Shadwen is a stealth adventure game from the developers of Trine

Its been known for a while now that Shadwen, Frozenbyte's time-bending stealth game, would be coming at some point in May, but now we finally have an official release date as well, May 17th.

You can expect to see Shadwen on the PC, PS4, Mac, and Linux at a €17/$17 price tag, with a slight discount awaiting those that buy it during the launch week. If you're wondering how all of it looks in action, here's the most recent trailer:

 

As you might expect from a stealth game, you'll have plenty of nifty tricks and tools with which you can dispatch guards in both lethal and non-lethal fashion, with levels designed around the idea of giving you numerous ways of approaching any single objective. Best of all, you'll be able to make full use of the physics engine to either create impromptu traps, or shelters out of the environment itself.

The most interesting gameplay mechanic, however, is the fact that time completely stops when you're standing still, allowing you to asses your environment, think up an excellent plan, and then completely fumble the execution. Thankfully there is also an option to rewind time, so if you find yourself in quite the pickle, you can go back a couple of steps and hopefully avoid the whole mess.

What excites me the most, and I'm fully aware of how bizarre this will sound, is that on the surface your character in Shadwen seems to be completely overpowered in every conceivable sense. The reason I say this is because in order to make Shadwen an actually fun game to play the levels will need to be expansive, tricky, and filled with enemies who have more than a single brain cell spread among them, as anything else will result in the player simply waltzing through.

It has been many, many years now since I've last played a decently challenging stealth game, so here's to hoping Shadwen manages to channel the same excellent level design as the Thief series, the modern one notwithstanding.