So, Shadwen, a small studio indie stealth/sneaking assassination game went live on Gog.com as well as Steam, so I have decided to try it out.

In some ways the game is very innovative. Rather than putzing around with save games or checkpoints, the game lets you rewind time at any time. So, if you die, for example, rather than having to reload at a certain point, you just hold the rewind button and try what you were doing again. And why not? The point of playing a game is to have fun.

The other thing that's innovative about it is that time freezes when you're not pushing any controls. So even though the game is real time, it's not really about having super reflexes. You can freeze time whenever you want and take unlimited time to aim. I am enjoying this feature because it has the good aspects of real time games, but it also lets me casually sip beer while playing. In this way, it combines the best aspects of real time and turn based games, because turn based games also let me casually sip beer while playing.

The game has something of a bare bones feeling because you can only stealth kill guards. If you are detected the game immediately ends, which isn't as obnoxious as it sounds because you can rewind time at any time. But it sort of feels like being a smaller production they decided to focus on the point of the game, which was stealth, and not tack on a melee combat system, or anything like that. So, it definitely lacks the breadth of Metal Gear, Thief, or Hitman, but on the other hand it also doesn't cost nearly as much as those big name titles.

I am a little disappointed that they didn't go a little crazier with brutal or fun stealth kills, however, seeing as that was the focus of the game. Again, it's a bit limited; there's only one way I've seen so far that you stab people. You can't throw people over ledges or anything like that. You can craft items which I basically haven't really got to try yet even though I've played for a couple of evenings now, and you can Batman around on ledges and things, which is always fun. I remember in contrast how much I enjoyed Tenchu with it's dramatic and flamboyant stealth kills, or even the much-maligned Rogue Warrior which featured over the top highly brutal and varied stealth kills that were probably suggested by Dick Marcinko.

The atmosphere of the game is dark medieval, but I'm not sure if the game is supposed to be a comedy game or not. This is because during the entire game a little girl follows your character around and apparently it affects the storyline if she figures out that you're an assassin versus if she doesn't see you kill anyone and doesn't discover any bodies.

The problem is that this little girl runs from cover to cover as soon as guards aren't looking, so basically it's pretty easy for her to stumble upon you murdering guards or find bodies you leave in her path. You can't just tell her to hold position until everything is perfect. So far I've managed this by sneaking past the first guards in a level, killing the rest of them, cleaning up the level, and then going back to kill the original guards that were preventing the girl from running. I expect that eventually I'll stop caring and just let the girl take in the full extent of the carnage, since it's sort of a pain in the ass.

To me it seems very comical. The game juxtaposes stabbing dudes from behind while blood splashes on the screen with some random kid running all over the level whom you're supposed to shield from the carnage. It almost sounds like some kind of Japanese game show. You're already slaughtering dozens of guards and on a mission to murder the king, so why does it matter overwhelmingly if a kid who insists on following you sees? "Why are we in the king's castle? I thought we were going to your house." "Uh, no reason. My house is, uh, behind the castle!"

So, at the end of the day, I appreciate the innovative or experimental nature of the game. It's not the best game I have ever played but it's not without merit either and I respect the fact it's not a big ticket production. I'll probably try and play it through once but I could take it or leave it.

The rewind mechanism is not that innovative. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time did it some years ago (not sure if it's the first or not), and a few other games since then (Braid comes to mind).
The time freezing when not touching controls has been seen in SUPERHOT, though once again Braid did something similar.

I guess what I meant to say was not that simply being able to rewind time is innovative, but rather that in lieu of traditional save points or checkpoints, you just rewind time. It's an unlimited resource. So, the game encourages risk-taking and crazy stunts or longshots because there isn't really a penalty for failure.

Maybe "innovative" wasn't quite the best word. I could have said "unusual design decision which I nevertheless enjoyed" or something like that.

I've noticed that a lot of my enjoyment of Kerbal Space Program is based on the ability to modify and retry my plans without penalty. Sure, I could calculate all of the relevant forces to figure out what would be efficient, but I'd rather strap on a half dozen solid rockets and see what happens.

