We have new rumors about Assassin’s Creed Hexe, that may spark interest in its new scenario.
Ubisoft made the official announcement for the title a year ago, with a very generic trailer featuring the Assassin’s symbol made from plant material. While everything in the teaser was deliberately made vague, the title and occult imagery in its branding suggest that the title will be set in the era of witch hunters.
As reported by Insider Gaming, Assassin’s Creed Hexe will definitely have a female protagonist, which some say is the first since Assassin’s Creed China. But, that is only true if you don’t count the games where you got to choose to play either a male or female assassin. So, for example, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla makes you choose between a male or female version of protagonist Eivor Varinsdottir. In the game’s narrative, Eivor is canonically female, but can sometimes take on the appearance of the Isu Odin because of Eivor’s connection to the Norse god.
Insider Gaming also repeats earlier messaging about Assassin’s Creed Hexe’s themes. In their words, it will be ‘the darkest Assassin’s Creed game ever.’
Putting these two details together may strengthen the case that the title will be about witch hunters, and you may in fact be playing an Assassin who is also Wiccan, or is perhaps being hunted as a witch but is practicing a non-Christian culture, that is similarly stigmatized and misidentified as being that of a witch.
Younger gamers may read this and be thinking of 2015 film The VVitch: A New England Folktale. Perhaps some older folks will think of more benign depiction of witches, such as Disney’s 1993 horror comedy Hocus Pocus. But there was a time when media, particularly cinema, had an obsession, not with the witches themselves, but the witch hunters; often cruel, callous men, guilty of crimes comparable to that of the Third Reich, or perhaps as should be better known, Leopold II of Belgium.
That includes films like Witchfinder General, which starred Vincent Price playing perhaps the most evil character he has ever played, or West German grindhouse standard Mark of the Devil, which starred a young Udo Kier. The witch hunters in these movies were depicted as particularly cruel in their search, stigmatization, and torture and killing of suspected witches.
In both these movies, the villainous witch hunters get satisfying endings, but that’s what you expect from exploitation films from 50 years ago. Today, Ubisoft may offer gamers a direct hand in going after witch hunters, using an Assassin’s hand, that may also be a witch’s hand.
