Sight offers you a lit-up vision of your environment, and it highlights enemies and things you can interact with. But you’ll always have enough to use two abilities: amber sight and your clone. You’ll find or pickpocket vials of it, and if you have enough, you can become invisible for a limited time. Styx comes with amber abilities, skills that use the sap from the World Tree. Kudos to Cyanide for giving Styx so many options it adds immeasurably to the game’s feeling of quality and realism.

Hide the bodies in dark rooms or chests or wardrobes or eliminate them with acid, so the other guards don’t alert, or use them to deliberately alert the guards to free up another path for you to follow. You can go up by climbing and make your way around top levels, or down and make your way hunched under tables or ore carts or benches.Įven your kills have variety: Sneak up and strangle them, insta-kill them from afar with your (limited) throwing knives, poison them, push them off a ledge, crush them with a falling object. Still others require arranging “accidents” with poison or dropping chandeliers. Others call on you to leave a trail of (well-hidden) bodies in your wake. Some need no killing but do require perfect timing. Even in a single large room, you can usually take a half-dozen paths. I truly enjoyed discovering the many ways to clear through a given mission.

(See “combat” under the “What you won’t like” section.) But if you want a challenging, intriguing traditional stealth game with some RPG-lite elements … Styx will surprise, and possibly even enthrall, you. If you want more combat with your stealth, this is not the game for you. Enemies that can’t see but can hear incredibly well, instantly kill you if you’re detected, or that have hyper-alert senses of smell, offer some variety. You’ll spend the game crawling through tunnels, climbing the walls, sneaking up behind people or elves or bugs and killing them slowly and quietly (or quickly and noisily), and hiding the bodies.

Even in total darkness, guards spot or smell you if they get too close. You’ll see and hear when they’re on alert, or when they’re on the lookout more than usual because of actions you’ve taken. Styx is a throwback, a stealth-focused game that includes only a minimum of UI to tell you what guards and enemies are thinking.

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