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All hail Styx. Or actually, don’t: I loathe Styx, but I quite like the games he features in. Styx is a sneering, diminutive goblin with a toxic personality, and while he lacks charm he’s very good at sneaking unseen through giant stealth sandboxes. A real run-of-the-mill asshole, then.
After two decent stealth outings, Styx is getting another airing in Styx: Blades of Greed. Like its predecessors, it’s a third-person stealth game with sprawling maps and zero accommodation for people who think they can just fight their way through it. The goblin has a couple of new tricks up his sleeve, like mind control and time shifting. The announcement also emphasises a new vertical focus, which is interesting, because the previous two Styx games were already pretty good at making you look up.
I loathed Styx (the character) so much that I didn’t really pay attention to the story in either Styx: Master of Shadow or Styx: Shards of Darkness, but in this new instalment he has apparently established his own “crew”, all the better to pull off the “heist of a lifetime”. I don’t give a damn, really; what I care about is the puzzle box quality of the Styx games. They’re quite unrelentingly tough, in a way most modern blockbusters dare not be.
The first Styx game, Styx: Master of Shadow, released back in 2014. “Admirably open levels that reward exploration means there’s high replay value if you’re prepared to overlook the back-tracking,” our review read. Both it and its sequel won scores in the upper 70s, which sounds about right.
If you haven’t played Styx yet, or claimed it while it was free on the Epic Games Store, both games are steeply discounted on Steam right now. You can grab both for well under a tenner. As for Blades of Greed, that’s coming in “Q4 2025”.
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Kurt Indovina
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