Patrice Désilets, the director of 1666: Amsterdam, almost couldn’t bring the game to fruition. Having worked on the project at THQ Montreal since 2011, Désilets lost the rights to the game when Ubisoft acquired the collapsing studio and promptly let him go, with 1666: Amsterdam doomed to languish in the depths of Ubisoft’s intellectual property vault. It was only in 2016 that Désilets wrestled back the rights to 1666: Amsterdam from Ubisoft – with the game making its way to early access on Steam a decade later.
To characterize the existence of 1666: Amsterdam, then, as anything less than a miracle is perhaps not an understatement. Many creators have lost the rights to their creative works with the legal quagmire surrounding game development, such as Keita Takahashi and Katamari Damacy, and the art collective behind Disco Elysium. Thus 1666: Amsterdam is a creation returned to its rightful, original owner, a hard-won triumph against rich execs and a rare victory for the artist.
It’s clear that 1666: Amsterdam is a labour of love. This care is evident in its compelling depiction of the witch trials in the Netherlands during the 17th century. For one, its setting of 1666 period Amsterdam feels like a suffocating Puritan nightmare, where women are frequently suspected, scorned and hung for being sorceresses; you couldn’t even walk in the streets alone without being condescended towards. One zealot I met as Noa, the powerful sorceress at the heart of 1666: Amsterdam, yelled at her for the audacity to wander around at night without company, treating her with the kind of contempt that is both fearful and derogatory in case she were to cast a hex upon him.
The thing is, Noa is entirely capable of such parlour tricks. You see, the sorceresses in 1666: Amsterdam embody the stereotypical traits that alleged witches were accused of having back in the days of the witch trials, and this is far from metaphorical. As part of a tribe of sorceresses known as the Zaindaris, Noa can harness two forms of energy – referred to the confusingly named LUX and NUX – to cast spells, be it gliding across canals and rivers or more destructive magics like blowing things up. She does this with a large, magical branch (one that she staunchly refuses to refer to as a broomstick), which allows her to wield her spells like a staff. And if spell-casting fails, she can also engage in close combat by smacking foes with her sacred branch. She even has a black cat with her at all times. All these manoeuvres are necessary because of Noa’s role as the Collector of the Zaindaris tribe; she is to exorcise several supernatural beings known as the Originals, who hide in plain sight among the populace.
It’s not all brute strength, however. As part of her hunt for these Originals, she needs to discover their names, locations, as well as a seal that proves that they signed away their soul as humans decades ago. While this means carrying out some light detective work, Noa also has to manage the omnipresent threat of being identified as a sorceress, dressing as a regular civilian and shedding the distinctive garb of the Collector. It’s an interesting twist to sleuthing; women of that era, after all, don’t simply wander into buildings, snoop around in alleyways on their own, or even ask too many questions. Those are suspicious behaviours befitting of a witch, after all. Instead, Noa can get her cat familiar to possess certain weak-willed individuals, hissing and clawing them into submission, with Noa being able to walk alongside these individuals (poor fellows, really) — in other words, blending in with them — to gain access to restricted areas. The feline is also good for opening locked doors, with him slipping into rooms via windows and getting into nooks, as he searches for new ways to get Noa into homes and buildings.
If this seems very reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed’s “blending” ability, it’s because Désilets’ was the creative director behind the series. As such, 1666: Amsterdam is very distinctly a game that has Désilets’ fingerprints all over it, with it taking place across three timelines: 1666, 1999 and the present. As you may have suspected, the Zaindaris tribe has persisted for centuries as a protector of humanity. The story is being experienced through Clio, whose father, Aaron, was the cat familiar that accompanies Noa in 1666. When Clio received a tomb and a letter from her father, she gets to experience the tribulations of Noa and her father in both 1666 and 1999 through an infernal ability she has inherited from them.
