Your intrepid heroes hide in the dark, jump off things, and stab. Shadwen faces the CHAIRQUISITION!
Game: Shadwen
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/425210
Devel: Frozenbyte
Engine: Trine 3 Engine Frozenbyte Engine 4
Price: €16.99 / USD$16.99 / CDN$ 18.99
Wazzat: Shadwen is a 3rd person stealth-action game where the only rule is to remain unseen. Stay hidden – or the ruthless guards will kill you on sight!
CHAIRQUISITION:
Makes with the working
V-
- It’s 2016 but I’m dinging it a chair for 2025 Venn.
- He might want to replay it at something higher than 1440p.
J-
- Hey! They fixed the fullscreen @UHD issue from trine 3 and their old demo
P-
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Shiny / Sounds
V-
- Darkness, Imprisoning me. All that I see. Absolute… well, darkness.
- Mushy, brown tinted, darkness.
- But that’s enough about the colour palette.
- Let’s talk about Really? o_0 what is wrong /w your face
- Right, moving on to the sounds.
- If you were expecting a bitching Trine esque soundtrack you will be disappoint.
- Because all you get is muted background noise interrupted by the occasional lady grunt.
J-
- The visual aesthetic is consistent with the setting
- The soundscape is also competently designed
- I don’t know why Venn expects loud music in a stealth game though
- However, the visuals look like an early ps3 game. They got away with this in trine 3 because of the cartoony aesthetic. Doesn’t really work here
P-
- They have their own screen of nope with the basic graphical options and resolution settings, limited as they are.
- Still, the game looks very pretty even if you don’t exactly enjoy their choice of character stylization.
- The brown/purple/orange visuals are very reminiscent of 2009-2016 Ubuntu releases but, in my opinion, they lend this game a nice visual atmosphere.
- And that atmosphere is compounded by a very good sound design as well.
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Control
V-
- Pedro mentioned they did something fky /w the gerbil.
- Explains why their is something fky /w the gerbil.
- Every aspect of this game’s control-organ can be encapsulated in one word, jaaaaaanky.
- Fky arse camera control because gerbil.
- A grappling hook that only sorta kinda works if you pause, take aim, and pray to the deity of your choice.
- And get this, they borrowed the busted grappling hook (scroll wheel) length mechanic from Trine 3.
- Playing the ground game is no better since collision detection is often too busy playing Trine 2 (The last good game from Frozenbyte) to realize that you are stuck between an empty space and a hay bail.
- In all fairness, this probably comes from the main characters inherent need to STICK TO EVERYTHING!
- And don’t get me started on little A.I. kid.
- I never seen a bot eat so many chicken wings more on rails.
J-
- It is complete horseshit that I can’t use my super fast scrollwheel as a zipline. HORSESHIT. -1 Chairs
- Dragging things with the hookshot using the scroll wheel seems to be a bit of a crapshoot as well
- I actually ran into an input bug that only allowed me to rotate my camera 90 degrees. It was fun
- I honestly don’t see this game working all that well on a controller. I also don’t want to go through the trine 2 exercise of figuring out a sane controller mapping
P-
- First thing I noticed when I started the game was the weird sticky mouse cursor which seemed to move at different speeds for no apparent reason.
- Checked the FerPS, they were holding steady at around 90-ish in the menu. So that couldn’t be it.
- So, I decided to tweak the sensitivity in the options menu. It has absolutely no effect on the cursor itself.
- There is some sort of software interposer between how the OS handles the mouse and the way the game interprets said input.
- And, as is often the case with those (see Source games if you’re not using Raw Input), it causes mouse deceleration.
- Why can’t I disable this?
- Also, the only way you’ll have full controller support, is if you use a mouse to help you set the bindings in the options menu.
- Guess I don’t need to expound on why that’s a problem when SteamOS is a thing, hm?
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FUN
V-
- When you start off you’re all outside and shite.
- It’s a bit neat with all the exploring and swinging.
- That all ends when you enter the city, which is apparently located in Barrow, Alaska.
- So, what elks can you do?
- You can run about, stab.
- Walk, stab.
- Swing, stab.
- Jump off things, stab.
- Craft shite, stab.
- Close game, stab.
- I’m at the three hour mark and simply no longer care, stab.
J-
- Pedro will get into more detail regarding this, but this really is a puzzle game.
- Sort of like a more extrapolated hitman go
- However, where Hitman Go had a relatively simple set of rules to follow, this is a little bit of a fustercluck
- Most of the time, I’m dark souls pivoting around enemies to stab them between the ribs. Not very assasinny
- Also, I really don’t get the point of trying to protect the little girl’s innocence.
- Listen, I don’t have time to explain medieval politics or power vacuums to a 6 year old girl. If I don’t kill his entire standing military ALONG WITH THE KING, another one of these assholes will pop up and we’ll be having this exact same conversation a year later
- Still, the babysitting mechanic wasn’t as overt as I thought it’d be. She doesn’t expose herself or you to the guards
- But yeah, there’s a lot of waiting, a lot of sneaking around, and a whole lot of yawning
- The superhot movement thing really only works for the swinging so that you have enough time to aim your hookshot
- I used an Item I crafted once. You have to look through every chest to find the pieces and it takes FOREVER
- But it’s boring.
P-
- Some games take a specific mechanic and integrate it into the core gameplay.
- They make everything else compliment that mechanic.
- In Shadwen, the whole “time stops when you stop” thing is completely unnecessary!
- It was a completely superfluous mechanic to the gameplay they already had.
- The game would work perfectly well without it. How do I know this?
- Meet my Tissot T wristwatch. It sat on the Q key, the whole time I was playing this game.
- And I played all the way through it. So take my word for it when I say, it was a tacked on mechanic.
- The core mechanic in this game is the whole “Escort quest” thing.
- You have to take Lily along with you on your mission to Assassinate the King.
- And this is where they put the little twist in the typical Escort Quest paradigm you have in other games.
- You can get to the end of the game with or without exposing Lily to your neck stabbing or the corpses of previously neck stabbed guards.
- It creates a challenge for people like me who like to artificially handicap themselves in videogames. Not that I – specifically – would need need to further handicap myself but I do like a challenge!
- It’s a puzzle game of figuring out which way you’re going and then working your way from the end of the map back to Lily, killing/distracting guards and hiding the corpses of the ones you killed.
- And in my opinion, while not exactly revolutionary, it’s a nice twist on the puzzle genre. It would definitely be worth three chairs.
- Except it has problems.
- It claims to have full controller support, but only after you’ve gone in and mapped everything in the options menu.
- If you have a Mistress of your own, you can get around it by using the Mouse & Keyboard mappings.
- Then there’s that stupid mouse deceleration happening, which the only thing it did was make sure I never used the inventory to craft anything else beyond the grappling hook.
- Also, every now and again, the AI will break.
- This isn’t a big issue on guards, since they’re pretty brain dead already.
- But the moment the AI breaks on Lily. Get ready to reload that checkpoint and do everything all over again, cuz that little runt won’t move and if she doesn’t move you can’t progress.
- And the whole “time stops when you stop” which, as I mentioned, adds nothing to the game.
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Final –
