Styx: Master of Shadows is a fantasy-stealth game developed by Cyanide Studio. It’s a prequel to Of Orcs and Men, exploring the origin of the master thief and assassin Goblin Styx.
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At the game’s opening you find yourself in a cell with the local noble, Lord Barimen, and his son Aaron interrogating Styx about his failed break into their home: the Tower of Akenash, home of the World-Tree and the Amber. They want to know who sent him and for what, suspecting the Elves of breaking the treaty they have with humans and hoping Styx will provide the answers.
Styx’s interrogation frames the events of every chapter as he tells his jailers about his plans which you carry out, and it is here where the first of Styx: Master of Shadows’ flaws comes in. The game desperately wants to convince you that you are playing past events, that you’re just following Styx’s narration, but it is immediately obvious (by the simple visual cues of character models and voice tone) that your protagonist isn’t Styx but another Goblin entirely. And because it’s so obvious about half of the plot becomes extremely predictable, with the second half offering at least a couple surprises.
The story itself is quite good hinging entirely on the dynamic between Styx and this second Goblin. The quest itself, the search for the Heart of the Tree, is meaningless in the end as this is a story about two Goblins desperate to discover or recover their identity and to find where they belong in the grand scheme of things. The downside however is the same effort that went into giving he protagonists such distinct personalities didn’t go into giving the rest of the cast a soul, coming off as nothing more than two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs. The guards themselves which are most of the enemies you’ll face are undistinguishable from each other in terms of behaviour, the only different between them being the armour they wear. They all speak with the same voice and say the same things.
There are however some issue with world building and how the events of the game and its portrayal of the different races and civilizations fit with its predecessor, Of Orcs and Men. One particular point is how Styx’s description of how Orcs are doesn’t match up with the race’s in-game representations in any of the two titles.
The stealth and exploration parts of the gameplay are the strongest. Enemies will be oblivious to your presence at first, once they spot you and depending on how far you are from them a yellow icon appears on their head; if you stay within their line of sight for enough time the icon will change to orange noting their suspicion; finally on discovery the icon will turn red. You can walk and run but these actions are both very loud so you’ll probably spend most of the game sneaking around moving cautiously and slowly. In any given section there is usually more than one way to reach your target, each path with its own set of dangers giving you the freedom to choose your approach. I favoured the high ground most of the time moving over the crowds instead of through them and it worked brilliantly unless the ledge-grabbing mechanic acted up placing me straight in line of sight of the guards. When you cling on a ledge, the character will sometimes hang on it until you want to climb over the railing but other times it will do this automatically for no reason whatsoever. By the end of the game I only ledge-climbed when it was absolutely necessary, because of how fickle the mechanic was.
Each mission comes with a set of challenges from not raising any alarms and not killing anyone to finishing the chapter in a set time. My issue with these challenges is twofold: firstly it’s not always clear what constitutes an alarm as very often I ran clean missions but didn’t get the challenge bonus, while on a particular mission everything went wrong yet I still received the bonus. The second issue I have is there are no non-lethal options whatsoever – everything in your arsenal kills guards.
In addition to the challenges, each mission comes with a set of secondary objectives given to you by NPCs but these don’t do much except give you more Skill Points at the end of a mission. Considering said characters all insist they’ll make the side-quests worth your while, it would have been nice to get something more – maybe better weapons, upgraded armour, etc.
You primary, secondary objectives and the challenge system all tie into the Skill system: completing any objective or challenge will give you a set number of Skill Points which you can spend in your hideout. For most of the game, the last Skill Tree is locked and I thought it was something that would unlock after a given story event. Then I completed two of the other trees and found that the last one is made of advanced skills that greatly enhance your abilities and are combination of other skill trees. It’s a fantastic system although the SP costs for these advanced skills are outrageous.
I commend the fact that if you kill guards using falling boxes or chandeliers, basically anything that could be considered and accident, no-one will raise an alarm. However their attentiveness part of their AI is unbalanced. On one hand they’ll react immediately should you overturn a chair but they lack any form of peripheral vision. In addition to that, many times I found that a given guard’s patrol (pathing) will only start or trigger when you’re in the vicinity which made getting through some sections extremely annoying. There was one moment in the dungeons where two guards just stood on either end of a bridge making it impossible for me to go through them if I wanted to avoid alarms and killing them. Once I got close, however, they started moving but by that point I was already out of luck.
