identical sport … about traversal…” laughs Désilets, “the cat is my strategy to play with verticality [here]… Even in Ancestors, the place you had been an ape in a clan, it was nonetheless this sheer pleasure of going round a 3D world. As soon as I analysed myself: ‘Why is that this all the time in my fucking video games?’ “As a result of I’ve obtained vertigo! In actual life, I am unable to climb – so possibly that’s why [you climb in my games]. Do not ask me to climb something. It is a joke in my household.”
Whereas hovering throughout canals as an agile Wiccan – or darting throughout rooftops as a black cat – supplies the vertical thrills that Désilets bodily cannot get pleasure from in actual life, 1666 departs radically from the standard Murderer’s Creed method in a single shocking approach. “Every time you fail, there is a reshuffle of your talents. You have to proceed your investigation with a unique set – that’s the place the roguelite factor seems,” explains Désilets. “You would possibly fail as a fighter and are available again leaning in the direction of witchcraft, so you must assume in a different way. You undergo the challenges the way in which you need – it is your sport, man. If you wish to spend six hours in a row being the cat, I do not care.”
Swapping polish for collaboration
“You are not imagined to do [Early Access] with a story sport,” shrugs Désilets, “However we’re supplying you with roughly between 10 to fifteen hours’ price of narrative-driven, open-world-ish content material… [and] our purpose is to have 1.0 by the tip of subsequent 12 months, with console releases on the identical time.”
For Désilets, the previous approach of delivery a sport was finished out of necessity, not selection, with the Murderer’s Creed veteran all the time wishing that he had extra participant suggestions and extra time to refine his artwork.
“There was a time in sport growth when the sport was completed… There was nothing you could possibly do — no patches. That point drove me loopy.” Says Désilets . “Now… give me suggestions…after which I can tweak. That is what sport making is all about: having a dialogue. Sure, I could make a extremely badass character like Altaïr, however should you take the pad and make him flip round in circles, the badass character is gone since you’re the one ending the sport. It is a co-creation.”
Narrative-driven video games often rely closely on cinematic polish to drag gamers in, making 1666’s rough-around-the-edges Early Entry launch a peculiar sight. But in an business affected by ballooning budgets and sweeping studio closures, launching a single-player journey this manner won’t simply be an anomaly- however a canny survival technique.
“I do my video games with my workforce a bit in a bubble,” says Désilets after I ask him concerning the precarious present state of the business. “I am not all the time in these conferences. I am not completely sealed off from what is going on on, however you stroll round, there’s an vitality right here…that jogs my memory of the previous instances… and plenty of high quality new video games. Perhaps we are able to entice new players into what individuals favored in 2007 after they first performed Murderer’s Creed. It is obtained that vibe, proper?”
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