The trailers for Assassin’s Creed Shadows teased elder millennial fans (read: me) who’ve stuck with the franchise for nearly two decades, yearning for a return to the original recipe. Ninja. Sharp blades. Stealth kills. Would our patience finally be rewarded?

Fifteen hours in, I’ve been granted a wish from a cursed monkey’s paw. Yes, Shadows revives the iconic assassination simulator of 2007. But the amenities of modern gaming — lifelike graphics, semi-permanent gore, an abundance of murder-ready gizmos — have twisted the game into something else, too: a slasher movie in which you’re the killer.

In 2007, the franchise debuted as a stealth game in which a blade to the esophagus produced the intended result: instant death. Altaïr parkoured through 12th-century Jerusalem, performing recon from the shadows and dispatching the Knights Templar with sharp steel. If you looked past the Holy Land setting, Assassin’s Creed played like the ninja games that children of the ’80s had “designed” in the back pages of their junior high notebooks.

Fans assumed that Ubisoft would eventually set its ninja game in an actual ninja setting. Well, maybe after the one set in Renaissance Italy. Or Colonial America. Or revolutionary France. Or London during the Industrial Revolution. And as all those........

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