#Shadwen play time how to#

And in almost every case, explosions or “accidents” alert the guards and cause you to “lose,” so there’s a powerful disincentive to actually playing the game this way. Explosive barrels can be tipped over and rolled into campfires, but good luck lining them up. The physics engine, while frequently hilarious, often thwarts such plans however. There’s a light Hitman vibe here, where you want to push your luck to see what you can actually get away with. It’s fun surveying a town square from high above, looking for opportunities to cause chaos.

#Shadwen play time how to#

Instead, it seems that Shadwen’s most interesting challenges are self-imposed: Figure out how to get a guard to walk into a dart trap or across a mine, or attach a sticky bomb to a rolling contraption to see if you can take out three at a time. There’s a rudimentary crafting system that allows you to create a variety of distractions and traps, but I never found them necessary to progress – taking out a sentry or two, or yanking down some furniture or barrels, were usually the only tactics required to finish a level. Guards will also raise the alarm once they’ve become “alerted,” either by seeing you directly or finding a dead comrade, and this also means an end to your assassination mission.Īs I mentioned above, the lethal path is a far easier way to complete the game. Once you’re spotted, you’ve only got a second or two to break line of sight before the guards will send a crossbow bolt your way, and despite being quite dim in the way that video game guards often are, they do not miss once they’ve got you in their sights. Shadwen is fairly lethal, but in a decidedly stealthy way: one-on-one combat means instant death, so you’ll have to rely on shadows and sneaky backstabs to eliminate enemies, should you decide to take the more lethal (and far easier) path through the game. But the big catch is that time only moves when you do, very much in the vein of this year’s breakout hit Superhot.

Guards can be distracted (usually using the game’s often wacky physics to pull barrels and hay bales around) or murdered, giving the game a frisson of Metal Gear Solid. How you deal with this situation will set the tone for the rest of the game, as you swing Spider-Man style above the streets, avoiding guards and guiding Lily through each level. The premise: As Shadwen, you’re on a mission to assassinate a king, but on your way from the outskirts of town to the castle, you encounter a young girl named Lily being menaced by guards for gathering apples outside a chapel. Not because of the familiar art style or the sometimes-repetitive level design, but because Shadwen (Frozenbyte, 2016) takes cues from so many other games in delivering up its stealth-puzzle-action hybrid of an experience. Stalking my way through the medieval town of Rivenden, I often had the distinct feeling I’d been here before.