Styx: Shards of Darkness

2025-08-24
Shards of Darkness is at its best when Styx is a foul-mouthed, slinking marmoset, able to fling his tiny body about vertically expansive levels full of hidey-holes and catwalks. In short: levels with options are nirvana. When you can dabble in both duct ducking and cliff clinging, you're going to have a good time. It's when the gobbo gets jammed into linear hallways full of traps and enemies that hear anything more than the gentlest press of an analog stick's worth of movement where the game hollows itself out. You've taken away the creativity AND I have to move like molasses?

Thankfully most of the game is that good type of stealth. Though they throw in the odd level of the bad kind to keep you from having too much fun. I mean for god sakes the entire last level is a linear platforming "challenge" against an enemy that can one-shot you. Way to end on a whimper, guys. Blessedly there is generous quick-saving so even in its worst moments it's reasonably forgiving and in its best moments you're free to save-reload-reload-reload to your hearts to content as you try every method of goblin-parkouring on the guards’ asses.

Oh there's co-op too which is both very amusing in how broken it is (the levels are NOT tuned for two people who can murder simultaneously) and how unfun it can quickly turn once you realize you're the guy who keeps setting off the alarms leaving your friend to deal with the aftermath. What can I say? They call me "Low IQ Greg" for a reason. And my name's not even Greg.

"Our protagonist is a swearing, fourth-wall breaking, goblin jokester" on paper is absolute anathema to me. Especially after the sheer deluge of rancid, quip-heavy horseshit we've had shoveled into our gobs by the Whedon-ites at Disney over the past decade. But heaven help me if I didn't actually enjoy him and, shit, I think the game would be worse without him. Sure I cringed when he mentioned streaming during one of the "I'm going to yell at you because you killed me" Game Over screens, but for the most part there's an economy to his one-liners that mostly had me grinning and occasionally even chuckling.

Well, cheers, Cyanide Studios, I think you just spawned another Styx fan.