Shadwen is a third-person stealth game from Frozenbyte, a developer known best for creating the side-scrolling Trine games. You play as Shadwen, an assassin who must utilize a dagger, grappling hook, and various other traps to escort an orphan girl named Lily through a dangerous village before finally murdering the oppressive king who rules over it. The premise is intriguing and the tutorial does a good job of introducing the converging pathways of Shadwen and Lily as characters, but the storytelling stops there and the game soon reveals itself as tedious, broken, and lifeless overall, with unnecessary features and bland design choices hiding behind every corner.
The main goal of the game is to escort Lily from the beginning to the end of each of the fifteen levels. She will rely on you either to distract guards using objects in the environment or to kill them with one of your various weapons, although the game recommends that you keep any dead bodies hidden, lest Lily’s character became more cynical and depressed as you progress.
Although Lily cannot be spotted by the guards, simply remaining in hiding if one patrols nearby, she will rarely run to the position where you would like her to be, and the manual pointer used to tell her exactly where to go is inaccurate and awkward, making communication with Lily nearly impossible. If you do choose to attack guards lethally but still want to hide their bodies before she sees them, you’ll be met with another irritating dilemma: Lily will often run through an empty space because there are no living guards around, passing the mutilated one that you had just killed and were in the process of moving out of sight. “What a dreadful role model for Lily you’ve become,” the game mocks you, knowing perfectly well that the fault is all in the AI, not the player.
The primary mechanic of Shadwen has to do with the manipulation of time itself. Time freezes when you stand still, much like Superhot, with dialogue and audio cutting out completely unless you hold down a certain key to allow time to continue moving. While this makes Shadwen seem more like a puzzle game than a stealth-action one, I rarely found myself in a situation when the ability to pause time was beneficial to my strategy. In fact, I found it more aggravating than helpful, grouchily holding down the additional key while waiting for a guard to pass or while attempting to listen to a nearby conversation. Stealth games require constant stopping and starting in order to execute certain plans without being seen, and this constant pausing of time in addition to the already clunky animations made Shadwen falsely appear to run at a severely low frame rate while also detaching me from the universe itself.
This mechanic also feels unnecessary since holding down another button already allows you to rewind time as much as you want. Why freeze time if you already have the power to rewind it? If seen by a guard you will be killed instantly, making this asset, although valuable, seem like an attempt to cover up the pathetic AI of the guards themselves, which is no better than that of Lily.
Many guards quickly forget about companions who never return from patrols, while some catch you by spinning around instantly for no reason and others pass by you in the wide open without a second glance. Some of the guards’ conversations about forest spirits and local lords can be interesting, but each one is undermined either by the automatic pausing of time or by the sheer repetitiveness of the guards’ phrases. The AI is inconsistent too, with the same exact approach to a situation sometimes getting you spotted and killed and other times working perfectly. With the limitless ability to rewind time in case something goes wrong, it becomes all too easy to sidestep and slit the throats of almost every guard you come across, even if it takes two tries to do so.
This powerful ability makes the craftable traps that can be placed around the level practically pointless too. The ingredients to make poison darts and mines are hidden in chests throughout the game, but the traps themselves can only be used once each and make the already simplistic lethal approach even easier. Apart from the novelty of killing a guard with an explosion rather than with a dagger or a falling barrel, it isn’t worth searching for the ingredients to create a few new traps.
I experienced several glitches and oddities during my time with Shadwen, such as my character clipping on obstacles and guards’ legs twitching like dead cockroaches; all of which illustrated a general lack of polish, but by far the most frustrating ones deal with Shadwen’s grappling hook. The grappling hook is used both to displace objects and to traverse the levels, but it is consistently unreliable. Often times it would attach underneath ledges rather than onto them, causing me to rappel into open areas where the guards could instantly see me rather than onto the empty platforms above them. Other times the hook would grab a new ledge when all I wanted to do was ascend the one I was already attached to. Sometimes it wouldn’t detach from an object at all. No matter what I was trying to accomplish, the grappling hook would somehow manage to get in my way.
Shadwen also suffers from a general lack of artistry. While the voice acting throughout the game is executed well, Shadwen and Lily only engage in conversation during the occasional concept art cutscene and usually during loading screens between levels instead, neither of which do much to flesh out their characters. The actual narrative is disappointing too, and quite straightforward.
Even the levels themselves are scarcely victims to creativity, with the same barrels, boxes, haystacks, and patrols of identical guards dispersed throughout. The dark, medieval village aesthetic grows old quickly, and many levels feel like extensions of one another rather than separate experiences requiring new strategic approaches.
Summary
Shadwen attempts to mesh the genres of stealth-action and puzzle games in order to create a unique experience in an original medieval world, but its time-control mechanics have little purpose other than to conceal the broken AI and the tedious gameplay. Repetitive environments and dialogue along with dry narrative, characters, and presentation remove the mild interest in the universe that players may have gained during the opening ten minutes, and a lack of overall polish does nothing to help either. Shadwen is a constant struggle to play, with numerous aspects competing to cause as much affliction to the player as possible. Shadwen may be able to rewind time in order to save herself from her enemies; I only wish I could rewind time back to before I played this game.
Tristan was a regular ICXM contributor between 2015–2017, publishing 51 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @tbogost.