Styx: Blades of Greed isn’t quite as well cut out as a fine piece of quartz, but it’s easily the best stealth game in years – and so utterly compelling you’ll be desperate to get back to it when you have to do boring un-murdery things like, I dunno, going to the shops, or feeding the cat.
Boy am I glad to see Styx again. Not because I felt any great yearning to return to the murky, Temu-Warhammer dark fantasy setting of long-forgotten RPG Of Orcs and Men, you understand. But because Blades of Greed represents an ever dwindling chunk of ore from that once rich seam of B-tier games that are just bloody good at what they do. The zenith of the “shorter games with worse graphics” category that people on Bluesky claim to want (and rarely seem to actively seek out, alas).
But don’t let the lack of a studio-shuttering budget colour your expectations: Styx 3 is marvellous on almost every front. Picking up literally minutes after the cliffhanger ending of his last outing, 2017’s Shards of Darkness, this latest installment throws a dash of Mass Effect into the pot, with the eponymous goblin assembling a crew of fellow outlaws, fugitives, and misfits on board a floating ship of thieves. The goal? Collect shards of quartz, a mysterious magical ore that is a crucial energy source for the evil human empire and its Inquisition, a ruthless wizard gestapo intent on eradicating the non-human races and generally not being that nice to humans either.
Stealing shards of quartz from all over the continent disrupts human operations and keeps the stuff out of Inquisition hands, but most importantly, it’s a convenient device for weaving RPG-lite character progression into the narrative. Styx is effectively a drug addict, always laser-focused on getting his next hit of quartz, as absorbing it grants him magical abilities. These quartz-derived abilities, along with your innate goblin talents and a set of Batman gadgets are managed via skill trees. It’s similar to the way a motivating heroin addiction makes you really good at pinching car radios.
And it’s a good core analogy for the entire thing: in a world-building sense, the Styx story is about a ravenous, ruinous empire addicted to conquest. In a meta sense, the game itself is astoundingly compelling: a Pringles can of objectives to methodically sneak, stab, and steal your way through that is more moreish than the Iberian peninsula.
It’s a curious structure for a game with grand, open-world ambitions. Proudly touted as a true Metroidvania, Styx 3 is set across three vast and beautifully distinct murder playgrounds over which the all-important quartz shards are scattered. The Wall is your main stomping ground: a location previously depicted in Of Orcs and Men, which divides the continent between the realms of those races and is a sort of big, dirty hybrid of Hadrian’s Wall, the old London Bridge, and the Burj Khalifa: a staggering, labyrinthine tangle of building regs violations, medieval bustle, and impossible verticality.
The second major location is Turquoise Dawn, a tangled alien jungle in which rests a fusion of Orcish tree city and wood-fashioned Imperial outpost: a feast for the eyes, and not at all similar to The Wall aesthetically or structurally, where you’re much more likely to die from misadventure or bug attack. Lastly, the ruined tower of Akenash: the entire setting of the first Styx game, reimagined as a warped apocalypse zone full of magical abominations and roving bands of Dark Elves on the hunt for relics.
Akenash is especially interesting if you remember 2014’s Styx: Master of Shadows, which I reviewed way back when and revisited a few weeks back in anticipation of this release. It’s a fine example of a particularly marvellous thing that only video game sequels can do: the chance to explore an old stomping ground in a new context, warped by time (or magical disaster). The Akenash in Blades of Greed is recognisably a post-disaster remix of the original levels, now presented from angles previously unavailable via a series of floating islands and Styx’s arr ay of unlockable traversal options that are metered out over the course of the game’s story and provide the Metroidvania part of this delicious genre cocktail.Batman’s grapple, Link’s glider, Corvo’s blink… a bit of everything is borrowed to give Styx an expanding set of tools for accessing ever grander parts of each map, unfolding beautifully like an origami chicken in a deft example of measured, finely tuned pacing.
