Styx: Master of Shadows is a 3rd person stealth game, which is also the prequel to Of Orc’s and Men (2012) also developed by Cyanide and published by Focus Home Interactive for Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
The Atrium of Akenash is an entire world isolated from the rest of the population. This new world is human dominated with elves guarding something called the World-Tree. This city thrives on a golden sap like substance, they call Amber (which is powerful and magical), and oozes from the tree like a thick waterfall.
Amber is a golden element that is magical, fair enough… but the game doesn’t explain what it is used for, other than it allows Styx to use powers and keep the guards high… on distilled amber fashioned by a man called Querberus (some old dude).
Styx is a 200 year old angry Goblin thief/assassin with a knack for swearing… ohhh I like him already. He also hears the thoughts of everyone who has ever consumed Amber, and because of this he has an incredibly painful headache. His goal is to steal the heart of the World-Tree. The developers don’t really tell you why or what the tree is used for other than oozing amber, but we will get to that side of the story shorty.
At the Tree, you will apparently find all kinds of fortune, and maybe a few answers in regards to “your true origins”. There’s a slight hint as to what this refers to in the opening cutscene… but it’s hard to pick out, because there’s so much information about what’s going on, so you may miss it… or maybe I’m looking too far into it?
Styx finds himself beside the World-Tree… but gets caught by a guard… HA. So you’re telling me a so-called “Master of Shadows” got detected or snuck up on by a rugged guard. That sort of defeats the purpose of the title, since according to the cutscene, you aren’t a Master of Shadows at all.
A few moments later you find yourself tied up in an interrogation of sorts with Barimen (The Lord of Akenash) and Aaron (Barimen’s son, pronounced Aeron… for some reason). After finding out the name of Styx, both the interrogators assume that he is working for the Elves, and they have a fixation around asking Styx further questions about the Elves… when he never said he worked for the Elves, nor did he say anything about the Elves.
That being said the developers don’t really fill in the blanks throughout the story. For example, why Goblins and Elves can hear people that consume Amber, but humans can’t… a lot of questions, and not a lot of answers.
I won’t ruin the twist for you, or the events leading up to it, as that will ruin the story for you, but I will say there’s about 5hrs of backtracking, and 3hrs worth of actual story… the devs told me this game was over 20hrs. I’m not sure about their math!
The gameplay in Styx consists of basic stealth mechanics, whilst giving the player the option to use some of Styx’s abilities, such as going invisible, and creating clones to help you navigate your surroundings.
The developers chose to use a similar climbing system to what you might see in Assassin’s Creed, and they refer to Assassin’s Creed in one of their promo screenshots, calling Styx “Assassin’s Green”… However, Assassin’s Creed, in my opinion, has a more advanced climbing abilities of the character, and a more realistic animation.
You can also use force when necessary, ie stealth takedowns, however Styx cannot attack. He can only parry opponents with an auto lock in combat system that is essentially a QTE, or quick time event. This was a little strange to get used t,o because if you wanted to stealth past an enemy, but get spotted, the combat system would auto lock anyway, and the only way to get out of the lock is to dodge out the way to a great distance, which will disable it. This was quite annoying, to say the least.
I would suggest that the developers add an easier way to unlock the combat system, rather than it auto locking you, which to me seemed like a way to force the player not to get into combat at all… This is unfortunate, because sometimes I would be nowhere near the enemy yet the game still entered the combat phase… ARGHHH why!
The enemy walking patterns seemed to be a little too robotic, which didn’t show any life towards them, on top of this, they wouldn’t search for you for very long if you were spotted. They would run to the section of the map they spotted you in, and walk around that room for a few moments, and then be on their way… this didn’t feel realistic for the player. Once I had learned their movement patterns, all I had to do was run behind a window and whistle so they would be alerted and walk/run to the area I whistled and then go a different way and that was the stealth within the game.
One the environments allowed the player to use a trap that caused “toxic gas” to disperse within the room, this wasn’t explained as to what it was, but it appeared to be highly concentrated Amber which would kill all enemies within that room. Yet the dead enemies didn’t show a visual representation of what was happening to them, like with Aaron later in the game gets his face melted off by the same Amber… hmm.
It wasn’t really enjoyable, alongside the auto lock in combat system… I believe the developers need to expand on the weaker aspects of the game, eg climbing and stealth.
The visuals for Styx weren’t too bad, with the occasional object failing to render its correct detail level (the object being blurry).
The character models seemed to be the focus of the visuals, which I didn’t mind, though it would have been nice if they fixed the texture pop in that started to occur after the first game patch.
Also, a necessary inclusion into this section of the review is that the game prefers 64bit operation, which for people who do not have a 64bit system, will mean they will encounter lower quality textures to the 64bit counterpart… not sure why the developers did that, as the game doesn’t use any more than 2GB system ram, but does use around 2GB VRAM (graphics card memory) on 64bit.
The options menu was a decent PC menu, with only one option I would have liked to see included, which was Antialiasing. In order to get AA to work, you had to dig through one of the System config files and allow MSAA.
The developers also chose to add 3 different cutscene styles which included a normal pre-rendered form, an In-game real-time form, as well as an end of chapter/mission cutscene which was concept art driven.
I wouldn’t have thought anything was strange, until I noticed that the concept art styled cutscenes, where the bulk of the narrative was being explained to the player, there were only a few concepts for each event in the cutscene… For me, this was extremely hard to follow.
Also, the physx within the game seemed to have body collision issues in some cases, where you would assassinate an enemy next to a ledge, and when they hit it they would go flying across the map. It was unclear if this was a mechanic they intentionally left in, or for some reason didn’t fix it.
Character clipping through walls after stealth killing someone by a poll/post would cause Styx to kill them through the object, which took away from the game’s atmosphere.
Styx: Master of Shadows had a really nice soundtrack, but would stop playing at certain points, which was strange, but nonetheless it was one of the better aspects of the game.
The sound design was okay, which helped the stealth elements of the game quite nicely, as you could hear footsteps from the other side of walls (in the same room just on the window sill).
If I had to complain about something, it would have to be that there was no water interaction which should have caused a noise when Styx walked over it. There weren’t too many things on the ground that could cause noise if walked on (other than your footsteps). Furniture and the sound of a body hitting the floor were the only “loud” noises that could occur by the player without whistling which wasn’t a huge issue.
A few of the important aspects of the game which make up the stealth mechanics, like climbing seemed to be limited to one direction when hanging from a ledge or climbing up to a ledge. This became irritating, simply because the developers themselves were trying to compare this game to Assassin’s Creed, which in comparison it really isn’t anything close.
While I do understand what they meant, it still looks like the developers had great ideas for the game but either ran out of time, or just didn’t finish them for some reason.
That is why Styx: Master of Shadows gets a 4/10 from me.
