A nice "Big Small" game. Small, because it not takes too many hours, but big , because it has many ways to finish each chapter. It´s a stealth game where you character must remain unseen...it´s up to you if you want to be a silent assassin or just a shadow, avoiding to kill while you try to reach your goal.
-Nice graphics.
-Fair "medieval" atmosphere.
-Good control system ( you can advance or rewind in the time,).
-Music it´s ok
-Multiple ways to finish the story..based in your choices..

I had a nice surprise with this game...i recommend it :)

This review may be read in full below or you can view the review with glorious formatting and pictures in the review originally posted on Vox Ludicus - Review: Shadwen

An assassin hell-bent on eliminating the king of a dreary medieval land, all the while taking care of a child who’s lost it all. Sounds good on paper, but is Shadwen a Shadwin?

Shadwen is a third-person stealth-action game developed by Frozenbyte, who you might know best from their earlier works – the Trine series. The game sees you taking control of Shadwen, the titular protagonist, sneaking and, if you wish, stabbing your way towards the King of Rivendon. One catch though, you must also escort a young girl named Lily.

I heard acupuncture can relive pain and improve sleep, Mr Guard.
Wait, come back! I know escort missions are the bane of gamers alike, but Lily behaves more like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite than Natalya from GoldenEye (shudders). For the most part, Lily follows a predetermined path through the level, moving only when the coast is clear or once the room is cleared of guards. Don’t leave her behind though, as she is needed to progress throughout the levels, be it by slipping through small enclosures to help you open up a door or helping you operate dual controlled levers.

Shadwen is much more deadly. She moves like a cat, climbs obstacles with ease and her strikes are fatal and without remorse. Her grappling hook, although unresponsive control-wise, grants a sense of freedom in game, making you feel like Spiderman whilst swinging to and fro. Aside from your dagger and grappling hook, you can craft a handful of other devices, such as a poison-dart launcher to help you on your quest. The crafting system is serviceable at best, but crafting recipes devoid of ingredients left me not too keen on concocting.

The gameplay is all-around decent, but a mechanic sets it apart from other games in the genre – time moves only when you do, or only when you hold down a button. You can rewind time if you make a mistake, wish to reposition yourself, or get spotted – one alert means game over. The game can be played lethally or non-lethally and your choice affects the game’s story, for if Lily sees you murdering a poor bloke, or in the act of disposing a corpse, you scar her for life, you naughty person, you.

Speaking of story, the premise sounds enticing, but sadly it doesn’t evolve into anything interesting and ends up becoming a generic medieval adventure. Mediocre voice acting and a forgetful soundtrack means that you won’t be remembering this game for its story.

Performance-wise, the game is well optimized, so you won’t be needing a NASA funded computer to run it. The game however isn’t bug-free. The grappling hook has a 50/50 chance of actually deploying, pretty aggravating when you wish to grapple while in mid-air. The AI can’t see Lily even when she’s basically breathing on their shoulderguards, but can see you perfectly in the dark. Lily herself is sometimes a nuisance – during one chapter her pathfinding code, I presume, broke as she basically sat inches away from the exit. I tried reloading several times, playing both lethally and non-lethally, but alas, she kept freezing in the exact same location, staring at the exit like a cow does at an upcoming train.

The game isn’t perfect by any stretch, and what it does good is merely decent compared to other games in the genre, but it’s a short game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. The time mechanic, coupled with the unique escorting you have to do make this game:

A Must-Avoid / A Try During Sale / A Must-Have

Did the first levels without killing guards
Lily: 'You're a bad person'

Well excuuuse me but I'm not

9/11

Way too easy.
Good as sneak&stab kind of game (maybe apart from the girl continously telling you not to kill *sigh*), with quite a few nice ideas. But overall - too easy. In but 1 place I had any problems to go through. If you get it at a sale - go for it. But it is not worth its full price.

A fantastic game for the killer in all of us.

While many complain about the Escort Quest portion of this game -the whole game- I never once found it intrusive. Despite guards seeing my waif counterpart, not once did I lose because of this, and all she really acts as is a key you need to get to the end of each mini-sandbox style stage.

That being said I also was a merciless psychopath, killing any, and all guards, in my path -which is a viable way to play- so perhaps my wanton slaughter had something to do with it.

The mechanics are some of the best I've seen in a stealth game, time only moves when you do, and besides that the best way to describe gameplay would be, imagine Spider-Gwen gave up her life as a superhero and instead decided to become an Assassin.

I highly recommend this game to anyone who even remotely enjoys stealth/assassination games.

Just to be clear from the start, Shadwen is not a bad game. I'm just not recommending it. Here's why.

