I’ve simply lost count of the number of times that Lily has sauntered in front of them only for the silly goons to not even bat an eyelid at her presence which begs the question why in the blue heck would she need Shadwen risking her neck when she’s basically invisible to her would-be harassers anyway? Crazy stuff.īeing an assassin with apparently some modicum of acrobatic acumen, you’d think that there would be some grace in Shadwen’s traversal of the environment but nah, that isn’t the case. Speaking of the enemy, the guards are a hilariously soft-headed bunch. Luckily, you can hide bodies in conveniently placed piles of hay to prevent Lily from seeing them, but the complaint about the lack of transparency in lethal and non-lethal methods still stands. For example, you could drop down on somebody and knock them to the floor, thinking that the lack of overt stabbery has only rendered them unconscious, only for Lily to skip along and become aghast at the sight of the felled (and apparently gorily murdered, but not) baddie.
On the topic of that, the big issue here is that Shadwen is horrendously unclear when it comes to enlightening the player on just what qualifies as lethal and non-lethal ways of dealing with your enemies. As such, any kind of confrontation cannot occur at all meaning that your options are expressly limited to sneaking past your foes, or, bludgeoning/stabbing them into the next life to achieve the same result. Somewhat annoyingly, the developers have taken the notion of stealth absolutely to the letter merely being spotted by a guard is enough to trigger an instant fail state and a pad-squeezing game ending condition. Additionally, those same objects, when shoved from a height, can be used to incapacitate guards in somewhat permanent fashion, too. In the case of the latter, the developer’s obsession with physics based objects first seen in the Trine games bleeds over here, as Shadwen can knock over vases, push crates and knock over bales of hay to create the necessary distraction to allow you to slip past. Throwing a wrench into the proceedings is a little girl called Lily, who must be protected both from harm and from the apparently violent excesses of Shadwen herself, with the game splitting off into two different endings depending on whether or not you elect to distract or simply murder your enemies.Īs Shadwen, your main goal in each area is to clear a path, either through means of assassination or misdirection so that the pint-sized Lily can reach the exit. A fantasy storylineįor the curious, the plot for Shadwen boils down to this cast as the titular assassin, players must find their way to a nefarious king so that he might be stabbed all the way up in an attempt to spare a downtrodden fantasy kingdom from enduring any more of his sadistic reign. If there is one area where the visuals fare better it’s in the cut scenes an attractive menagerie of hand-drawn illustrations which have quite clearly been sketched with a great deal of love, their presence serves as the sole highlight in what is otherwise a technically disappointing effort. From a technical perspective then, Shadwen stands as a far cry from the refined visual opulence of the Trine games for which the developer is known. It’s not just the environment that suffers from such technical maladies either the repetitive character models also get their fair share of visual misery too as heads get stuck in walls, limbs end up trapped in scenery and attempting to climb or jump onto just about any surface looks more akin to your on-screen avatar trying to have a good old humping session more than anything else.
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