Shadwen

Letting the players decide the best course of action is always a gamble, because although it would seem like the designers have less work on their hands, the reverse is actually true. Since there’s no telling what the players might do, every piece of the map must contain something of interest. Things get significantly more complex once physics enter the equation, because a lot of things can go wrong if you promise the audience the power to interact with the environment as they see fit.

Shadwen is not your typical stealth game, although it employs many of the same elements you might find in titles like Thief, Hitman or many other. Frozenbyte - the guys and gals behind the Trine series - tried to make the experience as seamless and enjoyable as possible, while still allowing the players to take matters into their own hands and tackle every situation in the desired way. Linearity is still present in the form of a pretty stiff storyline, but what you do in between the checkpoints and cutscenes is entirely up to you.

The game takes place in a dark medieval world, and there are two main characters you play with over the course of the story. One of them is Shadwen, an assassin tasked with making the king disappear, while the other one is Lily, a young orphaned girl who somehow finds herself in under Shadwen's protection. The game is far less violent when you play as Lily, given the fact that she cannot perform wild acrobatics or swiftly snap a man’s neck, but that doesn’t mean Shadwen needs to restrain herself from doing gruesome things in front of the little girl.

The whole game is pretty dark and gloomy, thanks to the uneasy atmosphere created by the situation of the two main characters, the world design and the general visual style. In fact, it feels very much like Thief, albeit only in certain regards. One of the most important differences is the gameplay itself, because time moves only when you do, thus allowing you to assess every situation as thoroughly as possible before making any moves.

Most of the campaign is a series of missions that have you making your way from point A to point B without being caught or killed in the process. To do so, you have to make full use of your special abilities, as well as the environment and everything in between. Shadwen has many aces up her sleeve, including a grappling hook and a decent collection of traps that can be assembled on the spot. It’s also possible to avoid every confrontation sometimes, although the game seems to force encounters in certain choke points.

Even so, the freedom to approach each situation as you see fit is a wonderful thing to see nowadays, especially in a stealth game. This also allows you to replay the game and find many different solutions to the same problems, or even try to beat your times by making a run for it. You can even make use of the realistic physics engine and kill enemies by dropping things on them, pushing stuff, or simply luring the guards into one of your traps.

The bad part is that the time stopping gimmick can make everything seem a bit pointless, in a way. You only need to hold down a certain key in order to rewind your actions as much as you want, which means that there’s really no game over screen and no real penalty for screwing things up. It’s one thing to abuse the quicksave function, but this makes it almost joyless sometimes. Granted, the difficulty level is high enough for that not to be the case most of the time, yet it would still be nice to have some sort of limit.

Lastly, there are some bugs and inconveniences to watch out for as well, at least until the developers start releasing some patches. The grappling hook can act wildly in certain circumstances, and Shadwen has some pretty unorthodox animations when she climbs on various surfaces. You’ll also clip through stuff a lot, although none of these proved to be game breaking in any way.

All things considered, Shadwen is a breath of fresh air in the video games industry, at least when it comes to gameplay mechanics and the way you are free to tackle the missions. However, it’s worth mentioning that the experience can be a tad too linear sometimes, especially since there’s usually one road you have to follow through each level. Even so, the fun is in the way you navigate these roads, and there are plenty of ways to do that.

On top of it all, the graphics are gorgeous, and the designers have managed to create a pretty moody atmosphere, even if the locations lack the lore and the personality to be memorable in any way. It’s still great to sneak around at dusk when the sun is about to go down, not to mention all the pretty post-processing effects layered on top of all those hi-res textures.