They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Ecumene Aztec however has to be one of the strangest examples of historical enjambment I have ever seen. Ecumene Aztec is slated for a 2025 release and had a relatively low key reveal recently, with a good old fashioned trailer on the internet rather than a showcase or at Summer Game Fest. It looked intriguing, but since then everything has unraveled quickly.
The premise of the game is (perhaps what should ‘was’ - more on that later) relatively simple. Taking obvious inspiration from Ghost of Tsushima, you play as an Aztec warrior who protects his land from the invading Spanish conquistadors. The early gameplay footage looked a little janky, owing to the fact this is a small team working on its first game that won’t be ready for at least two years, but there was promise. It was Ghost of Tsushima with an Aztec skin, but then many called Tsushima just Assassin’s Creed with a samurai skin when it was revealed, and this was a fresh perspective.
While there were potential pitfalls with being so heavily influenced for a first game, and the attempts to look and feel like a triple-A game without the budget, it was intriguing. Unfortunately, it piqued the interest of the wrong people. Though history is rarely black and white, in the battle of ‘the people who live in a place’ and ‘the people who invade it for adventure and riches’, there’s a fairly clean ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’. Some, however, don’t see it that way.
As reported by The Verge, shortly after the trailer went live a site appeared under publisher Giantscraft’s name. This site is not affiliated with the publisher themselves, so presumably was set up in the wake of the trailer as some form of revenge. On the site, there is a quote from famous conquistador Hernán Cortés, an emblem of the Cross of Burgundy, and various Spanish imperialist memes. The Cross is used in the modern day by far-right South American groups.
The negative reaction from the loudest, most toxic parts of the internet did not stop there. In the wake of the trailer, Giantscraft has announced it will be changing the game to allow you to play either as the Aztec warrior repelling the violent white invaders, or as the violent white invaders themselves. This change was accompanied by a PR statement to The Verge:
“It was not planned. However we saw that about 40 percent of [the] audience says that [they] would like to have [the] choice to join [the] conquistadors, so we might actually try to give this possibility. The game is not political in anyway[sic] and never will be, it is history FICTION.”
There are a couple of things to take apart here. Firstly, I respect that this is a small and inexperienced development team, and when faced with death threats (the same spokesperson confirmed these) and many loud voices telling you they will never play your game, it’s difficult not to blink in that situation. Most devs just want to make a cool video game that people enjoy, and so when the game gets targeted like this, they change it because they think that’s the way to please everyone. But there are two problems here.
First of all, any games that focus on real history, especially around lesser-told periods of imperialism, are political. Even if the devs just wanted ‘haha cool Aztec man’, it’s extremely naive to think playing as a guerrilla person of colour against white invaders was an apolitical framework. The stress that it’s not does a disservice to the story it could tell by attempting to appease the angriest corners of the internet who are still unlikely to play it or have anything positive to say unless it sides with the white invaders completely.
Then there’s the fact this was not the only criticism the game received. The far more reasonable critique has been aimed at the stereotypes in the trailer, the characters looking Maya despite being in the Yucatan jungle, the cities looking like ruins, and the ahistorical events and focus on human sacrifice - yet no changes appear to be coming for these elements. I understand that Giantscraft is in a difficult position, but it must know that only listening to the violent and most hateful critics is not the path to success. It feels like it has caved under the prospect of being mildly progressive, not wanting to alienate the audience screaming in its face, unaware that the rest of us, who have far greater numbers, will now drift away quietly.
Much like Unrecord a few months back, which is shot from the perspective of a police bodycam but claims to be apolitical, I’m not sure what Ecumene Aztec really wants to be. Why choose to make a game about the Aztecs only to instantly flip to a game about the conquistadors when some 4chan trolls gazump your domain name? It’s a history lesson in action - the white nationalists have waded into Aztec culture and stolen it as their own. Ecumene Aztec is proudly a game that stands for nothing, and it seems to have fallen for anything.