Styx: Master Of Shadows Preview (PC)

As a Goblin, Styx is an unlikely protagonist, coming from what is traditionally the more diminutive and less courageous of the green skinned races. Having said that, their stereotypical sneakiness and cunning make them the perfect fit for a stealth game, and Styx’ eponymous outing happens to be just that, as he infiltrates PCs later this year.

Set in the same world as Of Orcs and Men, it’s not the usual balance of morality in your usual fantasy setting, with that game positioning the Orcs and Goblins as the underdogs, persecuted by Humankind as a war rages between the various races.

Styx’ story is quite far removed from that conflict as he tries to infiltrate the Tower of Akenash, built by humans to protect a huge tree from which leaks the powerful and magical Amber, the source of Elven power. It also holds the secret to the origins of the Goblin race, with Styx being the first and having reached the ripe old age of 200. He plans to make the best of a power struggle between humans and Elves, to sneak into the tower and uncover these secrets.

The main hook to the stealth action here is a concerted effort to break open each level and section so that you can tackle objectives in a number of different ways. Just in terms of level design, there’s a lot of verticality to and what looked like a sprawl of options to deviate from the paths that the guards use, sneak above, underneath or around them and always stay out of sight.

Walls have plenty of plenty handholds adding paths for you to take and you can quickly clamber up into the rafters, but you can quickly extinguish flaming torches to avoid the gaze of guards.

While that won’t necessarily attract their attention, other things will. Their senses are based on sight and sound, so you’ll want to tip toe around and go for silent kills and so on.

By and large, it seems to have a lot of the core mechanics that you can expect from modern stealth games, as you can easily clamber around out of sight, peek through keyholes, take different paths and opt between lethal and non-lethal gameplay. However, this does have quite a few nice tweaks to the formula.

You can use the magical power of Amber to various effects. One will highlight interactive objects and guards, another will let you go invisible for a short time, but the most inventive create a clone of Styx and opens up a world of new gameplay possibilities. This clone can be used as a dumb drone to let you scout out and area, as a distraction to draw out guards from a safe area so that you might sneak by, as a way of pulling levels to let the real Styx pass through a gate or to attack and temporarily incapacitate a guard.

Guards will often be set to work in pairs and try to stick together or find their partner on a regular basis, making lethal kills trickier to pull off undetected, and the clone a very powerful tool. Additionally, guard patrol routes aren’t completely set in stone, with a degree of randomness to their patrol routes and movements, to keep you on the edge of your seat during those close calls.

Getting by silently is made more difficult by certain objects like chairs being physics objects, which will fall over and attract attention if you knock into them, while killing and stashing someone’s body in a cupboard currently leaves behind a pool of blood. This mechanic is still under consideration, and admittedly the guard didn’t search too that hard, but I do like the idea that even quiet kills could see your actions being discovered.

This opens up the idea that every one of your actions alters the manner in which an area and level plays out. If you don’t kill all of the guards, it could lead to the consequence that they will go and welcome the lift that you called, while freeing prisoners to act as a distraction so that you can get to a particular lever might mean that you’ll find a more powerful enemy blocking your path.

Styx has everything that you would expect of a stealth game, but is also trying to deliver in areas that feel fresh and that would push the genre forwards. Guard AI in particular has always been a weak spot, but by giving you the tool to avoid or deal with an AI that isn’t totally predictable, tries to work in pairs and wants to investigate certain signs of mischief, it opens up new and interesting gameplay possibilities.