A set number of quartz shards must be collected to advance from each act to the next. This takes something that would be a side-objective in, say, a recent Assassin’s Creed game and puts it front and centre: this is not a game about icon janitoring, but a tightly focused to-do list with an extraordinary amount of freedom in how you go about it. Over the course of the game I’ve stumbled across numerous alternate ways to get past particular obstacles. Many areas can be skipped entirely if you care to explore off the beaten path and make regular use of your “amber vision” (a detective mode dependent on amber, a liquid macguffin from the first game that is also a type of drug; Styx is a massive junkie).
There are five story acts in total, separated by linear, setpiece stages designed to tutorialise whatever new traversal gimmick you’ve just unlocked while allowing the game to showcase unique, one-shot areas as postcards of the wider world. This is, mercifully, not a full-on open world pivot for the series but its instanced, linear approach to widening and narrowing the scope at key intervals keeps things interesting, as well as making the world just feel larger than a true open world ever really manages.
What isn’t as successful are the cutscenes. Necessary for plot transport, sure, but often comically naff: partly for annoying technical reasons that have plagued the Unreal engine since the Xbox 360 days to varying degrees, but mostly because the voice acting is about 50 percent wretched. Most of the line delivery is functional but lacking any sort of charisma or flair, like the performer would have the exact same inflection reading the shipping forecast. A good deal of it is simply dreadful, as horridly miscast and clumsily delivered as the average school play. Add to this the Unreal-ness of it all, that engine’s particular difficulty with camera cuts (why are you redrawing the entire scene from scratch every time we change angles? Why?!), audio cues that ping in entirely the wrong places, and various other minor annoyances.
Attribution
Luckily, the cutscenes don’t form a high percentage of the experience, this isn’t Metal Gear after all. In pure gameplay terms, Blades of Greed absolutely sings. Its traversal is a rush to the senses, a game where you cover large distances with death-defying stunts and acrobatic feats like impossible ledge-grabs and riding vortex-like air currents half way to the skybox and back. And then, slinking around the small spaces, ducking under tables, scampering up walls, slithering through drains, grabbing any and all of the burgeoning opportunities on offer to position yourself for the kill, or the snatch. The array of magical abilities on Styx’s cheat sheet certainly make things fun, often inspiring the intense dopamine hit that comes when a game convinces you that you’ve gotten one over on the baddies. The rush of having planned and executed the perfect crime: a loosened chandelier here, a distraction there, a mind-controlled armoured guard puppeteered into plunging to his doom, why not? It’s only amber.
And yet some of the most thrilling time you’ll have with Styx is when you don’t have the amber to spare. When you can’t just Derren Brown your way around a problem. When you can’t vomit up a clone to go and pull the lever while you stay in the rafters. Resources are scarce enough that on plenty of occasions, you are simply unable to deploy gadgets or special talents and must solve the current puzzle of getting past some guards in a room by utilising the very basic tools that you had before you even booted the game up: hiding, observing, patience, and timing. Every scrape can be survived and every puzzle can be solved with just these fundamentals, and every blunder into open conflict will get you killed. This is what makes Styx 3 a true stealth game, a proper stealth game, as distinct from the franchise bloat that has, for example, made Assassin’s Creed into a straight up action RPG where the virtues of silence and shadow are paid a lot of lip service but ultimately are entirely optional.
Not so here. For those of us who frankly prefer all this sneaking around to a straight fight, Blades of Greed is the real deal, and despite a shift in the general direction of a more open world-ish experience it has, whether via creative restraint or the absence of an infinite budget, resisted the urge to load up on empty calories. Like the titular goblin himself, Styx 3 is smart, and lean. But it has also cracked the formula: previous Styx games relied far too much on reusing locations, which often felt stifling, and killed the sense of progress. What Blades of Greed manages to do with its Metroidvania sensibilities is craft a set of locations that you absolutely don’t mind revisiting. I’ll go further than that: when the set pieces and story cutscenes are done, they are a joy to return to.
And what this leads to is the conclusion that, not only is this the best Styx game by a wide margin, it’s also the best stealth game in years. Styx, you horrid, grotty little git, I didn’t realise how much I needed you back. Please don’t wait a decade next time.
A copy of Styx: Blades of Greed was provided for this review by Nacon.