Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Marketing Has a Cryptic Puzzle Already Driving Fans Wild [IGN]

The Hourglass Puzzle was teased in Ubisoft’s press release regarding the reveal, which was also announced publicly through a post on X/Twitter which showed a giant hourglass in Osaka, Japan. Fans were quick to spot a strange code on the bottom of this hourglass, S89N-029S, thus starting the community’s problem-solving effort.

This wasn’t too complex to work out, as its numbers were simply positions in the English alphabet, meaning it was quickly deciphered as ‘Shinobis.’ But the strange codes didn’t stop there, as scattered throughout Ubisoft websites, email, and social media lay other random assortments of letters and numbers.

Spotted by Busy-Jicama-3474 on Reddit, a background image on the Assassin’s Creed Shadows page on Ubisoft’s website contains a hidden code with 24 two-digit numbers. Another code found in an email advertisement had 11, 21, and 33 repeated over and over across several lines, all being 16 numbers long. And fans are going wild trying to figure them out.

Assassin’s Creed Codename Red becomes Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Tune-in for the Official Cinematic World Premiere Trailer on May 15, 9 AM PT.#AssassinsCreedShadows pic.twitter.com/xc1Q10N4Vh

— Assassin’s Creed (@assassinscreed) May 13, 2024

“If we pair the first and second numbers, along with the third and forth, and so on, we get four lines of eight pairs of numbers,” wrote Squidpsyco in response to the original post. “The only pairs that exist here are 33 and 11, and 11 and 21. This creates eight pairs with exactly two possibilities for each pair, which looks a lot like binary.

“If we treat the 33 11 pair as zero and the 11 21 pair as 1, we get four binary characters, which translate to the American Standard Code for Information Interchange numbers one, five, seven, and nine. This can’t be a coincidence because the four binary strands all give a numeral, and only a range of 10 characters of the 255 possible are numbers. So the chance that this is a coincidence is (10/255)4 or 16 in six million odds.”

The internet sleuth then connected that 1579 number to an Assassin’s Creed Shadows rumor that suggests a historical figure called Yasuke will be involved in the game. “1579 just so happens to be the year Yasuke arrived in Japan,” they said. “This probably doesn’t help with the main cipher on the website, but it is likely confirmation of the date of the game and Yasuke’s involvement.”

This “main cipher” was found elsewhere on Ubisoft’s website, where fans also found a code and key as one part of a series of rotating images. Several lines of numbers are presented next to the key, which contains Japanese Katakana characters.

The numbers were therefore converted to Katakana characters and translated to English by several fans online, revealing a cryptic poem. “Time is ephemeral, fragments are scattered across the network, the hourglass becomes the key to preservation, you should hurry,” it reads, according to Reil_ on Reddit.

The hidden code in the background image can be translated using the same means, resulting in the phrase: “One by one, things come into existence. For the past, time stands still,” according to Efigr, who claims to have solved the riddles.

The page with the key also had a jumble of letters and numbers in a web address, which was easily converted to be “assassinscreed.com” through the same method used on the hourglass code, though its specific page is then edited out with nine question marks instead. But as the main paragraph mentions the hourglass being the key, Efigr deduced this as a likely answer.

While the code on the hourglass would be the most obvious (through it being the least obvious) answer, especially as it used the same decipher method, visiting ‘assassinscreed.com/shinobis’ returns a 404, page not found error. But visiting ‘assassinscreed.com/hourglass’ redirects users back to the main Assassin’s Creed Shadow page.

“This redirects you to Ubisoft’s homepage, it doesn’t return a 404, probably meaning it’s a page waiting to go live,” Efigr said. It therefore appears Ubisoft wasn’t fully prepared for fans to solve the puzzles so quickly, or perhaps the community has just reached the wrong conclusion.

If a page is waiting to go live, it will likely do so alongside the full reveal of Assassin’s Creed Shadows on May 15 at 9am Pacific / 12noon Eastern / 5pm UK.

Despite the secrecy, leaks have confirmed a November 15, 2024 release date for the incoming game. Set in feudal Japan, Assassin’s Creed Shadows was revealed in September 2022 as the “next premium flagship title and the future of our open world role-playing games”, suggesting it will be closer in style to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Odyssey than 2023’s Mirage.

A leak in October 2023 gave fans their first look at what’s likely one of the game’s protagonists, a female assassin wielding a katana. Virtually nothing else is known about the game, however, but there’s not long to wait until Ubisoft reveals a proper look tomorrow.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.