I have spent some time wandering the few streets of 1666: Amsterdam currently available to Noa and Arron at this point in the process; more will be added. The thing is, I am still unsure where I stand on the experience. This is an early access game, after all, not a finished product by any means, but I sit between issues that could be addressed and ones I’m not sure about. I want my words here to be constructive, though, and the nicest thing I can say about the experience is that it reminded me of Vampyr, and that is a positive comparison.
Previously, I had played the Prologue demo when it was released. If you had played the demo, the data carries over, which is a good thing. In my preview of that, I stated it makes a fairly good case for the narrative and world. That said, I noted that you see exactly 0 of the promised elements of exploration that Panache Digital was promising players at the time. My comparison was to Life is Strange, with the player jumping from tight set piece to tight set piece.
Skipping all of that on my start here, this was not the end of linear progression. You pick up at about the end of the demo, which saw the witch Noa and Aaron, in his cat form, linking up at the ceremonial tree, with the game next tasking you to leave. This is a lengthy portion of narrative where you get introduced to possibly the best feature in the game. Mainly, that Nux can enchant water and then glide along it. In particular, the feature is important for traveling to and fro from the ceremonial grounds, but you can always use it.
There are no limits on day and night abilities, mind you, so flipping the witch switch is fairly easy. Weirdly, the game’s wanted level system is based on sight, so doing witchy stuff in front of people, or shady things like spying through a window, can get you caught. That isn’t really the weird part; the weird part is that you can do the magical switch to the floating demon woman in red on a crowded street and still flip back before you are wanted.
Getting caught comes down almost entirely to a fight you can shockingly play out anywhere. Only one of the forms can participate in the fight, so you get caught, switch, beat up guards, switch back, then walk fast and adorably to a location out of the way for the gauge to drop. I say this with love because Noa is adorable, and she grew on me as a lead. Despite being this easy to settle, though, witch fighting is not a sport I want to dive into as yet. Not to developers, witch fights—I don’t know what you do with that, but do something.
During that opening portion, you get your first taste of combat, and painfully, it is like 20 seconds after the initial demo ended. If I am being fair, there is an entire portion right after that I think should have been showcased prior. There is a moment when the main character gets knocked out and taken prisoner that would have made a far more compelling cliffhanger for the wait for early access. More importantly, almost everything else left out of that demo is showcased in about an additional 30 minutes of gameplay, though my guess is none of those features were ready. I get that, but seeing it now, it feels like a cop-out.
Had they done this, one might have noted that the combat needs some polish. You lock onto enemies, though adjusting and targeting can be a frustrating endeavor. More than that, the dodge can be frustrating. On more than a few occasions, my dodge threw me directly into another enemy’s combo, as the enemies that get behind you are almost impossible to control, at least at this point. Dodging also feels hard to control, which makes adjusting the field of play that much harder to get the upper hand. You also don’t have a counter or parry, which maybe is because I have had to review six parry games recently; I do feel like something like that might be useful.
The reason combat isn’t fun from the get-go, though, is that all her magical moves are locked. By the time you unlock them, combat is more familiar, and you can do things like pick an enemy up and slam them down on the ground. The only frustrating part is that everything is a hold command. You need to start the spell, hold for it to trigger, then release on time to use it. There is a gradient, and it is easy to hit perfect rather than not good on timing, but there really doesn’t seem to be a difference when it triggers. At least, not an important one. There are also moments later where the stages for fights are too small and the camera too crazy.
I was already frustrated with this from the demo, but it gets worse as you go. At first, you are searching bookcases, with you needing to hold them to search. Then the spells do this too; Aarom’s abilities require it, and you enchant things by holding the button. You hold for everything, and it feels unnecessary. You do get to look through things you shouldn’t be able to, so if the difference could be split and have a hold for stealing but not so for everything else, that would be great. The core loop of investigation forces it a lot, so any solution would be great.
Did I get to the open world yet? Oh wait, nope, because there are still a few more set pieces you go through, one of which might be my favorite ever. It is revealed that the time travel, for its part, has Noa and Aaron switch roles with 199, having Aaron exploring his hotel in Amsterdam with Noa as a black cat. These are the best Noa moments since the time-shock confusion for her is actually well written and humorous. Also, for a quiet girl, the fact that her solution to everything is to punch it makes her way more compelling to me than I care to admit.
Let me set the stage for you. The first time you make this switch, Aaron is still in his hotel room in his boxers and nothing else. They discover a page of this important magical book; I am totally not blacking out on the name right now. It’s in the courtyard. This leads to a linear walking path in which Aaron walks the halls in his underwear, while guests of the hotel watch and judge him, occasionally blocking his path. And all of this is set to Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd, for like, NO REASON! It is glorious. Possibly my gaming moment of the year. Who did this!? HOW DID THIS HAPPEN!?
There is one portion of the linear path that I have yet to go over, but we are going to skip that for a second since it ties into my biggest issue with the Early Access release of 1666: Amsterdam, so we will go back to that shortly. The game does eventually open up, but as stated, it’s a pretty small area you can explore right now. Again, early access games will often divide their content by area, so there could be more—maybe a lot more—or different areas. They have stated they will add more boroughs, though how that will look I can’t really speak to yet.
