Styx: Blades of Greed Review - A Classic Stealth Series Reborn?

Purist stealth games like Styx: Blades of Greed simply do not get made anymore. I say this with no lack of bias, but it may very well be the single most underserved genre in the gaming space, with only an occasional gem like No Sun To Worship or Intravenous reminding us that games where stealth is neither purely optional nor insultingly dumbed-down still have the right to exist.

As a stealth purist myself who loves nothing more than slinking through the shadows and taking out a roomful of enemies without being detected, the fact that Ubisoft’s most recent Splinter Cell game is now old enough to be celebrating its Bar Mitzvah tells me that the indie gaming scene is my only true hope. Perhaps that places too much pressure on poor old Styx, but alas, the question remains – does evoking the gameplay of classic stealth titles alone make Blades of Greed worth a recommendation? Much like a melodramatic teenager’s relationship status, the answer is “it’s complicated.”

For those in the know, you’ll recognize that Styx: Blades of Greed is not this sassy goblin’s first outing – just the first one in quite some time. Having been preceded by Styx: Master of Shadows in 2014 and its follow-up Shards of Darkness three years later, Blades of Greed already has a firm stealth foundation to build upon. But admittedly, while I did play both of those games, I finished neither of them, in each case finding the core stealth gameplay to be decently fun, but the overarching story and design failing to hold my attention in the same way that my homeboy Sam Fisher could.

Narrative plays a larger role in Blades of Greed than you might expect, and unfortunately more than you may want.  This time around, Styx is leading his own crew on board a traveling zeppelin that will serve as a home base between key mission areas.  Your primary goal is to get Quartz, a dangerous but alluring resource for Styx that gives him an addicting sense of power – but with risks that are unclear.  It’s not a complicated premise, and yet there are quite a few cutscenes filled with dialogue and character interactions that sadly do not stick the landing.  Each character is dreadfully boring to listen to, and even Styx, quippy and sarcastic as he tends to be, rarely goes as far as being funny.  There are even moments where Styx himself seems bored by the members of his crew, and it’s hard to argue with him. Frankly, if I weren’t reviewing this one, I would’ve been skipping every cutscene after a few hours because there’s simply no flavor to this narrative stew.

The structure, however, allows Styx a newfound freedom to visit areas that are more open than any game in his past, with some metroidvania elements giving previously visited areas a little more purpose.  What strikes me the most, however, is the sheer verticality in mind when these levels were designed – there are tons of ways to get around and get the jump on your enemies, and Styx’s move set works as a beautiful complement to this.  He can double jump and scramble up walls, push his back up to cover and peek around corners with the option to roll from cover to cover, kill from above, make himself invisible, generate a clone of himself to distract enemies, hide bodies, and much more.  There’s significant variation in how each encounter can play out, though admittedly with my ingrained nostalgia for older stealth titles it was hard for me to want to use his fancier abilities.  In any case, controlling Styx feels better than it ever has here, and despite the overall pace of the game being slow by design, as any stealth game would be, there’s little to nothing about Styx himself that makes getting around feel like anything but a fluid, well-calibrated experience.

It’s no surprise then that the core gameplay here is refreshingly solid, and feels, in the best way, like a PS3 game that got a technical glow-up.  While there are some crafting and leveling elements that feel like symptoms of an age where every game seemingly needs to have these things, they don’t distract from a sneaky experience that feels like it was made for people like me.  Enemies are tough but predictable, often hanging out in groups and following patterns that need to be watched closely if you want to get the jump on them.  Even on normal difficulty, getting caught is really bad, because it will only take a hit or two before you go down, and the new intentionally clumsy souls-lite combat system consisting purely of well-timed stabs and dodges is not something you’ll want to lean upon, especially in the frequent case where multiple guards are attacking you at once.  The goal is very much not to get caught, and I love that this isn’t optional, since I have major beef with the AAA industry’s taste for play-your-own-way style stealth that makes shooting or slashing your way out of a confrontation trivially easy.  Styx is not that game, and it’s all the better for it.  Using the tools at your disposal in a clever way to clear a room of guards, hide their bodies and make it look like nothing happened feels exactly as satisfying as it should.

I just wish that level of satisfaction extended almost anywhere else.  I know that’s a deep dig, and one I hate to throw out there in light of the seriously great core gameplay here.  But it feels like the game’s focus on its core gameplay and level design leaves its other elements looking deeply dated by comparison.

