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Styx: Master of Shadows feels like it should have come out a decade ago. It’s quite possibly the most old-school stealth game I’ve played since I was at school.
The eponymous character is a goblin with magical abilities who is great at sneaking around but crap at fighting men. That’s the important bit. He has a mysterious past, and previously served as one of the characters in a fairly-well reviewed second-tier RPG called Of Orcs and Men, which isn’t important, because this is a completely different kind of game and the story is a bit guff anyway, complete as it is with a shocking twist that’s telegraphed about two hours before its reveal.
This is a proper stealth game, the kind where getting into open combat is almost always a death sentence, and leaves you severely wounded at best. This is a game where your box of tricks isn’t available to you unless you have enough of a resource that isn’t very forthcoming. Amber, in this case, which can be collected in vials that are dotted around the cavernous levels, but in nowhere near enough abundance that you can rely on having a steady supply.
In this box of tricks is the ability to make yourself temporarily invisible, most useful for surviving cock-ups, and also an endless supply of short-lived clones that can be literally vomited out and sent ahead to make distractions, or operate levers in otherwise inaccessible areas. Quite how a clone of Styx with the exact same dimensions as him can squeeze through holes that he can’t is never adequately explained, but it’s a nice signature mechanic, and one that is crucial to the game’s puzzle solving elements.
It’s also pretty integral to the plot, which is a mixture of juvenile dark-fantasy s**** and some reasonably clever ideas, one of which is having the clone-vomiting ability driving the character arc of the protagonist. The other is playing with the traditional storytelling device of flash-forwards, inverting a common trope in a way that’s impossible to describe without spoiling everything. You’ll just have to take my word for it that it’s very nicely done, even if it is easy to figure out well before the curtain goes down.
The scarceness of resources in the world makes for a tense 20 (or so) hours. Invisibility is handy, but using it to get out of a tricky spot now, knowing full well that you might be buggered without it in a later, trickier encounter, is a quandary that permeates the experience throughout. For most of the game, you will be relying purely on the fundamentals of stealth – lurking in the dark, hiding under tables or in cupboards, staying still for minutes at a time waiting for that one brief moment where all the guards are looking in the right direction for you to scarper.
That’s not to say you won’t also be leaving a trail of corpses, but as with everything you do in the game, murder makes noise. Even the ‘muffled kill’ option makes enough noise to alert any guard (or nasty sound-sensitive insect) that’s close enough, so the decision to take a life becomes one of weighing necessity against danger. Choosing to go after side-objectives is subject to a similar dilemma, often taking you far away from your goal and exposing you to situations that would be avoided otherwise.
What this boils down to is that Master of Shadows is a game of hard choices; a constant battle of risk vs reward. You’ll die your way through it, and you’ll be abusing the quick-save key so often that it might well file a complaint to HR. The constant failures are frustrating, but the good kind of frustrating, which only hardens your just-one-more-go resolve.
The levels are well designed, offering just enough nooks, crannies and rafters to enable that satisfying, Arkham-style sneaking, but not so many that the player can avoid danger easily. It’s not an open-world game by any means, but the spaces are vast, emphasising verticality to a point where the first thing you’ll do in a new area is look up, partly in search for handholds and partly just to admire the architecture. Unfortunately, the later missions start re-using environments from early ones, having you creep through the same levels as before but in reverse.
It’s at this point that you can really feel the game starting to outstay its welcome, and exhaust its budget. It’s a pity, because it would be nice to see more of the Tower of Akenash, as it’s one of the most interesting fortresses in any fantasy lore – a city-sized castle in which the entire game takes place.
There are some beautiful places within the tower, but that beauty is hampered by a very last-gen presentation. It looks like a first wave Xbox 360 game, even at 1080p with everything maxed, with some blurry texturing and the kind of rigid facial animation that isn’t even on the same continent as the uncanny valley. Fortunately, the game is usually dark enough to mask these issues, but every now and then you’ll be thrown into a cutscene opposite a man with a painted on beard and eyes that don’t even follow you around the room as convincingly as a 200 year-old painting. Which can be distracting.
If you can get past the fact that it isn’t the best looker, you’ll have a good time with Styx. It’s particularly recommended for hardcore sneak-em-up fans looking for a genuine challenge: a stealth-action game in which the emphasis is unapologetically on the stealth, and not the action.
Version Tested: PC
Does the Master of Shadows risk being overshadowed?
Styx makes his mark on the fantasy sneaking/stabbing landscape at a curious time. Sandwiched between behemoths, and tied to an existing game that’s so off the radar they might as well be testing it in Roswell, could its timing be any worse?
With much of its audience still battering through the excellent Shadow of Mordor, and two full-fat Assassin’s Creed games just around the corner, it doesn’t seem so.
What Styx offers, though, is very different, despite its own marketing trying to associate it with Ubisoft’s flagship stabbing-sim (and seriously, “Assassin’s Green” might just be the worst pun in marketing history).
This is not a brawler with a bit of creeping, it’s a tense, linear, slow traversal through extremely hostile territory filled with pockets of instant death. Unfortunately, it’s easy to get the impression prior to playing that it’s a low budget equivalent of Assassin’s Creed, and I think that’s a shame, because I suspect there will be people who’ll give it a miss on that basis while simultaneously yearning for the next Dishonored, to which Styx is a much closer cousin, or a good Thief game.
At a budget price, and with the promise of a genuine, pure, difficult stealth experience that sets it apart from pretty much everything else in the genre nowadays, Master of Shadows has a lot going for it. Gluttons for dimly-lit punishment; this game has been made for you, don’t let it slip away.
