1666: Amsterdam is buggy and confusing at times, yet genuinely ambitious

1666: Amsterdam, the new stealth game from Patrice Désilets' studio Panache Digital Games, is now in early access, and it's one of the strangest games I've played in a while. It's also one I suspect I like considerably more than most people will. And that gap — between what the game wants to be and what it currently manages — says a lot about both its promise and its problems.

When Confusion Becomes Surrealism

There's an old Sam Raimi interview in the New Yorker that I think about often. As a kid, Raimi made Super-8 films with his friends so crude that audiences couldn't even recognize them as bad films — they were just baffled. For viewers to know they were watching something poorly made, Raimi first had to become a better film-maker.

That thought kept coming back to me here. Early on, I found myself wandering through a 1990s boutique hotel almost naked, chasing a vision of an outdoor space. My path was blocked by motionless, low-resolution clusters of near-identical people standing in doorways. Was this a dream? Possession? Some break in time and space? My best guess now: the game needed to funnel me toward a specific puzzle, so it used crowds to seal doors — but budget and team-size limits meant low-res, duplicated, unanimated characters. The result is accidental surrealism layered on top of the intentional kind. It's not bad, exactly. It's over-stretched.

The Assassin's Creed Problem

Made by the team behind Ancestors, and led by a designer best known for Assassin's Creed, the game initially invites all the wrong comparisons. You play a present-day character glimpsing past lives across three eras — the present, the 1990s, and 1666 — and in that last one you stalk targets through a hooded figure's eyes. It sounds familiar. It isn't.

Noa, your 1666 protagonist, is a witch first and an assassin second. She can't wall-run or leap across rooftops. Instead, she moves meekly through Amsterdam, listens to crowd chatter, identifies a target — say, a prosecutor notorious for punishing witches — gathers evidence, and triggers a boss fight. The pacing is patient in a way Creed rarely is.

Combat, though, is the weakest link. Noa is fragile, her dash trivializes spacing, and because failure is so punishing, I defaulted to boring stick-swings and retreats. It works; it's just not fun.

Where the Magic Lives

The stuff between fights is where I fell for it. Rather than a sprawling open city, the game offers one Amsterdam neighborhood at a time, modeling the interiors of most buildings — practically an immersive sim, delivered with gorgeous Dutch Golden Age lighting. One mission had me infiltrating a heavily guarded mansion: sending my witch's cat in through windows and ledges, possessing frightened guards to open doors from within, eventually walking Noa inside herself. It's complex, occasionally silly — grown men brawling with a cat — and genuinely clever spatial puzzle-solving that speaks to the era's atmosphere of surveillance and suspicion.

The Verdict So Far

The early access build runs roughly 15 hours; I'm about six in, having just beaten the first boss. Bugs persist — crashes, duplicated citizens, a cat falling through geometry more than once. Some argue the game isn't ready for early access, and that's fair. But with a small team and an audacious design, revenue may be what keeps development alive. That's its own kind of pact.

Source: the original publisher