Ubisoft has taken advantage of the hype and interest around Assassin’s Creed Shadows, mere hours before the official announcement.
As shared on the Assassin’s Creed subreddit by user The_Owl_Bard, the official Assassin’s Creed Twitter account shared a series of numbers on its profile description. You may no longer see the numbers on the page by the time you are reading this, but we have the numbers below:
“66 85 39 17 62 39 75 98 15 98 59 36 35 91
56 74 62 39 75 48 39 86 69 59 98 15 75 63 24 45”
As you may imagine, reddit went to work trying to figure out what these numbers mean. If you were paying attention to Ubisoft in social media, they actually told us about these puzzles in advance.
Ubisoft sent out a media alert email referring to an ‘Hourglass puzzle’ which Ubisoft would be running until today. The fans and press didn’t really get a lot of days to talk about this, so this promotion actually went a bit under the radar. Some fans believe they figured out the cipher, which fits 81 Japanese language characters in a grid of 9×9. They also found a website called assassinscreed.com/hourglass, which redirects to Ubisoft’s homepage for now.
BastianBa shared a solution, which apparently came from Discord user reilart. Their posts says this:
“ Twitter Bio 66 85 39 17 62 39 75 98 15 98 59 36 35 91 56 74 62 39 75 48 39 86 69 59 98 15 75 63 24 45
Solution: エックスジクデシヲルシヲ ミツケ – Find the death at the X-axis ワイジクデモクテキヲシルデアロウ – You will also know the purpose at the Y-axis.
Twitter Header 38 38 38 38 37 35 34 33 30 30 30 30 29 28 27 26 25 23 17 18 13 10 9 9 8 8 10 11 11 13 13 13 15 17 19 19 21 24 24 23 27 21 20 20 19 18 18 18 17 15 13 13 13 11 9 7 6 4 3 2 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 4 6 7 9 10 12 12 11 10 11 11 12 12 11 18 15 16 22 26 28 30 31 31 31 31 30 29 30 34 37 38
19 18 17 15 15 15 15 14 13 12 11 10 8 4 2 2 2 1 2 3 3 3 4 6 8 9 10 11 14 16 19 21 22 21 23 25 26 30 32 33 35 34 31 30 29 28 26 25 21 22 21 19 16 15 14 13 13 14 14 14 15 16 17 18 22 24 23 27 28 29 31 31 31 32 33 39 39 34 36 37 38 39 39 37 39 38 38 37 36 34 33 30 27 25 23 21 21 22 21”
Redditor Reil_ then pointed out that the rest of the code spells out a set of coordinates, which provides a silhouette of the game’s map. If the evidence is correct, then Assassin’s Creed Shadows may be set in Kansai.
If you watch a lot of anime or know a bit about Japanese pop culture, you may know that the Japanese find the Kansai dialect funny, a seemingly provincial accent, similar to how Americans see Southern accents from states like Texas and Arizona. But part of this is because Kansai is the older center of Japan. Kyoto, the old capital, is found in Kansai.
It all simply lines up with what has allegedly been leaked about the game so far. Oda Nobunaga died in Kyoto, and this game’s setting seems to involve that and other events in its vicinity.
Ubisoft may be set to reveal all of this in a matter of hours, but fans will still enjoy reading about how the fandom figured out all these clues Ubisoft left them, much like players had to do figuring out the glyphs in the Assassin’s Creed games.
