'We are actively reviewing the assets in question'
It was easy to miss among some of the bigger announcements last week, but Panache Digital–the studio behind Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey–is working on a game called 1666: Amsterdam, and decided to reveal it in pretty much the dumbest way imaginable in 2026.
While there was the potential for this to be a cool story–Panache founder Patrice Desailets helped create Assassin’s Creed and was working on 1666 at Ubisoft before managing to get the IP off them–most discussion about the game I’ve seen has instead centred on the fact that not only does its demo contain AI-generated imagery throughout, but even the game’s key art is riddled with nonsensical buttons and mismatched stitching, as you can see in the image up top.
In response to fans instantly noticing this and criticising the team, even on Twitter, Panache have issued a statement that follows a now-familiar pattern of “Oh, how did this happen?!”:
Fuck off. When even the key art has been so blatantly and unashamedly made using AI, do you honestly think we’ll believe that this was some kind of accident? I simply refuse to believe that an entire team of video game professionals saw that key art before it was released to the public, worked in and alongside the in-game art all that time, and just collectively forgot to update or remove it before going public.
The reason people get so upset about this stuff is that for many, myself included, it writes the game off instantly and forever. If you care about the use of this garbage in the games we’re trying (and paying) to enjoy, we now don’t know where else AI was used, or how extensively, because we cannot trust this game or this team. They’ve worked on this in the background while surely knowing the public’s reception to it is going to be negative, then when it gets discovered they expect us to believe that only now they’ve realised it’s in there, and they’ll get rid of it?
I’m so tired, man. I’m tired of having to activate detective mode on a video game every time a trailer or piece of art is released. Of dissecting the images and paintings found within a game just to see whether a human made them or not. Of seeing studios and publishers continue to expect us to pay money for a game when they are cutting so much of the work and soul out of the product. Of being asked to accept apologies when trust has already been broken. It sucks!
Luke Plunkett is a co-founder of the website Aftermath.
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