Assassin's Creed: Shadows - Claws of Awaji

The stealth is the best this series has built since the Ezio years, and Naoe is the entire reason. She crawls prone through tall grass, swings up a wall with a grappling hook mid-pursuit, and puts out lanterns so a room goes properly dark instead of cinematically dark. Light is a real system here, not set dressing: patrolling guards carry their own lamps, torches throw readable pools you can plan around, and the season wheel keeps rewriting your route, because the summer foliage you hid in gets stripped bare by winter and snow shows your tracks. Slipping through a castle courtyard without a single alarm bell feels engineered rather than permitted, and when it goes wrong the kusarigama makes open combat a fight worth having instead of a reload. Yasuke is the other half of the pitch and the more divisive half. He cannot hide, and the game never pretends otherwise. He kicks doors off their frames, shrugs off arrows, and works through katana, naginata, kanabo and teppo with a weight to the animations that Naoe's kit deliberately lacks. Some missions lock you to one of them, which is the smart call, but if you came for shinobi fantasy you will spend most of your hours as her and treat him as the answer to fortresses you have already failed twice. The open world scaffolding around both is the modern Ubisoft template with the worst edge sanded off: no icon vomit on the map, scouts sent out to narrow down leads, an objective board where you chase clues about the Shinbakufu targets you are hunting, and a hideout you rebuild and populate with allies you recruit. As an RPG, the writing lands more often than the structure does. Naoe's revenge arc out of Iga has a specific, quiet fury to it, and Yasuke's story about an outsider being handed a place in someone else's war has genuinely good scenes in it, usually the small ones between fights. The recruited allies get their own threads, and the era work (Azuchi-Momoyama Japan mid-collapse, Nobunaga's shadow over everything) is researched with obvious care. Where it thins out is choice. Dialogue options mostly select a flavor of the same beat, and the existence of a canon mode that plays the choices for you tells you exactly how much narrative weight those forks were carrying. If you are here because you re-read Disco Elysium's dialogue for fun, calibrate down. This is a good story you watch rather than one you argue with. The padding is the real complaint. Region after region resolves into the same rhythm of camps cleared, castles infiltrated and a named target killed, and by the fourth province you can predict the layout of a fortress before the scouts report back. Progression gates mastery points behind knowledge ranks, which is a polite way of saying go do a pile of shrines and kata if you want the good skills, and that is precisely the padded XP grind I would rather the studio had cut. Yasuke's traversal is deliberately clumsy and occasionally just annoying. Build variety holds up to roughly hour forty and then flattens, because both characters converge on one obviously strong loadout and the trees stop offering real decisions. The Awaji chapter is the version of this game with the fat trimmed. A tighter island, a rival shinobi threat, a new close-quarters weapon for Naoe, and an assumption that you already know how to read light and patrol timing, so it stops explaining itself and starts setting traps. It is roughly a long evening or two of content and it is the strongest sustained stretch in the package, which says something slightly awkward about the sixty hours in front of it. Steam settling at mostly positive reads about right to me: the stealth systems are excellent, the combat has real teeth on the harder difficulties, and the world is beautiful in a way that survives screenshots. It also asks you to do a lot of admin between the good parts. Go in planning to follow the main threads and the ally stories, ignore most of the map, and it is one of the better stealth games of its generation. Try to clear every icon and it will wear you down by winter.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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