The entire premise behind 1666: Amsterdam is fascinating, even if slightly convoluted; it took me a while to understand the difference between LUX and NUX energy, for instance, and the travelling between time periods can get a bit disorienting. Yet this intrigue is also elevated by the distinct thread of empowerment that ties the game together. Witches are, after all, a modern feminist symbol. Once prosecuted for their so-called demonic powers, and set up as scapegoats behind the plague and all manners of diseases, they’re now perceived as feminist resistance, feared for their stark individuality and strength within a deeply patriarchal society. Noa’s very visage as the Collector in her bright, crimson robe makes her an imposing character in particular, her every movement grandiose and purposeful. Whether she’s leaping off buildings or gliding across rivers, she’s never discreet or subdued. Her arms are outstretched majestically, as if unafraid to take up space in a world that condemns women for being too much. Then there are her fellow sorceresses, who are capable of defending themselves against the militia and willing to sacrifice themselves for a greater good. There aren’t many games centered on the women who practice or are accused of witchcraft, and it’s intriguing to see how this treatment towards women — especially those who do not fit into societal norms — in an era parallels the dynamics of patriarchy in our current reality.
Then there’s the roguelike progression, which adds a curious wrinkle to Noa’s abilities. Rather than leveling up in a conventional sense, Noa can discover artefacts and jewellery that grant her new skills and spells. These, however, are presented as hypotheses that Clio must make; narratively, it means that Clio is merely making conjectures about the abilities that Noa possesses to resolve her encounters with the Originals. If Noa loses her battle with the Originals, she loses these abilities, and she gets to choose a new set of abilities that can only be retained if she survives her fights.
But for all the ambition that 1666: Amsterdam displays, it falters in terms of execution — perhaps the central issue around the game presently. Take the roguelike system, which seems more tedious and punishing in practice. The entire process of picking and choosing new abilities just feels unnecessarily drawn out, and I found it a lot more convenient to just reload from an older save. This choice is also compounded by the fact that Noa’s resources, like the potions she consumes during her fight, are not replenished after her losses. Then there’s the cat’s controls, which feels frustratingly clunky since he can’t move around that freely. To leap to one platform, he needs to wait for a button prompt to show up — and sometimes these don’t appear at all.
And for all the resplendence of 1666’s era Amsterdam, the city somehow seems extraordinarily lifeless. That’s not to say that there isn’t anyone in the streets; in fact, Amsterdam here is constantly teeming with people, but these places don’t seem particularly lived in. It’s like living in a facsimile of a bustling city, with this virtual city populated by marionettes that stalk, walk and talk the same way. Even its villains – the Originals that Noa has to vanquish – are largely one-dimensional caricatures, spouting laughably cheesy one-liners like “I AM A GOD!” and “THE FILTHY MASSES DO NOT UNDERSTAND MY GREATNESS!”
What’s even more disappointing is Panache Digital Games’ unabashed use of genAI during the early stages of its development, a decision that seems antithetical to Désilets’ hard-won reclamation of the 1666: Amsterdam IP from Ubisoft, and the game’s implicit themes of empowerment. In a report by Eurogamer, Désilets has admitted to using so many AI-generated assets to the point where they “didn’t even realise it was AI any more because we were used to seeing it”, which Désilets pegs to being a small indie studio with limited resources. If it isn’t common knowledge by now, assets created through genAI are typically trained on the stolen art and written work of creatives, whose consent is usually not sought. Take Cara, a social media platform for artists who do not want their works scraped by bots for AI, but whose site was ransacked by AI scrappers repeatedly against their artists’ wishes.
For now, Panache has announced that they have removed all AI-generated assets from the early access version of the game, and that they will not be using genAI for the rest of the game’s development. But the damage is done, and 1666: Amsterdam’s legacy will be sullied by the use of genAI tools, even if Panache did end up creating an immaculate version of the game over the next few years. Of course, the reality is that more titles will inevitably be made with genAI tools, disclosed or not, in the near future, but here’s another question to ponder: how much of our games are we willing to cede to being created on the unpaid, stolen labour of disempowered artists?
