I attempted a little twitch tutorial of this one, but since I’m a twitch rookie apparently I didn’t save it anywhere. But if you saw it you get the basic idea – Styx is a pretty straight forward version of a stealth game.

The premise is you’re a skilled and agile goblin thief named Styx living in a sort of steam punk era fantasy land that contains Ogres, Humans, Elves and Goblins alongside flying ships that look like 1800s-1900s naval ships.

I don’t play a ton of stealth games, but right away I could feel this game was kind of a child of Dishonored. The world has a similar feel. You move along ledges, climb through windows, and set traps as you work towards your mission objectives. Your objective is stealth, so moving slowly outside of eye sight and killing enemies quietly is ideal.

The other major stealth franchise I played was the Batman series starting with Arkham Asylum. While Styx feels much more like Dishonored, I could immediately feel how much more carefully the Batman and Dishonored levels were built compared to Styx.

In Dishonored there was a sense that there were a few correct paths per mission, and to follow any of them you had to map out guard’s movement carefully and time your paths through them well. In Styx, it’s more like you’re in an open world with an infinite number of paths you can take.

That’s the first issue with the game, the open world design feels a little bit too easy to move around, and because you’re not forced through each area I didn’t feel all that excited to try to clear every space and grab every trophy. Why 100% the challenge when it’s not challenging? I’d often stare at a section for awhile and end up just hopping off a ledge and skipping the whole bit.

Problem number two: this game is buggy. It’s hard to tell from this image, but this is a shot of me killing a guard where the kill animation left me stuck in a wall. This was fairly minor, but this next one really derailed me, to the point where I nearly uninstalled the game:

So I play through three mission sections, which takes several hours. As I complete the third section, the game throws this lovely message at me, and promptly kicks me back to the start of the intro mission. I try to reload mission three and finish differently, completing more objectives… same thing. I google all over the steam forums and reddit, I find two traces of people running into this issue and no responses from devs or even possible work arounds from other players.

Near as I can figure it, after launch the devs added a co-op/multiplayer save because of all the complaints of players having to restart in co-op mode over and over. Now I wasn’t in multiplayer mode. It was just little old me playing three missions in the only solo mode available. Somehow the wires got crossed and it read me as a multiplayer game and deleted all my progress. Cool.

Sigh. So, I aggravated about this for awhile and then picked my shit up and started from scratch. With the low difficulty and knowing the missions, it didn’t take long to get back to where I was. But then when I was one mission away I get hit with this gem:

Yep, the game randomly robbed my progress on mission 3, kicked me back to the start, then recovered my progress after mission 2, skipping me forward. Awesome. Spit in my wound you buggy fucker.

All that aside, this is not a bad game. Stealth games are just satisfying in their own way. It’s fun to creep around and dispose of bodies. You can play like uncharted and map out little cliffside paths, or creep right past guards by timing your runs with their rotations. You can take them out with blow darts or booby-traps, poison their food or just strangle them. As you advance your skills, you can hide in chests and cabinets and insta-kill anyone that walks in front of them, swapping their body into your hiding place. At its core, the movement and gameplay are fun.

My main issue with it is that it’s much too easy. Over time you will look down at the guards AI derisively, as you can crouch-walk pretty aggressively close to them and strangle them with other guards just around the corner. Even when alerted, you need only walk into a crawl space or hang over a ledge and a fully alerted guard staff that just witnessed a murder will quickly go from panicked to shrugging their shoulders: “I guess he got away.” From there they’ll happily start non-chalantly patrolling over their friends corpse, occasionally glancing down at the body and remarking “lucky that wasn’t me” or “tch, someone should do something with the body” . Later on there are some creatures (“roabies” and some gaint flying bees) with better hearing and vision, but your humanoid targets might as well all be blind, deaf, and dumb.

I actually considered banning myself from using the “amber” vision mode after awhile – which is a simple tabbed vision setting which highlights items (in yellow) and enemies (in red). Stealth games often have this feature and my problem with it is it’s so powerful and so useful, that you often want it on 90% of the time, which makes it hard to absorb any of the actual beauty of the maps because you’re constantly triggering your predator vision which turns everything into very simple colour codes and greys out everything unimportant. But in this case again, it just makes an easy game even easier.

This is a big sentence for a blockhead, but a lot of the ideas in it are also derivative. It *feels* like a dishonored knock off. In the image above you’ll see enemies that look just like the old half-life ceiling monsters that would try to eat you with their long tongues. Around the corner from this I ran into a monster that spawned little exploding green glowing babies… they were banelings.

To top it off, the characters personality is basically a knockoff deadpool snark-machine. His humour starts of stale and petrifies from there.