I'm guessing Shadwen is an FPS?

Third person stealth and stab game.

Well, I just finished Shadwen this evening. While no one can say it's the best game anyone has ever played, I wouldn't call it a bad game either, for a budget release. I played version 1.0 and there are certainly a few bugs present, but no show-stoppers. As an example, for some reason the game didn't record as achievements the fact that I had completed the last two levels and killed all the guards on these levels, but then again the fun was in the doing, so I'm not too upset. I know I systematically slaughtered all the guards so I don't need to be validated by the game itself.

I think the most interesting comments I would make would be on the special design choices made by the development team:

1.) I don't think that the team intended Shadwen to be a comedy game, but I was never able to shake the inherent hilarity and absurdity of a little girl following around a mother-figure or older-sister-figure Celtic superassassin while the superassassin tries to not have the girl realize that she is slaying guards left and right, by murdering them out of sight and stashing the bodies before the girl can see them. In the first place, what an absurd premise. Since the premise is so absurd, it makes me feel like it's a metaphor. The game makes more sense if we consider the following interpretations:

*The little girl (Lily) represents Shadwen's conscience, and Shadwen concealing all the murders and the bodies represents the psychological mechanism of dissociation and rationalization in the assassin.

*The entire medieval setting is a metaphor and Shadwen is in fact a contemporary woman who enjoys using a strap-on and other fetish activities. She tries to conceal this fact from her daughter, younger sister, or other platonic female companion (represented by Lily) whenever they go out on the town in the evenings and begin engaging with men in flirtatious or sexual capacities. The fact that Shadwen is presented as being on a mission to kill the king suggests she is attracted to men with castration complexes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castration_anxiety).

*A mother (Shadwen) tries to protect her daughter (Lily) from male sexuality and is also in denial about the emergence of adolescence (through role-reversal, by stabbing the guards, but only when she feels the act of stabbing can be concealed from Lily).

2.) At the very end of the game, you can choose whether or not you are going to kill the king, and the choice you make affects the ending, which is mostly focused on the relationship between Lily and Shadwen (as opposed to, say, the political consequences of killing the king versus not killing him, or something like that). Seeing as the game never gets into explicit detail about why Shadwen wants to kill the king or who sent her to do so, it seems like kind of a strange choice to me. You're going to kill a bunch of underlings to get to the boss, but then let the boss off? Seems kind of elitist.

3.) The game is all about stealth kills and setting traps. There is no mechanism to, say, fence with a guard head-on and basically if you're detected and identified it's an instant game over. I don't have a problem with this design decision and I'm sure that if the team had a bigger budget they would have implemented more. However, I do think the game would have benefited from a few more stealth kill animations. Considering that outside of setting traps, you can only kill guards by stabbing them, or by jumping on them from a great height, I think the entertainment factor would have been greatly enhanced if they had more than just the few brutal stabbing animations the game currently contains. The other thing that I felt the game really could have benefited from was a mechanic to shove or throw people over ledges. The game already let you push and pull boxes around, and try to drop boxes or other objects on enemies as another means of killing them, so why not let you give someone a little shove when they're standing near an edge, or let you sprint into someone and bump them in a certain direction?

I would point to the example of Rogue Warrior; Rogue Warrior was by most standards a mediocre game, but the one thing that it did have was a plethora of hilariously brutal stealth and melee kills influenced by period military hand to hand combat. You could throw people off ledges, you could stab them in a variety of ways, you could twist their rifle up towards their face and make them shoot themselves, and you could even beat the crap out of them by punching them. The melee combat animations are one of the most memorable aspects of that game and managed to make it entertaining in spite of a weak overall product.

The thing is, Shadwen is so focused on stealth stabbing, and also one of the most distinctive things about it is this idea of hiding your brutal acts from Lily. So, the game would become more Tarantino-esque by the stealth kills becoming more over the top and brutal combined with the fact that you're frantically stuffing bodies under bushes and things like that before Lily runs by.