About 15 hours into Assassin’s Creed Shadows, it was finally time to take a journey I had been avoiding. Six-ish hours of gameplay earlier, I had unlocked second playable protagonist Yasuke, and saw in the gorgeous objective screen that he had two objectives tied to his narrative, in Omi. Like many other open-world RPGs, Shadows encourages you to fully explore the areas you unlock early, and I had a fun time assassinating and decapitating various foes in the game’s first two regions: Izumi Settsu and Yamashiro. But as far as I could tell, I was mostly done there, and ready to make a journey that would finally take me to some new parts of the game’s world.

That trek from my closest available fast-travel point to Omi was 3,000 meters away. That’s fine, I thought. It’ll be quite a journey, but I’m sure I’ll discover some things to interact with or explore on the way. I was very, very wrong, and ended up coming away from the end of my session wondering if I’d ever pick the game up again.

All journeys in Shadows are made longer by the game’s ambitious but flawed fealty to matching real terrain as closely as possible. It is nearly impossible to take shortcuts — hills are too steep to climb, forests are too thick to cut through. The environments are beautiful, but the paths to your destination are very limited, which takes a........

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