1666: Amsterdam

This one is for players who enjoy the friction of a real investigation, the sort who keep notes in a text file and are happy to be wrong for two hours before the pieces snap together. Anyone who needs a smooth, finished third person action game should walk away and check back in a year, because this is Early Access in the honest sense of the phrase. The Steam consensus sits at Mixed, with roughly two thirds of 728 players giving it a thumbs up, and that split stops being confusing about three hours in. The premise is doing something almost nobody else is doing right now. The execution keeps tripping over its own shoelaces. The structure is a loop, and the loop is the entire pitch. Daylight in 17th century Amsterdam is for legwork: knocking on doors, reading rooms, picking up the scraps of testimony and physical evidence that a case gets built from. The deduction layer does not hold your hand with a glowing waypoint. You are expected to carry competing explanations around in your head, notice when two accounts of the same night refuse to line up, and then commit to a conclusion you might regret. Cases give you room to be wrong, and being wrong actually costs you something. When that clicks, it produces the specific pleasure of solving a thing rather than being shown the solution, which is rarer in third person adventure games than it should be. Then the sun goes down and the game changes genre on you. Night is when whatever you dug up during the day comes looking for you, and the notebook gets swapped for confrontation and a set of witchcraft powers. The occult toolkit is the best part of the combat, mostly because the abilities feel like consequences of the investigation rather than a bolted on skill tree, and the horror atmosphere holds: narrow streets, bad light, the persistent sense that the city knows more than you do. The day and night rhythm also gives the whole thing a shape, so even a rough session has a clear beginning, middle and payoff. The fighting is where it falls apart. Combat is the weakest system in the current build, stiff in a way that reads as unfinished rather than deliberate, and encounters repeat their beats often enough that the dread thins out well before a case wraps. Signposting is inconsistent too. Some investigations trust you exactly the right amount, while others leave you circling a district because one interaction was not legible as interactive. There is technical roughness on top of that, the kind of frame pacing and animation seams you tolerate in Early Access and would not accept in a finished release. It is single player only, with full controller support and DualSense features, and it plays noticeably better on a pad than on keyboard and mouse. There is no Metacritic score, which is fair enough. Grading an unfinished build helps nobody. So the buying decision is really a patience decision. If you get genuine value out of watching an ambitious game figure itself out, and you are the sort of person who writes long forum posts about what the night loop could become with another year of tuning, jumping in now is a reasonable use of your time. You will get a solid stretch of detective work that feels unlike anything else on the shelf, plus a combat system you put up with to reach the next case. If you want the version of this that reviews well, it does not exist yet, and nobody can promise you a date for it. Wishlist it, follow the patch notes, and come back when the fighting stops being the part you dread. The idea underneath is strong enough to be worth that wait.

Alex · Scout Team

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