In February, one of the best modern stealth series is getting its next game, but you have a chance to get caught up on it for free before that happens. From January 15 to 22, Styx: Master of Shadows and Shards of Darkness are free to claim on the Epic Games Store, before the third part of the trilogy, Blades of Greed, launches on February 19.
These days, stealth games are eager to give you a way out. If you get spotted during your skulking, there’s usually an easy escape hatch, whether that’s an ability that lets you quickly zip back to the shadows, or the fact that stealth protagonists tend to have combat abilities as honed as their sneaking skills. The Styx games tread a more hardcore path, demanding you stay in the shadows by making their titular goblin anti-hero incredibly easy to take down once he’s spotted.
In that respect, being a tiny goblin in a world of tall elves and humans has its advantages. Styx is incredibly agile from the start, able to scamper up ledges and between covers quickly enough to sneak right under the noses of the guards he’s trying to evade. Especially in the first game, Master of Shadows, ledge-clinging can be a bit buggy, but usually not so much that it will ruin your good time. Levels are designed to let you use your mobility to its fullest, offering multiple paths to sneak around patrolling guards to your objectives.
Rather than going the Assassin’s Creed route by letting you earn offensive abilities, the Styx games are packed with tools more akin to Thief that let you manipulate your environment. Putting out torches from afar and luring guards with noise are common tools of the stealth genre, and they work wonderfully here.
Where the Styx games really shine is in their toolkit of magical abilities. Sticking to the series’ stealthy nature, you can’t usually just dispatch your foes with magic attacks, instead using them to make yourself even harder to catch up with. A brief invisibility spell can get you out of most jams, but the more enjoyable options include spawning a clone of yourself to distract guards and help with puzzles. The second game in the series, Shards of Darkness, adds a few more options to do away with enemies with poison and mechanical traps, but these more direct approaches always feel like complements for your stealth powers, rather than replacements for them. When it does come to direct combat, Styx is mostly limited to using timed parries to throw guards off balance before executing them, which feels clumsy and unreliable enough to dissuade you from using it as anything other than a last resort.
Coming out in 2014 and 2017, Master of Shadows and Shards of Darkness do show their age in some ways. On top of the sometimes clunky controls, they have a penchant for recycling levels and the vision ranges at which enemies can spot you can be deceptive at times, too. Their biggest drawback, though, is Styx himself. As goblins tend to be portrayed, Styx is a grumpy, unpleasant character who has no qualms about snatching gold and stabbing guards in his way. For the most part, that characterization works, making Styx a likeably cantankerous presence in the world, but it falls flat when it comes to humor. The Styx games are loaded with dated references and fourth-wall breaking quips which almost never land. It’s nowhere near enough to sour the mood entirely, but it does reach critical levels of eye-rolling.
If you like what you see in the first two Styx games, a demo for the upcoming Blades of Greed is also available now on Steam. Nearly a decade after the last Styx game, it promises a much higher level of polish — and hopefully a less grating sense of humor along with it.
