Hogwarts Legacy, the upcoming magical RPG set in the school from the Harry Potter series, may not be coming until next year. But that hasn’t stopped fans from speculating, predicting, and picking apart the game’s official media. And Reddit user General-Discount-305 has discovered a rather nasty secret hidden on the official artwork. If you look in the far right-hand side of this art, you can see, hiding in some kind of shrubbery, is an enormous spider.
It can be a bit hard to see unless you know what you’re looking for, and it even seems to be missing in some versions of this art. If you need a look yourself, for some reason, you can see it most easily on the Xbox page for the game. According to Harry Potter lore, the spider is an Acromantula, a giant spider that has magical properties. While the titular boy wizard originally encountered them in the second book in the series, more details about them were revealed in the supplemental textbook, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Potterheads will probably note that there is some in-universe inaccuracy to the sights on the poster, the Acromantula very much included. According to Harry’s textbook, the Acromantula is not native to Scotland, and they’re only in the Forbidden Forest because Hagrid, Hogwarts’ gamekeeper, brought one to the school as a student himself roughly fifty years before the events of Chamber of Secrets. This Acromantula, called Aragog, would be the father of the Hogwarts colony.
So there’s no reason for there to be one on the Hogwarts campus in the 1800s when the game is supposed to take place. That said, it would not be the only anachronistic sight even in this one piece of art. You can also see the Whomping Willow next to Hogwarts, and that was not planted on the Hogwarts grounds until 1971, specifically to accommodate werewolf student Remus Lupin. Writer D.C. Allen admitted in a tweet that it was a rookie mistake.
