In a sentence which may never have been written before and which I will surely be challenged about when I try to get into heaven, the official artbook for Assassin's Creed Shadows has leaked on a hentai website. In its entirety.
Originally spotted by enterprising Reddit users, who were no doubt browsing the website in question for precisely this kind of content, the official Art of Assassin's Creed Shadows book sprang up without warning on the e-hentai archive (no I'm not linking it) some time in the past few days. It's since been yanked down, but I was able to verify the book's presence on the website before it could be removed, setting me up for some very cool conversations with PC Gamer's IT department.
If this is your first time on the internet, hentai—derived from the Japanese word for 'pervert'—is a genre of cartoon pornography usually done in a style you'd normally associate with anime. The website on which the AC artbook appeared is something of a treasure trove of the stuff, although the book itself contained relatively little red-hot erotic action, which has really dampened my enthusiasm for the final product.
What it did contain was a couple hundred images of location and character designs for Ubisoft's upcoming samurai sim, giving us a glimpse at the places you'll go, people you'll meet, and enemies you'll dispatch in the hundreds over the course of the game. We even get some insight into just who that plucky kid that inexplicably dominates the game's keyart is. Turns out he's an "eight-year-old bundle of relentless positivity" who has a pet monkey, so there's someone I'll be leaving back at the mission hub.
Our anonymous leaker did not explain how they got their hands on the artbook or why, of all the websites on the internet, they chose to leak it on a destination for cartoon smut. They just dropped the gift and left, like a pornographic Scarlet Pimpernel.
I'll be honest, it all looks quite good. I have to tip my hat to all the research and enthusiasm that's so evident in the lovingly rendered images of terrible things happening in feudal Japan. Despite the fact that someone (presumably Ubisoft) has taken the book down, the horse is very much bolted, and it's not hard to find copies of the thing scattered all over the internet by now. Some places you can even visit on your work computer!
There's always the chance, of course, that this is some kind of bizarre, elaborate hoax, and someone ginned up their own fake AC artbook and uploaded it to a porn site out of an abundance of free time. I have my doubts, but you never know, so I've reached out to Ubisoft to confirm that the book is official merch and if the company got it taken down itself, and I'll update this piece in the event I hear back.
Assassin's Creed Shadows is due out March 20. From what I've heard from PCG's Morgan Park and from what I've seen on the internet's premier adult media collation websites, this one might be worth the wait. Consider me cautiously optimistic.
