There’s a satisfying feeling in stopping time, changing direction, grabbing another ledge, swinging yourself over a guard, pausing to check no one can see, then dropping straight down for the kill. Most often this will be about your movement, especially if you’re using the grappling hook for swinging from point to point. When you don’t move time stands still giving you the freedom to spin the camera around and figure out what you want to do next. What makes Shadwen unique, because you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s all a bit Ico meets Assassin’s Creed from the last couple of paragraphs, is its use of time. But I digress, we’ve all played games with even stranger plot devices. It begs the question in the story premise why you’re bothering to take this urchin with you when you could actually leave her quite comfortably after the first encounter and complete the assassination without alerting any guards at all. Shadwen is a seasoned killer and fairly acrobatic, preferring to use her grappling hook to keep above the city, and if it wasn’t for Lily, each level would only take a matter of seconds to complete. In fact, the only reason she’s present in the game is to slow your progress down because you can’t get through most doors without her (you need to pull two levers at once, maybe because there was some insane architect employed to build this city). She’s also fully AI controlled, and pretty good at staying out of sight or catching you up, so there’s very little to worry about with her. Lily can only run and hide around the environment (no jumping, climbing or dropping), which makes the conveniently placed bushes and haystacks handy because she has to wait until you’ve cleared the path ahead. Armed with only a knife and the ability to take down the enemy if they cannot see her, you have to weigh up whether it’s worth the risk of leaving bodies in your wake, or simply move the guard patrol routes so that Lily can run past and remain unscathed. Along the way she finds Lily, an orphaned girl, about to be arrested by a particularly brutal guard and decides to intervene, but does she kill the guard, or just distract him to allow both of them to escape? This is your major choice throughout the game – kill or avoid. Set in a dark and dingy world, Shadwen (the titular assassin of the game) is on her way to despatch the ruler of the land as part of a contract. That said, does what is effectively a long escort mission manage to keep your interest from beginning to end? Throwing a definite spanner in the cart wheels is that fact there’s a little girl you need to take with you after rescuing her from a grim fate. Coming from Frozenbyte, the Finnish creators of the Trine games, Shadwen is a physics based stealth puzzle game set in a medieval 3D world where you are an assassin heading to kill the head of an oppressive regime.
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