Launch Assassin's Creed Shadows, and you'll be greeted with a selection of memories to jump into, lore to explore, challenges to complete, and gear to earn. This not-a-launcher launcher is the Animus Hub, your gateway to exploring all the modern iteration of Assassin's Creed has to offer. It's also a forbidden hacked model of the consumer Animus Hub from Abstergo. It's the Dark Animus. And it's here to destroy your innocent ignorance and bring you into a hidden world you may have been best off not knowing.
Teased as part of the Assassin's Creed world for a long time, this new layer to how you engage with the series is embracing the part-game console, part-lifestyle device that's been part of the in-universe for a while. Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag first allowed you to mess around with the device as a kind of QA tester, reimagining the evil Abstergo corporation as a game developer with more than a few nods to Ubisoft's own studios.
