Shadwen
A superhot version of assassins creed
Shadwen is a stealth platforming game staring 2 characters, shadwen, and lily
They meet after lily steals an apple, you help her from the guards and she joins you on your journey to help you through cracks and pull levers
Unfortunately, what starts as an amazing and challenging stealth game, turns into a frustrating babysitting game.
YouShadwen
A superhot version of assassins creed
Shadwen is a stealth platforming game staring 2 characters, shadwen, and lily
They meet after lily steals an apple, you help her from the guards and she joins you on your journey to help you through cracks and pull levers
Unfortunately, what starts as an amazing and challenging stealth game, turns into a frustrating babysitting game.
You do get to play as both characters in the beginning 2 chapters, but the rest of the game you play as just shadwen, it’s up to you to distract guards or take them out to help lily advance through each hiding spot…
There are various tools you can craft with materials from chests to take out or distract guards as well as use your grappling hook to pool items and swing from beams...
here’s the catch though…
The different endings…
Killing enemies effects how lily portrays you… so how you approach every level will affect your story…
During my first play through I went through the more challenging no kills run... playing this game stealthily is when the frustrations of this game will be highlighted…
Lily is AI controlled.. And unfortunately this AI isn’t very intelligent….
Lily would constantly run from her current hiding spot back to a hiding spot we already snuck past...
in a kill run this isn’t a problem… but in a stealth run this is a problem because you are trying to set up distractions to advance her to the next spot, meanwhile she’s running back, completely wasting your time and effort…
You can somewhat control her by ringing a bell telling her where to go, but she will hardly ever obey your command... refusing to move from the spot she’s in that she can clearly pass without detection, or shell get halfway to the spot and freeze up, only to turn back around…
As much as I hate the idea of moving back and forth between 2 characters, I would’ve taken being able to switch back and forth to control lily myself over relying on ai….
It wouldn’t be too much of an issue if these levels weren’t so brutal... and they increasingly get harder….
The guards in this game have the hearing of a dog, if you brush past a bale of hay or even jump, their head turns like the exorcist to detect you and smack you with a game over..
Their hearing is so advanced that if you pull an object to make it make a noise, rather than inspecting the object making the noise, they will investigate your location 10 feet in the opposite direction, almost like there is some sort or magnet programmed in them... which I’m almost 100% positive there is…
and even if they don’t detect you, they will search for you until you do..
You can get away with hiding behind an object, but this is rare as the game throws 4 to 8 pony riding guards on top of you to deal with at all times…
And no enemy has a programed path to stick to... once they are alerted they go all over the place
this unpredictability definitely adds challenge, but it also takes away the entire point of the game...
How are you supposed to solve a problem with ever changing variables…
turning this more into an electric tabletop football game than a stealth game
And they won’t go back to what they were doing before if they find nothing.. sometimes they’ll just stand in front of you or circle around you so it’s impossible to progress from your position
thankfully they took a page out of prince of Persia’s book and you can rewind time to take a new approach….
They also took a page out of Ludacris’s’ and superhots book, because when you move they move…
if you stand still time stands still…
you can hold a button to proceed time though, so you don’t actually have to physically move from your location.
While Shadwen has greatly designed levels and is a decently challenging stealth game, there are just far too many ai frustrations that ultimately stop it from ever feeling truly satisfying.
You never feel like you’ve outsmarted the game...
you feel like you just got lucky that lily kinda did what she was supposed to.
I give Shadwen a
6.0/10… Expand