The odds of pulling over a stack of crates or swinging from a balance beam and getting the exact outcome you want in Shadwen are every bit as disappointing as you’d expect, which is why the ability to pause and rewind time at will-far from being a gimmicky replacement for the quicksave button-is weirdly crucial, letting you carry out your plans exactly as you envision them with a bottomless supply of trial-and-error on tap. Physics engines also have a history of being about as consistent and predictable as a litter of excitable puppies when dealing with anything more complicated than two cubes stacked on top of one another, and while this is all very well when chaos is the end goal-ragdolls sailing through the air, oil drums exploding, walls collapsing into dusty piles of poorly-mortared bricks-it’s not so welcome when you’re in a genre that punishes a lack of precise, careful, well-timed manoeuvres with a crossbow bolt to the face. There are a few sticking points here, though the grappling hook will only latch onto wood, or more specifically, bits of geometry that the game has officially acknowledged as wood, which isn’t always the same thing.
Like the rest of Frozenbyte’s catalogue, Shadwen is a game with an endearing Half-Life-2-esque fascination with using physics for absolutely everything it can an infatuation that manifests through your ability to drag props around, swing from overhangs, and generally behave like a bargain-basement Rico Rodriguez without the snazzy accent or parachute-farting capabilities. Presumably her conscience doesn’t extend to the women and children who will inevitably perish in the winter because she just gutted the family breadwinner on his night shift.Īnyway, back to grappling hooks, which are a much more reliable and entertaining investment than children. Shadwen accidentally reveals herself to a poor gutter snipe called Lily on the way to stab the new King, and rather than doing something sensible-like, say, cutting out the girl’s tongue and locking her in a broom closet-Shadwen’s Other M instinct kicks in and forces her to take inexplicable pity on the child, letting her tag along for the journey. Like the chap from F.E.A.R., you have the totally inexplicable ability to manipulate time-in this case, being able to freeze and rewind it as often and as far as you like-and also like the chap from F.E.A.R., there's a nasty little girl hanging around making your job a bit harder than it ought to be. You are the titular Shadwen, a humourless no-nonsense assassin on a murderous mission in the land of knights and castles and preposterously brutish slowly-patrolling guardsmen.
#Shadwen re full#
Thus my attention was snared by Shadwen, a stealth game with a backpack full of ideas that picked up the humble grappling hook, studied it for a moment, and eagerly stuffed it in with the rest of the mechanics.Īnd what a strange grab-bag of mechanics it is. There are so many ways the grappling hook can behave so many rules to be defined for its behaviour, and the marvellous thing is that no matter what those rules turn out to be, there's bound to be a creative application for it. What other gadget can promise to add so much with nothing more than a simple rope constraint? You get interesting mobility, shaped by momentum and gravity and the subtle vertical details of your surroundings, but you also get catharsis, either from the damage inflicted by the things you pull towards you, or the damage you inflict on yourself as you swing bodily into the side of a bridge support. In the past I've often asserted-usually with the air of a facetious scamp deploying his finest hyperbole-that there's no game on this planet that couldn't be improved, in some way or another, by the addition of a simple grappling hook.
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