Styx is a character who has won his autonomy in a rather daring way. Born as a co-star of the underrated role-playing game Of Orcs and Men, in which he shared the scene with a big ogre, he got his first role as an absolute protagonist with the third-person action stealth Styx: Master of Shadows, initially scoring a failure.
With time, however, the game has recovered in sales, has gathered around itself a good circle of fans of stealth titles and has become a cult object, celebrated as one of the few pure stealth still on the market. Obviously,
a sequel could not be missing: Styx: Shards of Darkness starts again from the predecessor and tells a new story starring the goblin Styx, a skilful thief able to infiltrate everywhere using the shadows and his innate abilities. Hired for a simple theft, Styx is once again entangled in a story bigger than him,
along with a group of dissidents of the special anti goblin STRAGE force, whose motivations are initially mysterious. We do not reveal anything else about the plot, apart from that it is very intricate in the advanced levels and that, as in Master of Shdaows, it turned out to be more interesting than we thought.
We reviewed Styx: Shards of Darkness, the new stealth starring the cunning and poisonous goblin
THE STEALTH SYSTEM
As we said, Styx: Shards of Darkness is a pure stealth game, which escapes from contamination with other genres, especially with shooters.
Actually, there are some role-playing elements, such as skill trees where you can spend accumulated experience points by going beyond the levels and achieving some secondary objectives, but this is in any case the enhancement of Styx’s stealth skills, or his ability to prepare useful gadgets to get out of trouble.
Of course, the first two levels (out of four) of difficulty selectable also provide the ability to face the enemy, but the combat system is clearly a patch, not even particularly successful (so much so that to try the game as it was thought, we deactivated it immediately raising the difficulty).
Styx is very comfortable moving in the shadows and taking advantage of the recesses of the levels to achieve its goals.The shrewd goblin has at his disposal a series of incredible abilities, many of which have already been seen in the first chapter: he can silently crawl behind enemies,
whistle to lure them, crawl under tables, into crates or closets; he can use roof beams like platforms, turn off torches to create dark areas, jump on someone to kill him. In case of need it can become invisible, clone, melt corpses with acid, place mines, poison the food with its saliva, use darts for quick and silent killings from the distance and much more.
The game system actually rewards the most skilled players, those who manage to overcome the levels without killing anyone or leaving behind as few corpses as possible.It is not easy, but it can be done, even if the desire to kill someone by taking him to slaughter him is really strong, especially at the beginning (you know, for the sake of experimentation).
Styx has various ways to eliminate its victims in a stealthy way: it can bring a quick blow that lands them immediately, with the risk, however, that the screams attract someone; or you can take your time and plug your mouth to the victim, to eliminate it more quickly and cleanly. Obviously it is important not to leave the corpses around, otherwise you end up sounding some alarm and warning the whole level.
The ways to clean up the crime scene are different: throwing bodies into the sea, from the sky or from any height with a vacuum; use crates and cabinets to cram or melt them in acid.The best way does not exist and the possibilities vary according to the situation.
In case of need you can also decide to place them in some dark corner without being too worried. But what would a stealth system be without a dark / light detector? Quiet, in honor of the progenitor Thief, Styx is equipped with all the gadgets needed to survive, including a special power called “Vista d’Ambra”, which allows him to highlight opponents, interactive objects and others that, if touched, produce noise.
