Assassin's Creed Revelations was good actually, and it's the unhinged sauce the Animus Hub needs to twist my mind into the perfect lore-absorbing shape

Launch Assassin's Creed Shadows, and you'll be greeted with a selection of memories to jump into, lore to explore, challenges to complete, and gear to earn. This not-a-launcher launcher is the Animus Hub, your gateway to exploring all the modern iteration of Assassin's Creed has to offer. It's also a forbidden hacked model of the consumer Animus Hub from Abstergo. It's the Dark Animus. And it's here to destroy your innocent ignorance and bring you into a hidden world you may have been best off not knowing.

Teased as part of the Assassin's Creed world for a long time, this new layer to how you engage with the series is embracing the part-game console, part-lifestyle device that's been part of the in-universe for a while. Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag first allowed you to mess around with the device as a kind of QA tester, reimagining the evil Abstergo corporation as a game developer with more than a few nods to Ubisoft's own studios.

Revelations: revealed

But before that, the way once-lead character Desmond Miles used the Animus to interface with his ancestor's memories came to a head in Assassin's Creed Revelations, the third game in the Ezio trilogy (and the fourth overall). The very premise of the game had Desmond trapped within the Animus itself, accessing memories of Ezio's late life via gates on a strange beach island, and chatting with the digital remnants of Clay Kaczmarek (AKA Subject 16), a deceased former Assassin who dived deeper into the Animus than anyone else right before Desmond's own journey.

The garbled speech of the Dark Animus as it promises forbidden fruits is, in my introduction to it after going hands-on with several hours of Assassin's Creed Shadows, set on a beachy backdrop. Just as Assassin's Creed Revelations offered a peek behind the Animus curtain as it was imagined in 2011, Assassin's Creed Shadows, via the Animus Hub, is offering up a similar promise for the current era of open world adventuring.

Here, though, without Desmond Miles as an avatar, we are the ones drawn in, letting the Dark Animus whisper in our ears. It's both a more tantalizing proposition and a trickier one to execute, as it must thread this retooling of how the series' long-running near-future metanarrative is delivered, while also encouraging players to complete their constantly refreshing challenges to earn keys to trade in for "sweet rewards".

But it's a thread worth lining up for a stich. While it's tempting to suggest Ubisoft drop the modern day storytelling altogether, for those bought into the massive series it doesn't really make sense. After all, some of my best memories of the series are simultaneously following along Ezio's coming-of-age tale, while also collecting anomaly fragments to tease out conspiracy-style theories that feel just real enough to be compelling. Assassin's Creed is the kind of series that will just casually inform you that John Wilkes Booth was a Templar and that the Assassins hunted him down to avenge Abraham Lincoln's death. Embrace how off-kilter it is, and it becomes very fun to explore the rabbit holes on offer.

The AC Files

Assassin's Creed Revelations, by being set entirely within the Animus and having you come right up against its strange, corrupted data, brought those two elements closer together than ever before. Which made it a shame that, in subsequent games, the two elements felt like they were crowbarred apart once again. Though, not every game can have you diving through digital distortions to quite that degree.

Which is why it potentially makes more sense to have that aesthetic become a wrapper through the Animus Hub. It could be having your cake, assassinating your cake, and then eating the messy remains all in one go. All while also providing a minimal barrier of entry for those who do want to just jump right into the historical stuff and not engage with the "Vault" and the rest of the lore.

Importantly, though, if done right, the Animus Hub will always remain to entice and convert those players into the wider Assassin's Creed lore, and will expand through subsequent updates and releases. At present, it's planned to remain a part of the structure going through to Assassin's Creed Hexe and Project Invictus. Ideally, there will be no escape, and you will join me in the (toasty, warm) fires of lore hell.

The Animus Hub may run the danger of becoming too easily pushed away, sidelined into oblivion. But if it can recapture that feeling best displayed in Assassin's Creed Revelations, of stumbling upon documents that you really shouldn't be looking at – vital across all the games to rope players into the mythos – we could be in for a real shot in the arm for Assassin's Creed loreheads. Bring on the Vault. It's time to pry it open.

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