Polygon.com / 04.04.25

It's surprisingly hard to find things to do in Assassin's Creed Shadows' empty world

About 15 hours into Assassins Creed Shadows, it was finally time to take a journey I had been avoiding. Six-ish hours of gameplay earlier, I had unlocked second playable protagonist Yasuke, and saw in the gorgeous objective screen that he had two objectives tied to his narrative, in Omi. Like many other open-world RPGs, Shadows encourages you to fully explore the areas you unlock early, and I had a fun time assassinating and decapitating various foes in the games first two regions: Izumi Settsu and Yamashiro. But as far as I could tell, I was mostly done there, and ready to make a journey that would finally take me to some new parts of the games world. That trek from my closest available fast-travel point to Omi was 3,000 meters away. Thats fine, I thought. Itll be quite a journey, but Im sure Ill discover some things to interact with or explore on the way. I was very, very wrong, and ended up coming away from the end of my session wondering if Id ever pick the game up again. All journ...
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