You can push objects but not pull them, and while you can drag objects with your grappling hook, you can’t stand still and haul them with the rope, which would be extremely helpful when you’re balancing atop a narrow ledge. In addition to this are a few weird mechanical inconsistencies. But none of them make any fundamental difference to your strategies. It adds a few “tools” which you can craft from diagrams, like distraction toys or deployable crossbow traps. The things you’re doing at the beginning of the game are exactly the same as those you’re doing at the end. This leads us on nicely to Shadwen’s biggest issue, which is that it fails to take these ideas and evolve them in any meaningful way throughout the duration of the game. Shadwen’s violet nights are certainly distinctive, but it’s overwrought and causes every mission to appear almost identical, although it doesn’t help that the same assets are used over and over and over. I think Shadwen would be better served if the player could stop time manually when they felt the need, and then the game continued if they moved after that. Here it constantly feels like it’s interrupting the game’s flow. The time-freezing mechanic doesn’t work anything like as well as it does in SUPERHOT. Shadwen both looks and moves like a Claymation model moulded with too much water, cartoon-like in appearance and with weirdly floppy animations. The controls are slippery and the world lacks a sense of weight and solidity.
Given the writing is so weak, however, the player has little reason to care about Lily's fate.Įqually important to a good stealth game is how movement and interaction feel, and sadly Shadwen doesn’t feel particularly great under the fingers either. The flimsy storytelling wouldn't be such an issue, but as I mentioned, one of Shadwen's central hooks is how your behaviour around Lily affects the story. There’s an attempt at Thief-styleĬonversations between guards, but they lack the dark humour of the Looking Glass classic. It almost entirely takes the form of conversations between Shadwen and Lily during loading screens, but none of them are believable or invest you in the characters. The writing is trite and simplistic, and the acting poor. I love the inherent deviousness of it too, mercilessly shanking dudes in the neck just beyond the sight of this sweet little girl.Īt this point you’re probably wondering why I didn’t enjoy Shadwen, and the answer is, sadly, none of these concepts are particularly well implemented. It also results in some tense moments when you desperately try to stuff a corpse in a haystack just as Lily rounds a corner. It provides a Dishonored-like condition upon violence, but doesn’t force you into a particular approach. In other words, you can employ your more lethal tools as much as you like, just not when Lily is around (assuming you want to spare her the horror of seeing a mutilated corpse, that is). Importantly though, this only happens if Lily sees you do it. If you murder a guard in front of Lily, or she spots a corpse, then it will change her behaviour later on in the tale. Lastly, and this is the one aspect of Shadwen that I really do like, your approach to clearing a path for Lily can affect the direction of the story.
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