The cool part about this is that you can gain access to basically every building, so the area you get is very dense. As it stands now, there really isn’t much to do. The town has plenty of life, with crowds and mongers around, and even doomsayers spreading misinformation. I love that aspect, but once you get to the main tasks, you realize those are really it. Most of my off-the-beaten-path exploration was in service of getting lost trying to accomplish those. You can explore buildings or glide the waterways, but outside of items for crafting, which is a function too confusing for its own good, you find yourself back on the path of tracking the originals to slay come nightfall.
Mix Aaron into this, and the world just becomes confusing, with tasks often making simple things complicated. That thing I skipped earlier: Noa had to escape from the prison she was taken to. Aaron’s gameplay is fun as he slips through bars to find keys, but I needed to grab my items so that she could transform. I missed the chest with them, WHICH WAS RIGHT THERE, and I was stuck trying to figure out progress for 30 minutes.
The thing here is that was my mistake; I thought she commented that the items were somewhere else, so I sent out Aaron, who had a lot of free exploration he could do that seemed right until I couldn’t figure out a path forward. I own my mistake, but the game does a horrible job of outlining anything you need to do. A waypoint on that chest, or an easy task outline, would have made my mistake easy to fix, but there is none. The game goes for a minimal approach, but it really doesn’t work.
This became far clearer during my first investigation. It is easy to find the person I needed to, but then you need to find his office in a massive building. I’ll just let you know, his office is right next to him, but the game doesn’t tell you that. There is a massive building with tons of locked rooms, including that room. So, you send Aaron out to try to get around latches and locked doors for something that you only have a vague idea of what it is, at best. The good thing is Aaron can possess some guards, so you can get basically the same abilities as Noa in rooms that are restricted to her, which made life slightly easier.
Then you are tasked with going to his house, which you have a street for, but not actually a location. Again, you can search just about any house, so you can easily end up robbing the wrong crib, yo. His house is called “The House of Balance,” which is cleverly vague, given that the wall of his house has an easy-to-miss emblem of scales on it. I didn’t even see that until later. I found the location because narrative points are often marked by hanging words you can walk through for dialog, which I found as Aaron was wandering through a random house, hoping I would see anything useful.
Controlling Aaron can be a tad annoying because his hop mechanic can be very finicky to fight with, making jumping from floor to table to shelf and back a fight. With him, though, any exploration feels big because the solution could be something obscure, which is why any version of direction more than vague kitty visions for what he can interact with would be helpful. The same goes with Noa. As best I can tell, checking all the info that you have gathered on a target can only be done by returning and looking at said target. You can track targets and a few buildings around town through the map, but rarely can you track any of the elements meaningful to an investigation.
To find the singular item in the house of balance that I needed, it was in the attic. To unlock that, I needed to—and this is true—leave with Aaron, go six houses over, climb onto the roofs, make my way back over, then get in an open window to unlatch it. I’m not sure if this was right, but I was so deep into it, damn it; it worked, and that is all that matters. I imagine there are other solutions. Subsequently, I had no idea what I was looking for, or if the attic was even right, so I had to look through bookshelf after bookshelf until the right item fell out.
After doing ALL of this, everything else is pretty easy. You return to the person, cast a spell on him, then wait until night for a boss battle. The fun part about the boss was that I could not dodge its attacks since its big ol preying matis scythe hands outranged me. I had about 15 health potions on me and used every one to slay it. This then essentially returns us to the beginning, with you needing to travel the waterways to the ceremonial ground. Essentially, your time in 1666 Amsterdam is always on the day the collector must slay their target, with the day segment and night segment being straightforward in that regard.
Steam Deck:
Unfortunately, 1666: Amsterdam is not really viable for the Steam Deck yet. It DOES NOT claim to be Steam Deck verified. The game does have controller support, and that is functional when playing on the Steam Deck, but unfortunately this version has massive performance issues that make the game unviable for players who were hoping to play. They have only the handheld as a viable option. In particular, framerate unsteadiness makes spending any lengthy time in the game challenging, though it can boot up and run the game, which isn’t always common for games in this position.
There it is, 1666: Amsterdam as it stands. I don’t hate it; it just hates me having fun, and that makes me a sad panda. I really need there to be something, ANYTHING, that makes tracking less obnoxious. Likewise, I get the minimalist approach to everything, but it doesn’t work. It works less because half the time you can’t figure out if you are even in the right place. Combat could use polish as well, though I will admit even now, first impressions don’t hold true throughout. Where it succeeds is its world, which does feel alive; I just want more ways to become integrated with it, with maybe more to do.
These are solutions I would hope the developers already know should be added, so at this point, chastising would be premature. From what I know, more boroughs and more combat options will be added, but there isn’t really a map for early access development, which I think would be beneficial to get out, but I digress. I enjoyed what I played up to this point; it’s not bad; it just needs focus and direction, but I think that’s achievable.
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