Imagine a game built on the premise of stealthily slipping into holes and crawling under tables. A game where shadows are your friend and light is your enemy. It takes place in a world where shiny objects like coins are yours for the taking, and underground ruins and stalwart fortresses, brimming with soldiers are begging to be explored. There’s just one caveat. You’re a rather diminutive goblin named Styx, with a bad case of amnesia, a penchant for drinking potions and a face only a mother could love (theoretically).
Styx was released in 2014 to not quite critical acclaim. It was offered free to PS+ members last month and as a result, I found myself playing it quite a bit. I also found myself dying in game quite a bit. The game could probably be titled Styx: House of 1000 Corpses and it would still be apt, as you’ll die in the game quite often, however, these deaths aren’t in the challenging, learn until you master it kind, commonly found in series such as Dark Souls, but the cheap, unfair kind of deaths that ultimately prove more frustrating than fun. As a result, you’ll find that in trying to slog your way through the various levels, that stealth will trump brute force, almost every single time.
This is a shame, because Styx actually has some interesting elements going for it. For example, the stealth aspect isn’t terrible, as there are plenty of places to hide, and Styx’s short stature makes him able to fit under tables and desks and hide in other out of the way places that would seem to be off limits to anyone of normal size.
Styx can also extinguish torches by humorously jumping up and physically putting them out. Styx can also unfasten chandeliers, from up in the rafters in many levels, much to the dismay of anyone standing underneath.
One of the more interesting aspects of the game is the ability to create a “clone” of yourself that looks like a thinner, gangly version of Styx+Gollum, who can cross certain thresholds and open doors, activate switches and distract enemies, allowing Styx to move about freely.
The clone has a time limit, but can be upgraded to hold onto enemies, or even become a silent bomb, laying in wait for enemies to spring a trap, and then blowing up. This is a rather helpful mechanic in a game where too often the deck seems stacked against you, in terms of enemy numbers and abilities.
Speaking of upgrades, aside from the clone stuff, many upgrades, like corner kills and aerial assassinations, feel like they should have been included in the price of the car for free, and not as a luxury option.
Styx can drink colored potions that provide life and focus and if this too sounds familiar, then you’ve probably noticed that the game draws more than a slight inspiration from the recent Thief game.
Visually, the game isn’t terribly impressive on a broad scale, but little details, like lighting and shadow effects are well done. You can see small golden coins glistening in dark corners from far away, and torches light up whole sections of large rooms.
The story itself is pretty forgettable and simply revolves around Styx’s quest for his memory, which involves looking for various treasures in hidden areas of the world, like giant incinerators below castle keeps, and roach filled underground structures.
You can upgrade Styx in a variety of ways, each one costing progressively more skill points. You earn these skill points in levels by completing secondary objectives, such as remaining undetected, swiping certain items, finding hidden rooms, and dispatching enemies unseen.
You can unlock five abilities in a number of different categories, such as stealth, combat, cloning, kills, equipment, and predator. Unfortunately, these unlockable abilities don’t quite put you on the same level as your enemies; they just serve to make you a slightly stealthier or more equipped target.
Therein lies Styx’s biggest problem, the game wants you to believe you can work your way through each level through combat or stealth, or a combination of both, but in practice, combat, more often than not will end in your untimely demise. This isn’t something like Dishonored, where both approaches are feasible.
A large part of this is due to the fact that even though Styx carries a knife larger than Rambo’s, you cant really swing it during your exploration of the game’s large levels. Even in combat, you don’t have an arsenal of moves at your disposal, rather you can press square to parry, and that’s it. You need to time this perfectly too, as swords, hammers and crossbows all require different timed parrying skills, and you need to parry a series of blows before some enemies will open up, allowing you to take them down.
What may have been intended as a way to ensure a challenging experience, in terms of combat, only seems to ensure that death is an inevitability.
Speaking of deaths, guards will seemingly appear out of nowhere to take you down at the slightest hint of your presence. You can counter this by quickly moving into shadows or ducking under a desk or squeezing into a nearby pot, but only to a certain extent. Guards seemingly operating way above their pay scale will snatch you out of covered holes, reach under desks and pull you out and spot you in the shadows rather quickly, even if you’re stealthier than the average goblin.
Once detected, it becomes one on four, or one on five all too often, so your best option is to run away until the guards give up and resume their normal patrol routes.
In the end, Styx: Master of Shadows just can’t support it’s own ambitious designs. It’s a bit like Atlas, supporting the weight of the world on his shoulders, yet Styx painfully buckles under the weight of trying to support a unique protagonist, a challenging gameplay system, a few novel mechanics and some inspired by other games of similar genres.
Like Styx himself, the game seems too diminutive to handle all the tasks set before it, so, like a thief, perpetually in search of treasure, it finds itself relegated to the shadows for the foreseeable future.