Despite just being revealed to the world in December, Frozenbyte announced today that its “true stealth game” Shadwen will launch on May 17. The studio acknowledged that it’s an unusually short time from reveal to release, but said it needed to get another game out fairly quickly after Trine 3 “didn’t do so well,” and that a lot of the necessary groundwork had already been laid.
“There were some initial designs and plans of course that had been done before the actual production started late last year, and we used a lot of the tech that took a long time to make for Trine 3—the rope and movement animations being the biggest and most obvious ones,” a studio rep said. “So it was made in a rush, but we had a very focused plan and the result is something we’re very proud that the team managed to pull off.”
The Trine 3 heritage is definitely there, although toned down quite a bit, and Shadwen herself has fairly obvious echoes of Zoya, that game’s thief character. It’s a little less light-heated and charming, though; I suppose the introduction of murder and hiding bodies away from the innocent eyes of a young orphan girl will have that effect.
