$16.99Shadwen Stealth at your own pace
Sneak an assassin through a grim medieval city, with time itself on your side and a small witness at your side.
Is Shadwen worth it?
Shadwen is worth it if…
- you like stealth you can plan slowly instead of reacting fast
- you enjoy physics sandboxes where the environment is your main weapon
- you want your choices to matter to someone, even a small someone
- you would rather replay a level a new way than grind through a long campaign
Screenshots
Time waits for you, literally
Time only moves when Shadwen moves. Stand still and the world freezes: guards hang mid-stride, crossbow bolts hang in the air, and you can study the whole scene like a chess board before committing. It turns tense stealth into something closer to turn-based planning, without the usual punishment for a wrong step.
Made a mistake? Rewind. Instead of reloading the level, you can pull your own actions back and try the approach again from a few seconds earlier. Freeze mid-leap, check where the guard is about to turn, then adjust. Once it clicks, the game plays like a puzzle you solve at your own speed, and the pressure of being seen never quite goes away, it just becomes something you can outthink.
A rope, gravity and bad luck for guards
Shadwen carries a rope that attaches to almost anything, and the physics do the rest. Grapple up to rooftops, drop silently from a ceiling, or drag objects around to topple them onto the wrong person at the right moment. A heavy crate rolled off a ledge reads as an accident. A keg of gunpowder pulled onto a campfire does not, but it does remove two guards from your problem very quickly.
Crafting adds to the toolkit: from found blueprints and parts you build poison traps, spike devices and decoy toys that lure guards exactly where you want them. Deaths can look like misfortune or like a massacre, and choosing which is half the fun. The levels can be walked many ways, and finding a route nobody else would think of is where the game shines.
What should you know before playing?
How long is it, and is there a reason to replay?
A single run is fairly short, around seven to eight hours across fifteen levels. The two approaches play differently enough that many people run the game twice, once as a ghost and once as a butcher, and the endings change with your behaviour. Chapter select makes a second pass easy.
What is the story about?
Shadwen is an assassin travelling to kill the king. On the way she meets Lily, an orphaned girl who follows her, and the heart of the story is that relationship: what Lily sees, what she believes, and whether Shadwen will bloody her hands in front of a child to stay on schedule. The plot itself is simple, told in short scenes between levels and guard chatter, so come for the stealth and the companion more than a deep plot.
Do you have to protect Lily constantly?
She follows you from hideout to hideout and can open doors for you, but the game is lenient about it: she cannot get you killed through ordinary carelessness, so she works more as a moving puzzle piece than a liability. You decide when and how she moves, and keeping her path safe is part of planning each level.
