Unveiling Shadows: Deciphering the Mysteries of Assassin's Creed's Latest Tease

‘Assassin’s Creed Red’ spawns ‘Shadows’ as Ubisoft begins the hype for a new series of Assassin’s Creed games. Clues to the identity of the next instalment of the company’s long-running, blockbuster franchise now appear almost everywhere you look. Ubisoft has dispatched its online squads of fans on a strange and wonderful puzzling spree as they scour the internet looking for hidden messages, cryptic clues and mysterious statements. A gamble from a company that tried – and failed – to jump-start a new series with last year’s Valhalla? A shrewd plan to hype a new series of games based on a turbulent century in France’s history, using modern gaming techniques to learn about the long and traumatic history between France and the Ottoman and Islamic worlds? Readers of this magazine will know immediately which of these explanations is correct. While Ubisoft’s series has featured stories in early modern Britain before, the fact that most key Assassin’s Creed timelines appear to centre on a secret war between assassins and the Templars remains a deep mystery. On 14 February, Ubisoft released A Crack in Creation (AcTC), a long-form commercial featuring the techno-fantasy conceit of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, in which a technological invention called the Animus allows modern humans to explore ancestral memories during a long-ago war between Knights Templar and an order of Would-Be-Counter-Assassins. Also in AcTC, modern hackers discover under a Virgin Mary fresco, housed in the Louvre Museum, the hidden locations of the lost treasure of US gold stolen from a 19th-century frigate. The stolen gold is part of the entire history of the Assassin’s metaworld and humanist philosophy of history that, in the narratives of AcTC, led to secular societies in the modern West. But first thing’s first: deep inside AcTC is a snippet of French song, which when played backwards infuses the eye of a thorny ornamental bush in Notre-Dame cathedral, Paris, with a powerful glowing blue light, as though the bush had been bathed in a ray of light from a stained glass window.

The Hourglass Enigma and the Shinobi Clue

The most prominent feature in the video was a huge hourglass with red sand in it, and at the bottom of this hourglass lay a mysterious code ‘S89N-029S’. The eagle-eyed fans would have noticed that these characters on the corner of the hourglass bear a similarity to the English alphabet, as the series of numbers and letters roughly spelled out ‘Shinobis’ (which means Ninjas in Japanese). And thus began the feverish speculation that Assassin’s Creed Shadows might, after all, contain ninja lore and secrets.

Connected Through Codes: The Binary Puzzle

Further investigation of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ promotional materials revealed other puzzles, leading the community to crack them. One – which was posted to Ubisoft’s official site for the game – was a string of 24 two-digit numbers, and another (parts of it hidden cleverly in the body of a promotional email) was another reiteration of the numbers 11, 21 and 33. Put together, the two binary codes revealed the number ‘1579’. At first glance, that might seem random, and a number you would expect for a new Ubisoft game. However, in light of recent discoveries, it sparked some interesting theories in the community. One of the most likely explanations is simple and follows directly from the other clues we’ve uncovered: Yasuke, an African samurai who was brought to Japan in 1579, could be featured in the game or might be the backdrop for the game.

Unraveling the Katakana Key

There are other, even more obvious, challenges from Ubisoft. The Assassin’s Creed website features a turning number puzzle of Japanese Katakana characters, the translation of which becomes: Time present, shattered fragments, and the hourglass provide a key to permanence, you’d best hurry. And: One by one life forms, time’s flow has stopped – permanence. Possible themes of time’s impermanence (in the first message) or preservation and the ages (I like this ask more about time) are clear. An element of gameplay or narrative that relies on or concerns itself with preservation and time – some part of the game that enables the player to enact preservation of their character and the world state, perhaps chosen fragments of data, or maybe even keeping some game machine that is a culture ‘bottled’ in stasis?

Fans' Relentless Pursuit for Clues

Indeed, response has been exceptional. The community has interacted vigorously, theorising, discovering and sharing leads between players and fans alike. One of the most conspicuously unexplained aspects of Play-Altair is the ‘desynchronised’ page coded as ‘assassinscreed.com/shinobis’, which currently just reads ‘No …’ With the official cinematic trailer due for release on 7 May, the fans’ excitement will reach fever pitch, and speculate hungrily whether their theories and deciphered clues match those of Ubisoft.

What's Next for Assassin’s Creed Shadows?

With the first cinematic trailer for ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ still to be unveiled, all these elements have been pieced together like puzzle pieces to what will hopefully be the next chapter of the Assassin’s Creed story.

CONNECT: A Deeper Dive

Connect, you see, has always been the connective tissue linking the Assassin’s Creed Shadows puzzle together. Connect is you all – the fans who might not know each other but, as you searched, so did you. Connect is the literal connections that forged between clues. Connect is our Assassin’s Creed community, coming together for the first time. Connect is every fan, from every corner of the Earth and every language, coming together for a shared moment to unwrap the gift that is our franchise through new eyes. Connect isn’t really a game; it’s life. And the Assassin’s Creed series wouldn’t exist without you.

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