Styx: Shards of Darkness

If you enjoy pure stealth games and finding inventive ways to take down enemies without alerting anyone, play Styx: Shards of Darkness. It has a fun, but albeit short campaign, but I feel that it’s fairly re-playable. It records your time for speedrunning and there are bonuses to completing the level under certain times as well as completing a few challenges within each level.

This game is the second in the Styx trilogy. Master of Shadows (game 1) definitely shows its age with its movement and enemy pathing. However, the voice lines and character interactions make the first game a fun experience minus the bugs… they come up later. The third game; Blades of Greed released this year in February. I haven’t finished it but it’s on the backlog. It’s fun but it takes some adjusting to.

Shards of darkness is a game based purely on moving silently through crowded areas such as taverns, airships, and Elven bases. You are a small green goblin named Styx with a very sarcastic and gruff sense of humor, often cursing. When you die in the game, you get a “You Died” screen similar to FromSoft games. Styx himself points at you, laughs, and criticizes your poorly timed button pressing. The Arkham Asylum series did a similar death screen with its villains depending on whose environment you’re in.

The gameplay is very straight forward; you have tight controls that feel good moving Styx around. You can crouch to go stealth. Crouching also lets you hide under tables and chairs. You can also hide in closets, chests, and even the rafters of certain buildings. Movement in this game is all about being silent and unseen. Run too fast and you alert the guards, knock over a vase or chair and you alert the guards, etc... Many objects in the game are interactable and you must be careful while sneaking around. Guards have a classic alert system. They have a meter above their heads that goes yellow if you're suspected and Red if they full on notice you. IF you are suspected, the guard will make note but probably not investigate however, they will run over to you and attack if you get seen. you must then run and hide or try to fight the guard off. Fighting makes noise and will alert more guards to come over and attack. You have a limited number of gadgets you can use to subdue enemies including a poisoned blow dart to knock out an enemy, a bottle of acid to dissolve a body, a lock pick and a few other items as well that can make distractions to pass by the guards unseen. All your items can be crafted by materials you collect as you pass through the different levels of the game. You also have an ability to clone yourself, take control of your clone, and use it as a distraction or to activate puzzles/ pull levers for Styx. You have one last ability to make yourself invisible for a short period of time. The cloning ability and the invisibility come from using 1 of the 2 consumables in the game. The first is a yellow flask named Amber. It’s a sap like substance that give Styx his power powers, the 2nd is a red health potion. Both are found through each level. Sometimes even being on an enemy guard's belt that you have to pickpocket to obtain.

The level design is very unique to each area of the game, and I think is one for the strongest aspects that makes this series what it is. You aren’t just making yourself invisible to get past guards in a hallway, you are using verticality through ropes, chains, and rocks that you can climb that can lead to secret passages or avoid enemies all together. If you do not wish to engage in combat, you do not have to. It is rather difficult to not "Silent take-down" every guard you see. They give you multiple ways to traverse each area the way you want to. This game has very little to no combat. You have a parry and an attack. This is not a souls-like. If you are caught or killed, you restart at the last save.

One of the biggest frustrations I have with this game and most stealth games is the level with the blind enemy with super hearing. This game, the previous game, and I think Blades of Greed all have a section of the game or two with these bugs named Roabies. They are gross little bugs that look like overgrown ticks that when they hear you, they rush you and explode covering you in acidic bug juices. usually always fatal and the levels they are in seem to last longer than I'd like them too. It’s difficult and takes patience but these levels are doable.

The story is decent but not the best written. It follows Styx where the previous game Master of Shadows. He is on the hunt for more power through Amber and Quartz. Styx is able to absorb and harness energy from raw amber as well as the Quartz crystals. Finding these throughout the game unlock abilities and powers you can use in the late stages of the game. It does have fully animated cut scenes and is mostly fully voice acted. The character interactions and relationships that develop are far more interesting than the main story line to me. Because of Styx’s sarcastic nature, he is also making shrewd comments during gameplay as well as to the other npc’s you meet during the game.

There is also a decent RPG stat-point wheel. As you complete missions and side objective you earn points you can spend at the different skill and crafting tables. if you'd like to make an Assassin build you can, want to lean into the cloning and use your clones to do the work, you can. Points can be limited and you really have to pick and choose what attributes you'd like to play with. Between missions, you can refund the points spent in your skill tree and re-spec Styx before the next mission.

If you like purely stealth games, this should be in your backlog.