Here's a trippy Watch Dogs: Legion short film

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Ahead of the big Watch Dogs: Legion reveal during today's Ubisoft Forward online presentation, Ubisoft rolled out a faux-live-action short film setting the game's stage: The city of London in the grip of an authoritarian surveillance regime, where every step is seen and tracked, and no deviation from the strictures of the law is tolerated.

The first couple of minutes of the video provides a quick overview of a familiar but fantastical London, which has rapidly spiraled downward into an embrace of bigotry, fascism, and technology without oversight. It's not pleasant, but there's a glimmer of hope at the end: A common man, standing up for what's right, because he knows the consequences of staying silent.

At the core of the video is a modernized take on First They Came, a famous poem about the rise of Nazism in Germany, that replaces socialists, trade unionists, and Jews with protesters, journalists, and street artists. It's a reasonable thematic fit, but it feels ill-conceived: I don't think that turning a reflection on the ease with which humanity stood by and watched while the real-life horrors of the Holocaust unfolded into a marketing blast for the latest update to a mainstream videogame series is really such a great idea.

Watch Dogs: Legion will be out on October 29. You can watch 20 minutes of the game's hacking, holograms, and spiderbots right here.

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Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.