Styx: Master of Shadows

The Good
+ Unforgiving stealth gameplay with some magical twists

• Appealing level design with an emphasis on verticality

• Magic powers are fun to use

• Surprisingly interesting storyline

• Decent voice acting
  
  The Bad
  - Overly long campaign where just about every map is recycled and rehashed

• Most upgrades are useless

• AI glitches

• Annoying enemy types

• Average graphics

• Bad soundtrack
  
  The Bottom Line
  Styx: Master of Shadows is a stealth game from French developer Cyanide. This is more of a mid-range game. Not AAA, not indie, but somewhere in-between the two. This game is both a spin-off and a prequel to Of Orcs and Men, an obscure RPG also developed by Cyanide that didn’t exactly earn glowing reviews when it was first released.

  The game follows the titular character Styx, who is a 200-year old, intelligent goblin, as he attempts to infiltrate Akenash, a city based around a giant central tower. He wants to steal the heart of the World Tree at its core. The World Tree produces a magical sap called “amber”, which appears to be harvested and used as a drug by humans and elves. The plot is initially very confusing. It’s difficult to get a handle on what everything is in the world, and the exposition and worldbuilding feel decidedly rushed. That being said, it’s certainly worth sticking to, as there is a plot twist which occurs about halfway through the game that is actually rather cool, and the overall story gets a whole lot more interesting from there on in.

  Styx is a master of stealth and a hardened, efficient killer. He is able to blend into shadows, making it much harder to see him. His diminutive size allows him to creep through vents, hide under tables, and take cover behind knee-high objects. Styx is also an agile jumper and climber. The levels are often vertical and are designed to take advantage of this.

  There are several different types of items that Styx can make use of. In addition to health and amber potions, Styx can also use acid to instantly clear dead bodies, use throwing knives to kill enemies from afar, and use sand to put out wall-mounted torches from a distance. Unlike other stealth games, there is no “non-lethal” option in Styx other than simply sneaking past enemies. This does create a bit of an interesting challenge. After all, it’s easy to just shoot tranquilizers or knock out guards with a black jack and forget about them. Styx forces you to either sneak or kill, and you really don’t have options otherwise.

  In addition to the aforementioned items and abilities, Styx also has several magical powers, which are controlled by the amber. The first is “Amber Vision”, which highlights interactive objects and enemies in the environment, allowing for planning a clear path. Styx can turn invisible for a short period of time, which comes in handy for more reasons than you might realize. Finally, the most interesting ability by far is cloning. Styx can essentially vomit out a controllable “clone”. This clone is capable of crossing under certain doorways, distracting guards, and exploding in a puff of smoke. Later on, you can upgrade it to grab and hold enemies for a bit, and place them in boxes to grab whatever enemy comes near them. There are also a few puzzles which require you to operate Styx and the clone in order to open doors. The catch is that the clone is extremely fragile and will die in one hit, in addition to having a short timed lifespan. All of these abilities are powered by amber, which is usually in very short supply. If you run out, you’ll have to attempt to pickpocket it off of the guards. That being said, you will always have enough amber to at least create a clone or use amber vision, though more advanced abilities such as invisibility and clone smoke bombs will require a greater supply of amber.

  When detected, you can either run away or attempt to battle your pursuer. Styx punishes mistakes, as it’s very difficult, mostly impossible to survive after being detected, though with enough practice and some ingenuity and luck it’s sometimes doable. The combat itself is highly simplistic. The camera will lock on to the nearest enemy while you strafe around them. You can either parry them a few times with your dagger or dodge-roll away them and try to escape. Some enemies will kill you immediately if they catch you, however. In addition, any enemies who use projectile weapons such as knives or arrows will not hesitate to use them even if you are battling a guard, meaning that if you need to fight someone the best place to do it is relatively far away from other guards. There are a couple of sections where you absolutely cannot be detected or even raise suspicion at all, which can be extremely frustrating. There are a couple of boss fights in the game where you will absolutely have to use Styx’s combat skills, and these can also be frustrating for people used to the stealth mechanics.

  The game also has a few other enemy types to keep you on your toes. There are bugs in some areas of the game which have been mutated by the amber. These bugs cannot see anything, but will immediately investigate even the slightest noises made near them, forcing you to creep around as slowly as possible. You can kill the lesser ones with a throwing knife but are otherwise defenseless if they catch you.

  The other more annoying enemy type is the Doomed. These appear later in the game and resemble the Lost Souls from the Doom games. That is to say, they are flying skulls. Once these things see you, they will kamikaze towards Styx and explode, causing them to take off roughly half of Styx’s health. There are times when they are nearly impossible to avoid, and while their attacks are easy enough to dodge, doing so often puts you in places where other enemies can see/hear you. This makes them incredibly annoying to deal with and put a damper on my enjoyment of the game whenever they were present.

