Shadwen Review: Escorting in Stealth Games Can be Fun!

Shadwen is a stealth/action game from Frozenbyte (makers of Trine). But this is not like any other stealth game I have played before. The most striking feature of Shadwen is how time works. Once the player stops moving, the time also stops. Another not-so-popular feature is having to escort an NPC (Lily) throughout the entire game. 

This time stop feature feels gimmicky as you can simply push a button to flow the time normally. The only time I really made use of this feature was when I was jumping around to grapple on higher objects. As I had to be precise, jumping and then immediately stopping the time while I am mid-air allowed me to easily target the place I wanted to move towards. Other than that I generally found this feature a little bit annoying. But I definitely respect the developers for trying something new on an already niche genre. 

In addition to the stop time, the game also has rewind time option which is the best feature in the game. It works exactly like it does in Life is Strange and it allows for some much riskier gameplay as you don’t have to reload a save every time you fail. 

Now let’s talk about escorting Lily. I had so many questions bothering me, “how can I instruct her to move?”, “will she break my ghost run?”, “what will guards do when they see her?” and so on. Escorting can be the most annoying thing to do in stealth games. Hell just thinking of those escort missions in MGS V Phantom Pain and Styx Master of Shadows reminds me of some rather nightmarish memories. 

That being said I absolutely loved how they approached this feature. Lily will NOT get you detected in any way even if she is being seen by the guards and in fact she is actually an insanely sneaky little girl. As soon as she finds an opening, however small it might be, she just starts running to the next scripted hiding spot. You can also easily control her movements with a button but her AI is already quite capable so most of the time I just let her move by herself. I expected this feature to be the most frustrating one but it actually provided me with some awesome entertainment. Watching her abruptly bumping into guards over and over again only to rush back to her previous hiding spot in panic was totally hilarious.

Shadwen has a very intuitive and user friendly crafting system. In order to craft traps, first you need to find plans contained in chests you can find throughout the game. Levels are fairly short and linear so these chests are quite easy to find. Once you find the plan, you can see what kind of materials you need to craft the trap. These materials can be found inside the same chests. However, I found the number of traps you can craft fairly limited and they are generally targeted at lethal playstyle. 

It is safe to say that the actual culprit in the game is the AI of guards. They are completely stupid and very easy to take advantage of which is my biggest complaint. In the beginning as I was struggling to find the detach grappling hook button a guard started patrolling near my rope. The rope got tangled around his legs and he kept moving like nothing happened while my rope followed him. Another odd thing with the AI is that they investigate the source of the noise instead of moving objects. You can grapple a box, make it hit the ground and drag it right in front of their faces but they will still go where the box initially hit the ground. Noone really cares about a box moving by itself and noone follows it… So it can get a bit tedious to lure enemies to a particular location but it does make some funny moments!

I also have complaints about the difficulty. The hardest difficulty doesn’t really increase AI reactions or their cone of vision, it only removes markers. Some top difficulty with challenging AI, more expansive vision for guards and Lily’s detection failing the mission would be most welcome.

The game has 2 different endings for both lethal and non-lethal approach so in total you can have 4 endings depending on how you play and which choices you make during the final cutscene. It adds a lot to the replayability of the game but that being said, I found the narrative of the general story based on your play style and their corresponding endings inconsistent. Without spoiling the story, Shadwen's general attitude towards Lily or vise versa during a lethal playthrough will not make sense once you see the ending, same thing goes for non-lethal ending as well.     

To sum up Shadwen has provided me with the most entertaining escort type of stealth gameplay I have ever seen. It managed to make this try-hard serious hardcore stealth purist laugh out loud rather than punch desks which some other stealth games are known to make me do. While the execution of AI and difficulty options need improvement, the game is still a breath of fresh air and the developers deserve high praise for their attempt! I really hope to see more unique Stealth games like Shadwen in the future.