Shadwen is an odd game, cobbled together from various other mechanics and it's good that indie developers try stuff like this. However, this time it doesn't work so well.
The core game plays like early stealth games, not so much Assassin's Creed as Tenchu Stealth Assassins. The stealth kills are fairly bland (I count 3 I think, neck stab, throat slit, double kidney stab). There's a grappling hook which gets you spotted more often than not and is best used for dragging objects to cause distractions. There's the rewind time mechanic from Prince of Persia: Sands of Time which having no in game explanation or any restrictions pretty much wrecks any challenge in the game. There's also the "time only flows if you move" thing most recently seen in Superhot. It's cool, it's very very cool... but it doesn't bring anything to a game that has no combat... There's not one single moment where it comes in useful.
The game can be played as a murder hobo (kill everyone) or a stealthy (kill no one) kinda deal... Sounds great right, kill no one? Pro Stealth? That would be great except the whole thing is one giant escort mission of a girl called Lily. The guards can't actually see her... but you need to provide her with cover to get from point A to point B. Sadly often her AI refuses to move even when the coast is clear so murdering people is far easier than trying to stealth it. Sadly, Lily has no personality whatsoever and will chastise you between levels for murdering people... On top of that there's very little in the way of story, no character progression, hud, skills or loot. Oh there's some sort of crafting system but I finished the game just fine without crafting anything in 6 hours. A pressure mine doesn't seem so cool when it's game over the moment the guards see a dead body...
And why is Lily even there? Because my Assassin on a mission to kill the king for reasons unknown happened to get spotted by her and decided to drag her along instead of slitting her throat? O_O

Ultimately, I don't dislike the game. It was an ok six hours, but that's all it is. One evening's entertainment. You may get more mileage if you really wanna go through twice for achievements' sake but the level design is linear and unimaginative and the game just doesn't live up to the potential.
The time stopping is cool though... I can't deny it. Pointlessly cool.

(Edited for typos)

Welcome to Shadwen, a third person stealth game from Frozenbyte, the folks who brought us Trine. You play as Shadwen, a ruthless killer turned babysitter for a girl called Lily. You come across Lily being questioned by a guard because she’s eating an apple and so you take out the guard to help Lily. Despite the fact that you’re on a mission to kill the King, you let Lily stick around and it seems that her main purpose in the game is to natter on about how awful killing is. You’ll have to make sure Lily can safely move through the game’s levels without being spotted.

Visually, Shadwen is a bit of a mixed bag. The graphics are great, even on medium it’s a good looking game and the overall look of the game helps get across the dark and uncivilized nature of the city you find yourself in. The animations are what let the game down in the visual department. The animations are really clunky and in some cases unnatural, the movement of the guards was particularly clunky and some of Shadwen’s animations fall into the unnatural category. I was also a bit disappointed by the lack of any movement for dead guards when you drag them around, they’re completely rigid and it just looks weird.

The actual gameplay in Shadwen is also hit and miss. Most levels are split up into three different sections and your goal for each of these sections is to help Lily reach the end of the level. There will be several different places for Lily to hide and she’ll move from hiding spot to hiding spot so long as there aren’t any enemies in the way. The way forward for Lily can either be achieved by simply killing the guards in her way or by distracting the guards away from Lily so that she can slip past. While killing the guards is obviously a lot easier I found that distracting them was actually a bit more enjoyable. Although having Lily as a companion does lead to some interesting challenges in dealing with guards, I didn’t feel like she was important to the game at all. Other than using her to open doors you have no interaction with Lily and her only purpose within the game is to give you a reason to kill or distract guards. I get that she’s necessary for that purpose but it would have been nice for her to have other stuff in the game to do. More on Lily later.

Killing being easier doesn’t mean it’s entirely safe. First off, if a guard spots a dead body they’ll move to investigate and once they get close they’ll enter an alert status and shout out, triggering nearby guards to enter alert status too. A guard in alert status (who hasn’t spotted you) will run towards the nearest alarm bell and if he reaches it it’s game over for Shadwen. It is possible to pick off one guard in alert status but you’re screwed if more have been alerted. The other way for a guard to enter alert status is if he actually spots you, there’s really not much you can do here as this (in my experience anyway) always leads to death by crossbow bolt. Thankfully you can rewind time!