As this is a stealth game you can obviously stealth kill enemies and I love how Cyanide studio implemented its silent kill. When you stand near an enemy that hasn’t seen you, you can click and kill them loudly or keep the mouse button pressed and start the silent kill countdown. It takes about five to ten seconds for a muffled kill and I loved that as it added a bit more tension and strategy to my assassinations. Once someone is dead you can pick up the body and hide it, I often went off to find the nearest abyss and used it as a body dump fore great effect. You also use the button-hold-countdown for lock picking which the character will do on his own, I loved this and with the sheer abundance of badly implemented lock picking mini-games, I’d prefer it if more games made it like this.
Adding to the stealth complexity is a vast array of enemy types each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Some guards re-light the torches you put out, while Knights are immune to your weapons forcing you to use environmental kills to take them out. Some use helmets which means you can’t kill them with your throwing knives.
Speaking of the knives, I’ll just point out that it’s terrible design not to be able to recover the knives from bodies. They don’t melt when they kill an enemy, nor do they explode, so they should be retrievable!
If you are discovered in the course of your sneakiness you’ll have to endure what is Styx: Master of Shadows’ worst aspect: combat. Instead of the strategic combat found in Of Orcs and Men or the free-flow-combat you’d expect if you played any Assassin’s Creed title you are instead locked into a duel with a single enemy. What is bad about this? Well, a couple of things: first, you can’t attack. I mean you can but it doesn’t do anything at all and your only option is to wait for enemy attacks; parry three of them and then press the instant kill prompt. It’s counter-intuitive, boring and to be honest, whenever I was discovered I just reloaded my last save preferring not to bother with the cumbersome combat (besides, constant quick-saving is extremely important in this game). The second problem is actually the worst of the two: while you’re locked into your one-on-one duel every other enemy can still attack so you’ll often die at the hands of enemies you can’t defend against. It’s what made the final boss of the game so infuriating for me as I constantly died from throwing daggers hitting me while I was busy duelling.
Finally there’s Amber, the game’s version of magic. You have three powers at your disposal from the start: first is Amber-vision, the game’s version of Assassin’s Creed’s Eagle Eye which highlights important objects and reveals hidden symbols. Second is invisibility which consumes obscene amounts of Amber but is extremely powerful and helpful to get out of tight spot or past annoyingly positioned guards. Then there’s Clone, the centerpiece of this game: your character can literally vomit-up a clone of himself and you can take control of it and use him to open certain gates from the other side, draw attention to itself and away from you or even set traps for enemies. It’s a versatile little bugger and you’ll always have enough Amber to summon one.
The environments, from the dank sewers and grim prison cells to the lofty towers and governor’s apartments are all extremely beautiful and filled with the tiniest details. Instead of being simple set pieces you travel through the locations feel lived-in and you can believe someone lives and works there. There are chairs and tables, beds and bunks, armour and weapon racks as well as many other small things that speak of a living and breathing world. But as beautiful as they are and because the game insists on constantly revisiting the same areas you’ll probably find yourself annoyed. I would have loved to see more areas instead of having to revisit previous ones all over again with new enemies and objectives.
The voice-acting is really good, though there are some clear lip-syncing issues. The Goblins are as foul-mouthed as sailors and their euphemisms will have you at least chuckling all the way through the game. Most importantly as this is about a journey of self-discovery a voice actor’s emphasis should be on conveying the character’s emotional turmoil and on that front, the voice actors nail it.
In terms of innovation, I can mention the aforementioned Guard AI in terms of accidents and how quick they are on noticing when something, meaning you, is afoot. The stealth kill system is fantastic and while the lock-picking isn’t new it stands out among the myriad of mini-game infested titles out there. The Clone is perhaps the greatest innovation for a stealth game as it opens so many possibilities for a given situation. You no longer need to confine yourself to the shadows if it’s too hard, now you can send your clone to draw attention away from you while you sneak past into victory!
Every location has a number of coins to collect plus a chapter-specific relic where collecting them all will take a lot of trial and error and possibly more than one replay. Add the different challenges and sub-quests to the mix and it really bumps up the replayability factor for this title.
In the end, Styx: Master of Shadows is a flawed game but it delivers plenty in stealth-Goblin-goodness. With a fantastic origin story and so many good design ideas I can’t wait for Cyanide Studio’s next venture into this fantasy world of theirs.
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