Assassin’s Creed’s new Animus Hub – the project formerly known as Assassin’s Creed Infinity – is threadbare and relatively ignorable at launch, but that’s fine.
Incorporated into Assassin’s Creed Shadows – it is essentially the game’s start menu – the Animus Hub lets you scroll through a list of Assassin’s Creed games, ordered chronologically by the date of their setting.
This list includes Shadows, obviously, and the four games before that – so, the Ancient Egypt-set Assassin’s Creed Origins, the Ancient Greece-set Odyssey, the Viking adventure Valhalla and the Baghdad-set Mirage.
Selecting any of these lets you see the hero(s) of said game, with Shadows showing you both Naoe and Yasuke in their current gear from wherever you’re at in your playthrough. This is a nice touch, and selecting Shadows will then take that character straight into the Animus loading corridor (that bit where you can run around while the game gets ready) and off into Japan.