One of the biggest mechanics in Shadwen is that time only moves when you do and you can also rewind time whenever you want. The whole time only moves when you do mechanic works reasonably well in the game, mostly due to the fact that there’s a key which (when held) makes time continue even when you’re not moving. The problem I have with time moving when you do is that it makes the game considerably easier, even easier when you consider that there are no consequences for failure since you can rewind time. The combination of these two mechanics, while reasonably fun to play around with, make the game feel more like a puzzle game than a stealth game as you’re just trying to figure out the solution that gets Lily safely to the end of the level since if you get something wrong you can just re-do it right away. Maybe that appeals to you but if you’re expecting a traditional stealth game experience or a particularly challenging game you won’t find it here.

While we’re on the subject of difficulty, Shadwen features three difficulty levels: Easy (Line of Sights visible as well as “Helpful Highlights”), Normal (just “Helpful Highlights”) and Hard which features neither. The difficulty levels do not change how tough the enemies are in any way. Helpful highlights consists of enemies who are searching for something being highlighted in yellow, red for enemies in alert status and white for enemies who are speaking. None of these difficulty levels offer any real challenge due to the game’s time mechanics and the fact that the guards are pretty easy to deal with which contributes to the game being far too easy overall. I like to be challenged when I’m playing a stealth game and Shadwen just didn’t challenge me in any way.

Circling back to the levels themselves, the game has fifteen of them. The levels start out with reasonably short lengths but they gradually increase in length and difficulty as you progress through the game. An increase in difficulty essentially equates to how many enemies there are and how close together they are. Obviously, the more guards there are the more guards you’ll need to kill or distract and if they’re closer together it’s harder to create opportunities to pick off guards one by one though it doesn’t make distracting guards much more difficult. The level design in the game is fairly basic in the game and despite different settings the enemy layouts are often identical, for example you’ll find two enemies talking while another guard patrols nearby, there just isn’t enough variation in the levels. The level design also contributes to the game being far too easy because you never need to deal with more than two or three enemies at a time.

Being a stealth game, the quality of the AI is rather important. Unfortunately Shadwen’s AI is fairly weak. The AI will notice movement (if you’re far enough away they won’t realize you’re actually an enemy so they’ll come to investigate) and they will check out any sounds they hear but there are some serious flaws. The biggest issue is that (in my experience anyway) the guards don’t always see Lily and so you can actually instruct her to move to a new location and she’ll walk past the guards, pretty much makes escorting her pointless. The other problem with the AI is that they’re just too simple. Yes, they will detect you but if three guards go to investigate something and only one comes back, he doesn’t bat an eyelid and they seem to have absolutely no periphery vision as I was able to leave dead bodies or even walk beside enemies and they wouldn’t notice.

Just a couple of things to wrap up. Firstly, I didn’t find Shadwen, Lily or the overall story particularly interesting. The story just didn’t grab my attention and neither did the characters. However, I did enjoy the dialogue between guards, they did a good job at world building with the dialogue and while there were only three or four different voice actors the conversations were usually new instead of being repeated. The fifteen missions do offer a fair amount of content for the price but there’s not much in the way of replay value unless you want to go back and replay the levels for achievements (you’ll need at least two playthroughs to unlock them all). I would have liked to have seen a little more variation with the guards since there were only two different types and even then the only real variation was that one of the guards required an aerial attack to kill.


Shadwen may be enjoyable for some but its weak AI and the fact that it’s far too easy really let it down. If you’re looking for a stealth game that’s not too challenging you might want to grab it, if not I’d suggest waiting for a sale.

Lone Ranger Reviews.

El K.

Shadwen is not a AAA diamond, polished to a shine, and I am not going to tell you that it does not ache for some better coding in places. For a game released in 2016 it feels more like the early Thief games. The models and textures have been updated; the animations, maybe not. But its engine is serviceable, and used to create a fun twist on the stealth genre.

I see some reviewers referring to this game as one big escort mission, and it isn't fair. The little girl, Lily, can't die. She can't even alert the guards. She follows a more or less predetermined path through the levels and it is your job to clear the way for her, not because if she's seen you will lose, but because she won't allow herself to be seen -- if a guard is watching her path, she will run back to cover.

Now, that said, Lily is elite. She plays the game like a stealth veteran, walking right up behind guards and waiting for them to turn so she can slip past them. She runs along lines of peripheral vision like she's the assassin, not you. Her pathing might be the best bit of coding in the game. That's not to say she never glitches, but when she does, it is generally in your favor.

If you're really into stealth games like I am, you might actually find yourself wishing she was less good, because at times it doesn't feel ilke she is adding the challenge to the game you were expecting.

Shadwen is reasonably priced and worth a purchase for stealth fans, if only because more indie developers need to be encouraged to move into this space. With Assassin's Creed moving further and further from traditional stealth and the future of Metal Gear Solid in question, there is a void to fill, and Frozenbyte has made a good faith effort.

