That being said, the further into the game you get, the more plausible it is that guards could be looking directly at Lily and not register her presence at all. While it’s nice that Lily can’t cause an immediate game over, it would have been nice if the game had obfuscated its mechanics a little better. When this happens the guard either freezes, struck by temporary blindness, while Lily completes her move, or Lily scarpers back to her original hiding spot – sometimes past a gaggle of guards on her way back. However the game doesn’t factor into its rules what should happen when she moves into the line of sight of a guard that turns around, or walks around a corner.

As per the rules of the game she won’t move into a guards line of sight. Luckily Lily is more or less invisible to guards, thanks to the AI programming. It’s an added level of micromanagement that becomes a tiresome burden very quickly. In each and every level you not only need to get past all the guards without being seen (as soon as you’re spotted it’s game over), but you need to get Lily past them all too. After two brief tutorials that see you control first Lily, then Shadwen, you’re going to need to escort Lily through each and every level. Lily is only, for want of a better term, affected by the killing that she can see – so if you can murder a guard and hide his body away from her sight then she’ll never even know the difference.Īs interesting a premise that is, though, Shadwen is still one long escort mission from start to finish, and not a very good one either. Although to Shadwen’s credit, it’s not as simple as a binary choice. Making the choice between killing or not killing changes the way you approach the game. Guards litter the various levels ahead of you, patrolling slowly between you and your goal. It’s an interesting premise for a stealth game. After saving her, Lily decides to follow Shadwen on her dangerous journey, and Shadwen must make a choice – risk the girl’s trust by killing the guards that stand in her way, or find another way to get to her target. On her travels she runs across a young orphaned girl called Lily being harassed by a guard. Shadwen is a third-person stealth game that casts you as the title character, an assassin who is on a mission to kill the king. This game was reviewed using a key provided by the developers

Shadwen game trailer