Chief among my grievances here is the mission design.  Much of Styx: Blades of Greed will simply thrust you into an open area and say “go find these shards of Quartz and absorb them,” with any potential intrigue left off the table.  Guards who patrol never say anything interesting, and while each area indeed feels like the stealth playground it was intended to be, there’s a coldness to the lack of meaningful lore or context in any of it.  To distill my point, it feels like a series of fetch quests, some even having the annoying audacity to send you to a location and have the very piece of Quartz you’re hunting be snatched out from under you and moved to another location. What’s better than a fetch quest?  Surely a fetch quest that snatches the prize from your grasp multiple times like a bully playing keep-away with your school lunch!  Between this and the boring story, the core stealth experience is left with a lot of heavy lifting to do.  And unfortunately, elements of the game’s presentation are not here to help.

Now, don’t get me wrong – Styx is quite a fine-looking game on a technical level, and clearly a massive visual improvement over its predecessors, as you’d reasonably expect with a 9-year gap between it and the most recent entry.  But that comes with its drawbacks – for one, performance is extremely rough if you’re trying to play this on a low-end rig.  Pay attention to the recommended specs here because even on my laptop with an RTX 4060, I could only sometimes get 50-60 fps on a combination of low to medium settings at 1440p, and that’s with DLSS enabled.  On a desktop RTX 4080, it was easy enough to get 60 fps even on max settings, but DLSS and frame generation felt pretty much required for that to be realistic.  Steam Deck owners – I would not even bother right now.  While it looks quite nice, this is a demanding one that’s sure to see some Steam reviews lamenting how poorly it scales.

Where I fail to see the point in its high-ish end visuals is in the fact that within each biome, environmental design looks almost identical from area to area.  There’s little to no visual variation within each zone, with so many assets used and reused within the sometimes massive levels that I frequently wished the focus was more on giving each building character rather than just making it so that there’s a lot of them.  The level design, to its credit, does have a pretty wide variety of approaches built-in, and that’s important.  But whether I enter a building through the window, a hole in the wall, or by jumping down its chimney, the fact that everything inside looks very nearly the same as in every other building kills some immersion through sheer recognition of just how little there is to discover.  And that impacts the gameplay in a sense too, because while exploring will net you some items that could help you out in your sleuthing, these rarely feel essential and the visual uniformity to everything made me ache to simply get through the next fetch quest rather than exploring my surroundings in-depth.

Audio design in Styx is pretty minimalist, but not to a fault – this is a slower-paced stealth game, after all, with rarely the sort of fast-paced sequences that demand a hard-hitting soundtrack.  And what’s there is fine, both in terms of music and ambient sound design, albeit nothing that’s going to turn heads.  Enemy dialogue, however, feels from the PS3 era in an arguably bad way, though that’s in the eye of the beholder, with voice acting ranging from fine to awful and the sort of pointless quips that added nothing to the vibe but sawdust-flavored filler.

While I found the game pretty stable overall, it’s definitely prone to some odd bugs here and there, although none that broke the game too badly even in the worst of cases.  For one, there’s a mechanic that allows you to poison guards’ food so that they’ll eat it and quickly die on their next patrol of the area, but the way it tends to work (or not) often left me scratching my head.  Sometimes I would poison food and the guard patrolling wouldn’t even touch it, and in one strange case a guard got sick and died before I even poisoned his meal, which was convenient but certainly interesting.  Guard patrols can also sometimes break, like in one case where three guards I needed to get past stopped patrolling at all and just hung around each other, making my objective exceptionally difficult even after multiple reloads.  I managed to still get past with some clever use of tools, but it’s important to have reasonably predictable NPC behavior in a stealth game like this, and times when that breaks can add some frustration.

In the end, Styx: Blades of Greed ends up feeling like a more finely-tuned, but perhaps less interesting evolution of its predecessors.  For every way the core stealth experience and open-ended level design takes a step forward into the modern era, its mission design, cold visual uniformity, and lack of immersion feel firmly rooted in the past.  It’s nice to have a new game come out for those who value experiences where stealth is mandatory, but it misses the mark too often to feel like a standout example of the genre.  It’s easy enough to recommend to folks like myself who are starved of modern stealth games, but I’d caution even them to come in not expecting it to make the wait for a proper new Splinter Cell-like any easier.  It looks like it and it feels like it, but much like asking ChatGPT to pretend to be your girlfriend on Valentine’s Day, it won’t take too long before you see through the cracks.

At I Dream of Indie Games, we value games as more than just a number, and assign them a genie lamp ranging from the dreaded indie Krampus all the way up to the coveted golden genie lamp of approval.  As a solidly fun stealth game wrapped in a blanket of unfortunate flaws, Styx: Blades of Greed gets my cautious recommendation and earns itself the bronze genie lamp of approval.

BRONZE: GOOD