Killing is easy, not killing and getting away with it is the challenge!

Ok, so the little girl can be annoying and not go where you want sometimes, but I got kids..... they never do as they are told.

You play Shadwen as an assassin on a quest to kill the king, but along the way she encounters a little girl, Lily. Lily follows Shadwen on her adventure throughout the kingdom, and you have to make the moral decision along the way of whether to murder enemy guard’s right in front of this poor little girl’s eyes or find another way around.

The main game play in Shadwen is quite simply, remain hidden from enemy guards. If you get caught or detected, you will fail. The game’s rewind time mechanic allows you to rectify any mistakes you make really easily and you will make a lot of them. Accidently knock over some glass bottles and alert the guard? Just rewind time and be more careful next time! The game also offers a unique element where if your character is not moving time freezes. This took me a while to get used to as it can be a little disorienting when you are used to the world just carrying on around you when you are idol, but you soon get used to it and are able to use it to your full advantage. It allows you to plot your next movement precisely without worry of being caught, it also makes clambering up buildings and scaffolding much easier as you can pause time and carefully aim where your next grapple hook is going to land.

Speaking of the grapple hook, this will also be a key piece of equipment throughout the game. You can use it to grab onto objects in the environment to cause a distraction for the guards. You can pull crates, shelves, pretty much anything which can be moved around with your hook. This will allow you to slip past guards unnoticed and without brutally killing them. You can even make deaths of guards look like it was an accident, maybe by pulling a box down on their heads, and whilst this does count as you killing them, the guards won’t instantly become alert of any suspicious activity. You will also be able to create traps and decoys too, these more or less will also kill the guard, but in much more interesting ways than just stabbing them in the back, with items such as poison traps and spiked devices.

The aim on each level is to create path safe for the young girl Lily to pass through unharmed. The game right down to its core is essentially a long escort quests, but don’t worry – Lily’s AI is absolutely stellar. She will remain hidden in shadows, boxes and haystacks and not cause you any unwarranted hassle. You can more or less forget about her right up until you reach the end of the level and have to backtrack to clear a path for her. She won’t just walk out in front of guards, or make any noise which you wouldn’t normally expect. I was really impressed with how well Lily reacted to every situation thrown at her such as guards unexpectedly changing their patrol path. Lily will stop where she is going and immediately find somewhere to hide. This is how escort quests should be done!

Shadwen looks absolutely stunning. The game is ran using the developers own game engine, which doesn’t have a published name yet, but it is safe to say they have a real asset on their hands. The almost photo realistic environments and character models are something special to gawk at. Lighting and shadow is used perfectly to not only create a dark atmosphere but also to enhance the gameplay elements of stealth and deception. Character animations throughout are fluid and realistic too. You can really get fully immersed in this game’s world as it will suck you in with its beautiful art style. The game’s voice acting is spot on as well; between levels you will get some dialogue between Shadwen and Lily, and throughout game play you also get to listen out for guards chattering between themselves too. The sound effects play a key part in the game, guards really pay attention to any sounds and will investigate. Anything you bump into, move or interact with will cause a sound, so you really need to pay attention to what is around you at any time.

At the start of the game you have three levels of difficulty. The easy mode will remove most of the game’s challenging aspect and allow you to ghost past a lot of the levels with much ease. This will add a cone of sight on all enemies making it easy for you to see what they can see. If you want the full experience of stealth you really need to be playing on the medium option. You can change the difficulty of levels on the fly which is always nice to see in any game.

Whilst there is about six hours of content on offer in Shadwen, I don’t really see there being any real replay value on show. You could possibly get a second run throughout of it, as depending on how many guards you kill throughout the story, will affect the way Lily thinks about Shadwen during and at the end of the game. This is the sort of game which would really benefit from seeing some sort of daily challenge mode included, or an extra game mode that we saw in the likes of Dishonored with its time trails.

I was impressed with how well the game ran, I was able to get a steady 60 FPS with all the graphical settings turned up to max. The only grip I had with the game was you cannot change the graphic settings whilst in game, you have to quit back to desktop to change anything but a minor issue none the less. I played using a keyboard and mouse but full controller support is available.

Shadwen is a game that caught my attention right away from its gorgeous graphics and interesting game play. The core game play mechanics remain absolutely key to the game’s success and any stealth and action fans will definitely need to be checking Shadwen out. This is coming close to Frozenbyte’s best game that they have released. The regular price is well worth what you are getting in terms of production values and gripping game play.

Disclaimer: The following review was conducted on PC via Steam. A code was provided by the developer for review purposes.