To make matters worse, the levels the AI trudge around in can sometimes be far too basic to be engaging. It was laborious, frustrating, and if it weren’t the only reliable way to keep her away it would really seem to be going against the spirit of the game. My general strategy devolved into carrying the guard’s corpse to drag it to a hiding spot, turning the camera to Lily, and spamming the button that orders her to move, giving me enough time to hide my kill. Trying to hide a body to make sure she doesn’t see it? Too bad, here she comes anyway because there aren’t any guards around, and so it’s her time to leg it. If she’s not refusing to move, she’s refusing to stay put. I don’t know how many times I’ve successfully gotten to the end of the stage, only to then have to go back to shift a guard out of the way just to get Lily to move.

Coordinating with her is almost impossible, and when the level only ends once both Shadwen and Lily are at the final gate, that can be a royal pain in the arse. Sometimes ordering her to move will make her run half way, see a guard, and run all the way back to where she came from, only for her to then run straight past an entire garrison of guards on the way back. Lily will run to the next hiding place as soon as she thinks no guards are looking, except when she thinks she’s not being seen and when she’s actually not being seen seem to be two entirely different things. Players who want to protect her will need to put extra effort into hiding the bodies in bushes or out of her path before she sees them, and this is where a lot of the game’s frustration comes into effect. Some of the story can change depending on how well you hide the atrocities you commit from her she’ll be traumatised if she sees a corpse, and eventually adopt a more nihilistic outlook on the game’s events. Every level revolves around leading Lily, a small orphan who takes a liking to our protagonist, to safety.

In fact, the AI in general is Shadwen’s biggest stumbling point. While superhuman AI isn’t a big challenge when any mistake can be undone, it does ruin any real attempt to build tension. The rewind mechanic also feels like an easy way to cover up the unforgiving and binary guard AI that can identify, take aim, and kill the player in one shot almost instantly. A button has to be held to make time move when the player is stationary, meaning waiting for guards to move out of the way (a core part of almost any stealth game) can be more than a minute of just sitting in a bush, awkwardly holding one key down. It’s a neat idea in isolation, but it’s not one I think lends itself particularly well to a stealth game. If everything goes wrong and the guards are alerted, time can also be rewound to attempt a section again and again. This gives the player time to assess their surroundings, look for vantage points, and aim the grappling hook to perform speedy air manoeuvres. The main mechanical hook of Shadwen is that, much like Superhot, time won’t move until the player does. What’s worse is that it manages to fall short in some of the most crucial ways a stealth game could. Unfortunately, after playing both the preview build and the final retail copy, it’s safe to say that Shadwen is as bare-bones as it gets. With that setup, and a really interesting world to play about in, there’s no way it could fail, right? Wrong. Shadwen has a really cool premise: take control of an assassin (also called Shadwen) with a grappling hook and the ability to manipulate time, to sneak through an occupied city with a little orphan girl to take down a despotic king. A few nuggets of goodness buried under a mountain of bland

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