She’ll call you a murderer, she’ll question your morality, and she’ll even become scared of you. If Lily sees you killing people, or happens upon a dead body, she will get upset. There are games like the SWAT series, where playing non-lethally is the optimal strategy and killing is generally more trouble than it’s worth.Īnd then there’s Shadwen, where a murderous approach is by far the easier way to play the game, in a purely mechanical sense, but comes with a clear narrative cost. There are games like Splinter Cell and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided where the focus is on giving players a choice in how they approach the game, with no particular aspect being framed as better or easier. There are games like Metal Gear Solid, where the no-killing route is purely there for an additional challenge and, perhaps, a point of philosophical projection by the player. It’s a remarkable hook because, as much as the stealth genre in particular loves to flaunt the ability to take a pacifist route, it’s rarely enforced in the way that it is in Shadwen. However, Lily is young, impressionable, and doesn’t respond well when Shadwen kills enemies, so there is, in theory, a strong motivation to take the much more difficult non-lethal approach.
The basic premise is that, on the way to kill the king, the eponymous assassin saves a young girl called Lily who, with nowhere else to go, tags along. A game doesn’t need to be “good” to be worth playing, and Shadwen is a perfect example of that. It’s so unpolished in its current state that I couldn’t in any right mind recommend it to someone looking for high-quality entertainment, but it’s so rife with good ideas, and could be such an important point of reference in the future, that the thought of it not getting some wide exposure saddens me. It’s not necessarily a good game, but it’s certainly an interesting one, which makes it a curious game to review.
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