1666 Amsterdam was one of the more intriguing games to come out of Summer Games Fest. Then again, I always gravitate towards the antithesis to the norm anyway, so there was never a world where this wasn’t on my radar. Promise me a demo that night, and I probably will download it and not get to, but I will constantly think about what it would be like trying it out. Thankfully, point one for 1666 Amsterdam, the pull was too strong. Developer Panche Digital Games was speaking my language, and so here we are.
Funny enough, for a game with 1666 in the title, the demo has a decided lack of that particular year in it. We start in 1665 with Noa, who is a witch but also not. You start traversing the woods in a more normal, Puritan look before a swap to the more possessed and frightful. She is also the collector, something the game constantly reminds you she was born as, a concept that I am still not clear on, but I sense that that is the point.
In all the gameplay of the gameplay present, the game comes across very similarly to Life is Strange, or maybe VTM: Swansong, if we are looking for a horror equivalent. There is definitely a feeling of AA in almost all aspects of design, and everything you play through is a set piece with some form of interactivity. To be clear, this isn’t a bad thing; this is a demo for a game about to enter early access. I would be more shocked if there wasn’t a lack of polish. The thing here is that there is a juxtaposition to what they made the focus of trailers that might not match the tone in your head, but I digress.
Noa gets some magic abilities, which are mostly holding a button to charge and then hitting another button to trigger an effect. In the demo, it is only lighting torches and braziers, so I’m unsure how often this ability pops up and how varied we see it. I can live with it, though it is a tad boring, but the big issue is that it is far too long a charge for the payoff. This would be an easy, but I think valuable, tweak, even if some sort of upgrade tree is intended for abilities like this.
The whole long walk you take as Noa is to reach a tree where you get to pick out the eternal symbol of the witch, a black cat, as part of this big, ceremony-like event. Again, there really isn’t anything deep here in the demo, but you are given the choice of a few cats with different details. I picked the alchemist because that sounded like fun, but the guardian and dreamer were interesting too. I am interested to see how that plays into the full game, honestly. Not only that, but I am hopeful this will be a captivating component to the two-character mechanic, but we are getting to that.
As this sequence ends, we jump to, maybe, the present day. I’m not sure, per se, but it is at least post-2000. You now play as Clio, meeting a professor friend of her father’s, following a trail of breadcrumbs left by her dad, who… Isn’t around for reasons. This is the portion of the trailer that feels most like a narrative episodic game. Clio is in a small library, mostly tasked with locating books by using a compass in the center of the room to learn where sections of the library are to find books. Here, we get a bizarre animation for locating items where they just sort of get thrown at the player, something I hope is on the agenda to polish further. Either that, or it is a placeholder for now.
This whole thing might feel unrelated to the absurd opening, but it is the first step in a chain of interconnected events to set up the time travel component of the game. It’s left mostly a mystery, but just enough so that I am anticipating the game now to see where this goes, even more so than when I saw it at SGF. Demo, you did your job. Piecing together everything in the library triggers a flashback to a flash forward to a flashback to 1999 when we play as our second protagonist, Clio’s father, Aaron.
He narrates as he walks through a hotel with the love of his life. Here, one of the most glaring issues I had with the demo comes through. It relies heavily on screen grabbing, jump cuts, and violent red horror cuts… A lot… You might have noticed this following Noa; how could you not? But in this sequence, the couple passes a multitude of Puritan pictures on the wall, all doing this as you pass them. I will say, though, a later game used these pictures in a much more fun way, feeling almost Max Payne-esque.
This is also a weird portion as you listen to Aaron describe how in love with her he is and how he never saw something coming; you arrive at the room and are immediately tasked with finding relics, and oh right, she requested mirrors be set up around the bed a specific way. Love is blind, but seriously, he had better have been possessed by hell because it is not that blind. That is a ton of red flags the player walks straight into, but he was obviously aware.
Remember that two-person mechanic I mentioned? I should rephrase. It’s more like one person, one cat. Aaron is that cat. The cat, to be more precise. See, Aaron is narrating how he became a cat, gained some insight into how to explore through these means, and then was whisked away to a tree ceremony in 1665, where a witch dressed in red picked him to be her companion. It’s a rough start to a friendship, but as they stare into the camera, a pair, we can only imagine what will come of this. This is where the demo ends, with a lot of ground yet to cover.
We know there is combat in 1666 Amsterdam, though, as I said, we get mostly explorable set pieces here. The city of Amsterdam is also explorable and open-world, but we don’t even get a taste of that here. There is also a day and night cycle similar to The Blood of Dawnwalker. In one, you play more reserved in the day, trying to root out demonic entities. At night, you can take advantage of every witch’s ability in your arsenal, but none of that is here.
This is a demo meant to lay down the game’s premise and hopefully intrigue you enough to keep the name 1666 Amsterdam on the tip of your tongue. For me, the demo managed to do so. I’m in a sense of confusion after playing, but it’s a good thing. I will be returning to Amsterdam, hoping the rest of the game lives up to the concepts at its center.
1666 Amsterdam is slated to release in early access sometime later this year. The demo is available on Steam and the Epic Game Store if you want to try it for yourself.
Remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Bluesky to keep up to date on everything we have going on!
