As perhaps the highest-profile game of 2025 so far, Assassins Creed Shadows has been a major topic of conversation among the gaming community. Its been out for a few weeks, so the chatter in the Slack channel that we spun up here at Polygon to discuss the game has slowed significantly (especially with some people on the team having moved on to other games that generate feverish posting, such as Blue Prince). Even so, I probably shouldve known that I wouldnt be able to innocently drop my latest progress update into Slack without my co-workers commenting upon it, baffled anew by the strange ways in which I play video games.
“Im ~26 hours in as of last night, and I just now unlocked Yasuke,” I wrote on Wednesday morning.
The ensuing thread ended up with 75 messages in it. The first response arrived within two minutes of my initial post, courtesy of our curation editor, Pete Volk:
a real question: how
as in, what have you spent your time doing? what does your objective board look like?
These are good and valid questions, Pete! I wish I had better answers beyond “my brain is broken” and “if you saw the way I play this game you would fall asleep within minutes” and “this is why I pretty much never finish open-world games.”
Assassin\u2019s Creed Shadows<\/em>\u2019 photo mode."" data-modal-id="single-image-modal" data-modal-container-id="single-image-modal-container" data-img-caption=""For the uninitiated, Yasuke is one of the two protagonists of Assassins Creed Shadows, but aside from a snippet of the intro, you dont get to play as him until youve completed the games first act. Now, if youre a normal person, youll probably reach that point in 10-12 hours or so. Our guide about unlocking Yasuke allows that it may take some players as long as 20 hours. But longer than an entire rotation of the Earth on its axis? How in the Animus is that possible?!
Here is where I tell you that I am weird. I get easily distracted by shiny objects in games, which is a problem in open-world experiences, as they are typically designed to encourage exploration and investigation. I also love stealth games, but theyre often designed in a way that indulges the worst of my perfectionist tendencies: If you let me engage in save scumming, I will use it to the fullest extent.
Related: Its surprisingly hard to find things to do in Assassins Creed Shadows empty world
Perhaps you can begin to comprehend why an Assassins Creed game would be a rapacious consumer of my leisure time. This is particularly true with this Assassins Creed game, for which I had previously typed the following progress update into Slack: “I am now something like 16 hours into AC Shadows and I still havent decided if I actually like the game.” I was about to start the (justifiably well-liked) quest in which Naoe participates in a tea ceremony, and the reason it had taken me that long to even get there was that I simply didnt care much for the story up to that point — something that is only slightly less true now that Ive unlocked Yasuke.
So far, Ive mostly been ignoring Assassins Creed Shadows main missions in favor of exploring its version of feudal Japan, and undertaking side activities such as infiltrating castles. The game takes place circa 1579, toward the end of the Sengoku period, a time of widespread civil war during which the prototypical idea of a Japanese castle came into being. They were laid out with a multistory keep surrounded by courtyards, moats, and residential buildings. In Assassins Creed Shadows, the grounds of any castle are full of guards to contend with, along with civilians who will scramble to alert their armed compatriots if they see you.
Ive now cleared out enough castles to realize that the process doesnt change all that much from place to place, so this element of the game is starting to lose its luster for me, even though I still find that the underlying stealth experience delivers satisfying thrills. I do have hope that spending time getting to know Yasuke, now that Ive unlocked him, will force me out of my obsession with Naoes stealth mechanics — since hes simply not that kind of assassin, or indeed an assassin at all — and break my bad habits. (I dont have the same hopes for the story to improve, since my co-workers tell me that it doesnt get more compelling from here on out.)
But why rush? Maybe Ill just abandon everything and take up virtual sightseeing, trying to recreate shots from my honeymoon in the games photo mode. Himeji Castle, here I come...