We’re excited to announce our new stealth IP: Shadwen! Release in 2016.
Shadwen is a true stealth game where the only rule is to remain unseen. Stay hidden – or the ruthless guards will capture you on sight.
Check out the very first trailer below!
Shadwen, an assassin on a quest to kill the king, has a chance encounter with a little orphaned girl, Lily. She follows Shadwen on her dangerous journey, but when the ruthless guards get too close, Shadwen must take action right in front of Lily’s eyes.
Will Shadwen resort to violence and let Lily witness her crimes, or can she find another way and protect the child’s innocence?
To kill or not to kill – that is the question.
FEATURES:
- Stay hidden – avoid detection and guards, who will ruthlessly kill you upon capture.
- Time is an accomplice – time stands still when you are not controlling Shadwen, allowing you to stop at any point: mid-motion, during jumps, right before a guard sees you.
- Carefully rewind time to manipulate your past and present actions to gain an upper hand on the guards. Make precision movements to nail each move and try different strategies for the ultimate solution.
- Pick your assassinations carefully. Avoid being seen, heard or getting caught indirectly. Suspicious sights and noises will alert the guards – use it to your benefit.
- Sneak and explore around the dark and gritty medieval province and use the environment to your advantage – use your rope to grapple onto rooftops, silently drop from ceilings, or veil yourself in the shadows.
- Use physics and a freely attachable rope to drag and topple objects. Make deaths look accidental; let gravity do the grave work.
- Set up traps and hazards to lure guards towards their untimely demise; discover new ways to eliminate or distract your foes by crafting items into deadly surprises, including poison traps, spike devices, smoke bombs and more.
- Lethal and non-lethal solutions. Choose your play style but remember: actions have consequences.
- Become a true god of stealth and protect Lily’s innocence – complete the game with no bodies left behind.
PRE-ALPHA DEBUT DEMO!
Available only for Humble Monthly‘s December subscribers. Provided only as an additional extra, not as a part of the regular December Monthly drop of games, and does not entitle to the full game upon release in 2016.
Hope you enjoy this exclusive sneak peek! If you’ve tried it, we’d be stoked to hear your thoughts!
Follow Shadwen on Twitter and Facebook to make sure you get all the latest news and updates!
Don’t forget the Frozenbyte Instagram and Snapchat (frozenbytegames) either. 🙂
4 comments on “Shadwen – Frozenbyte’s New Stealth Game Announced”
There are a few things I’ve noticed that concern me with the game – the time mechanic, the kill approach, and the story around Lily.
So we can see that if you screw up then it’s no biggie because there is no punishment for failure – just go back in time! This is kind of weak in my view. I hope there is a little more to it than that, but it looked, on the face of it, to be save scumming at its finest.
When dealing with the guards it looks like there are two methods – do not engage, or slaughter. What about knockouts? The aim, it appears, is to reach a single person to kill. Leaving a load of bodies in your wake is not the assassination approach, it is any first or third person shooter. So could there be a different way to take out the guards that is not so violent? I’m thinking temporary knockouts, a la NOLF, where the guards are down for a set time, and then wake up, or where the guards remain unconscious, but can be woken if a partner finds them, a la Dishonored. Ultimately, this could also play into the nature of Lily’s “innocence”, which brings me to:
Who is Lily? Why do we care whether she sees a violent death or not? The period this game is set in, if aligned with our own European history, was one where death was much more common, and children learned the hard truths much earlier than they do today. Lily, as an orphan, would probably be much more aware of the brevity of life than most people in the first world now. So is there something else that is important about Lily that requires her to remain innocent? Does she have a back story, or is she basically a familiar who measures your own morality?
Those points aside, I am excited for this game. I really want it to be good, because I love stealth games – the Thief series was one of my all time favourites – and I don’t think there are enough of them on the market. The pseudo middle ages is a great time period for story-telling, with rambling castles and cobble-street cities. I look forward to new developments.
One thing I forgot to mention – the grapple rope that can attach to any acceptable surface, great! the original Thief games, Gold/Dark Project and The Metal Age, had the same system for their rope arrows, where you could attach the rope wherever you wanted (as long as the surface was wood). When the reboot of Thief came along it was a pity that they went for a consolised system where you could only attach a rope to certain very specific points, limiting the freedom of movement.
Your return, here, to the older system is actually a good step forward, ironically, and will lead to much more varied and organic gameplay. Good decision!
I already loved this game. it seem a really good stealth game and I love stealth game… Also I’m not a big fan of new triple A stealth (like deus ex hr and hitman absolution) because are too easy compared to old games… also they have a different feeling…
when I saw a gameplay of this game I see some new, and good, feature but also that good feeling of the old good games (maybe it’s the dark atmosfere or the lack of cinematographic cutscenes that sometimes are too intrusive).
trine was a good novelty for me. but as a stealth shadwen could even become one of my favorite games.
You forgot to mention the platforms the game will be released for!
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