So Gameplay – fun but easy. World, kind of a knock off with pretty bad writing. Level design too open. From there there are a few other interesting things. First, the skill tree:

Each section aligns with different skills. One helps your sneaking and killing, one opens up new alchemy formulas, one helps with your clone’s powers, etc. This style of skill tree was satisfying to me – they were straight forward, you could read them all quickly, each one only had to be unlocked once and immediately granted you the listed ability. It allowed you to think about your play style a bit and enhance whichever style of play you liked in a meaningful way. Good on the surface, but again the game goes out of the way to ruin its ideas by randomly resetting your skills every few levels. No idea why.

The weapon/armour items were also poorly thought out. Early in the game you can access a cloakroom where you can swap items, but all you have are two dagger options with slightly different effects. Over the first 4 missions I only picked up one new item. The whole item concept just seemed like an afterthought.

Alchemy – as you progress through the levels you pick up ingredients that can be used to make potions, weapons on traps. Unlike weapons, these are plentiful throughout all the levels, along with crafting tables that you can use to replenish things. My one annoyance with this is a huge number of the ingredients are just for health potions, which you basically never use because it’s a stealth game… you either kill undetected or you get one shot for the most part. So I ended up wandering through levels unable to collect or do anything with all the extra health potion ingredients while low on everything else.

The fact that there’s an alchemy skill that unlocks things like acid mines was pretty cool, I enjoyed that part of it.

Clone: your character has a bizarre ability to burp out a clone of himself that can move normally but can’t kill anyone or interact with everything. He’s basically a scout/decoy. Cool concept, but I never ended up using him. I think the problem for me is, because you’re in a video game where you can quickly restart anytime you die, you are effectively a safe scout for yourself. There don’t seem to be any portal style physics challenges where you might need to be in two places at once to accomplish something. That would’ve been cool. As is, it seems like another half-baked idea.

I feel similarly about the “look through keyholes” feature. Neat idea, but in practice you just open the door and then look around. There’s never a good reason to use these abilities.

Still, despite all the flaws I intended to beat this game because I was still enjoying the core gameplay. Then after mission 5 it gave me the same solo mission save bullshit and kicked me all the way back to the prologue. Godamnit.

Sorry Styx, I can see a lot of work was put in and some good thoughts are in this game. But it’s buggy, a lot of the ideas aren’t fleshed out, and level design falls far short of a Dishonored type stealth game. C+ and fuck you.

EDIT: Okay, I went back and ended up beating it, restarting for a third time. On the third play through I didn’t run into any further bug problems. I became a bloody expert at the first three levels, and just to pour salt in my wound, just as I got back to where I originally was, the developers started reusing levels. So I felt a little bit like a groundhog day character, trapped in a loop, beating the same levels with slight variations over and over.

A few closing notes as I completed the game. First, this game attempts to mix in a little bit of platformer/puzzle games (and I will admit, they did eventually have ONE where using the clone was necessary) – but they all fall flat. At every point they present you with the most basic, unchallenging version of these puzzles:

Ooh, a floor symbol game – step on the wrong square and you get burned! Except, there are only two symbols, and the adjacent platforms display which symbols are safe in each line. Tough stuff.

Another example of a puzzle challenge, make the laser beam bounce across the mirrors to reach the far side. Never seen that before (yawn).

Bosses: There are only two bosses in this game. The first one is a giant queen bug that spits acid at you as you scurry around platforms pulling out about eight rocks, which triggers a cut scene that kills her. The second one is a giant golem at the end of the game who shoots laser beams out of his chest. Again you scurry around a map across platforms, dodging lasers until reaching a giant ballista, and then… cut scene and he’s dead. If the game itself was under-challenging, the puzzles and boss fights stood out as particularly basic.

Pure quartz: you find a few of these rare items scattered around the missions. They are kind of like side quests – they are not mandatory but they are heavily guarded and if you acquire them they can be used to unlock your final ability in each skill tree. Cool, I enjoyed detouring to grab these. Weird thing is, by the end of the game I had extra pure quartz and no skills left to unlock? Game provides no guidance on why, is there something else I can use them for? Who knows.

Amber: amber potions can be used to turn you invisible for when basic stealth is not enough. There is a whole skill tree around using amber (killing enemies silently, turning them invisible when you’re invisible, etc). I tended to save it because it was scarce, but then every time I was faced with a challenging section and I thought to bust it out, I’d get the message “you can’t use that right now”. So… basically they created a game that wasn’t hard enough, gave the user too many powers, and then had to disable them for every tough moment to preserve some difficulty. Alright.

Same conclusion as before, this game is half baked, and down every interesting idea in it you’ll find a fatal flaw that prevents it from shining. Also, the story and all the characters are bad. Still, it’s satisfying enough to jump around buildings and kill guards that it at least never felt like a slog/grind to play through (except, of course, when the game randomly restarted me… TWICE). Thanks for the hours of mid-level annoyance Styx, and fuck you.