  In-between missions at Styx’s hideout, you can stock up on items and earn upgrades for Styx. The upgrade system is a rather cool idea in theory but it’s a bit disappointing in practice. The game markets itself as having “RPG Elements”, but the upgrades really don’t allow for any substantially different “builds” or play styles like you might expect in an RPG. There’s a couple of upgrades that are somewhat useful, but the rest of them are more stuff that is nice to have, rather than stuff that changes and augments a particular play style. Of the upgrades, the only stuff I would say is essential is fully upgrading Stealth, Equipment, and Cloning. All other stuff is pretty ignorable unless you plan to be fighting or killing a lot of opponents, but even these aren’t always useful against certain enemy types. I had pretty much everything maxed-out before the end of the game. However, there is a final set of upgrades that you get upon completing the game known as “Predator”. These upgrades require both a large amount of skill points as well as maxed-out upgrades in each of the main skill sets. These give you advanced abilities such as seeing enemies through walls, but I would have loved to have been able to unlock them earlier in the game. I also hated that there was no way to upgrade lock picking speed, something that would have really come in handy during certain sections of the game where it takes forever to unlock a door.

  There are several AI glitches that can make the game rather tedious to play. The first is that guards can occasionally get stuck in a quick patrol going left and right a couple of steps but facing forward. Guards also don’t know how to handle when their routes cross each other. I’ve seen multiple instances of enemies just walking right into each other thinking they are going somewhere when they are actually stuck. It’s funny and sad at the same time.

  I also had occasional problems with the platforming. Styx would sometimes decide to pull himself up to a ledge when grabbing it, and other times he would just simply stay and hold on to the ledge. I think it might be due to me holding the stick upwards upon grabbing a ledge, but I can’t say for certain. I wish the game was more consistent with this. An even bigger problem is that Styx is incapable of grabbing onto a corner when moving horizontally along a ledge. This makes sneaking past certain enemies very tricky without the usage of some of Styx’s items or magical abilities.

  The biggest issue with the game is the strange way it recycles its content. Once you reach the halfway point, where the aforementioned plot twist occurs, every mission after that is essentially a mirror of a previous mission. In other words, instead of sneaking forwards through an area, you have to sneak backwards through the same areas, just with different enemy placements and occasional new enemy types. The level that occurs after the halfway point is the same as the previous one. While it does make the game world feel very consistent, it also kind of feels like the designers became lazy and just rehashed everything rather than give us something new. The increased plot momentum at this point means its not as boring as it could have been, but it’s still extremely disappointing to only have half a game regardless.

  For a game that is only available on next-gen (or current-gen, depending on how you look at it) systems, it’s surprising how dated Styx looks. Even as a last-gen game, Styx is rather average. I can only assume that this game was in development for last-gen as well but Cyanide decided to simply drop them in favor of the new consoles. While the game runs on Unreal Engine 3, there isn’t a whole lot of usage of real-time lighting/shadowing, something that older stealth games seemed to have down pat. There are also some really poor textures and clipping bugs here and there. In addition, cutscenes have strange lip-syncing issues. That being said, the art direction is decent and the levels are often appealing from a design and architecture standpoint. I love how the upper areas of Akenash are clean and palace-like, while the lower areas are very run-down and gritty. The game also ran well on my PC. The graphics aren’t horrible, but they’re not fantastic, either.

  The soundtrack in Styx is bad. There are a couple of decent orchestral themes, particularly the hideout theme, but for the most part the soundtrack is primarily ambient and not particularly memorable. One section of the game actually gave me a mild headache while listening to the music in combination with the ambient sound effects. The credits theme sounds is especially poor, as it sounds like an unfinished string loop that goes on an on with no changes or variations.

The sound effects are good, though it can be a little difficult to hear exactly where enemies are coming from, especially if they are right above or below you. The voice acting is decent. Many characters have that hard British accent that seems to be common in medieval-styled fantasy games. Some characters come off as flat or corny, but for the most part the voice acting is pretty decent, with Styx himself coming across as believably snarky.

Styx: Master of Shadows is a very uneven game. There are quite a few times when all of the pieces come together to form an engaging stealth experience, one that is thoroughly rooted in the old-school traditions of the genre. It’s a shame that its rough edges couldn’t be smoothed out even further, and it’s obvious that Cyanide could only take the game so far due to their budgetary limitations, since nearly all of its content gets rehashed during its campaign. Nonetheless, it is still a decent pick if you are a fan of games such as the Thief series or even Splinter Cell and are looking for something new to play. Cyanide have promised both a bigger budget and a new graphics engine for the upcoming sequel, Styx: Shards of Darkness, so hopefully they can take what they’ve learned here and knock out a truly killer game on their next outing.