REVIEW – Styx: Blades of Greed finally commits to bigger, airier maps while delivering Styx’s mandatory cynicism, quartz hunger, and stealth-first gameplay. The problem is that the game too often nudges you instead of inspiring you: it shows you what you’re “supposed” to do, then slaps your wrist the moment you step outside its narrow lane. But if you accept that the save button is your best friend here – and that messing up is part of the learning curve – there’s a surprisingly satisfying, experiment-heavy stealth game hiding under the rigidity.

Styx: Blades of Greed continues a stealth series that started back in 2014 – and if anyone hasn’t grown more lovable since then, it’s Styx. You’re playing a quartz-addicted goblin who’s apparently being watched by some higher power, while down on the ground just about everyone hates his guts. In this world, goblins are the punching bag, so when you get spotted it’s not a warning or a cautious search – it’s an instant dogpile, like their only mission is to grind you into the dirt. In a stealth game, that at least tracks: it explains why there’s barely a “second chance,” and why the only sensible plan is to stay unseen.

Styx himself fits that setup perfectly. He’s cynical, sour, and never stops cracking jokes – not because he’s charming, but because if he didn’t laugh at his own misery, there’d be only one other option. That self-mocking survivor mentality is what keeps him entertaining even when the game is busy borrowing your patience.

Big maps, narrow lanes

Styx: Blades of Greed drops you into several semi-open zones – bigger “playgrounds,” basically. Quartz stones are scattered around, side quests and extra tasks get sprinkled in as you progress, but the main objective barely changes: go from point A to point B without getting noticed, grab what you need along the way, then return to base. Quartz unlocks new abilities and pushes the story forward – on paper, there’s a solid reason to poke around.

Level layout often nails that mini-sandbox feeling: when you arrive somewhere, it genuinely looks like there are multiple routes and multiple solutions. The catch is that there’s almost always one path that’s clearly more efficient than the rest – it’s just not always obvious where it is or how to find it fast. That’s classic Styx: you test a route, backtrack, look for a ledge, a crack, a shortcut, and then it clicks – you’ve found the “right” direction.

It’s also obvious the game wants to feel modern, and it gets there partly by borrowing familiar control and system ideas. Crafting lockpicks and tools, for example, feels a lot like The Last of Us – except Styx is rummaging through his pockets instead of a backpack. The ledge-to-ledge movement, climbing, and general traversal often gives off Assassin’s Creed vibes, while the stealth pacing and certain habits feel straight out of Far Cry. On top of that, you get a lot of prompts, pop-up hints, and training wheels – which is the trend, sure, but I would’ve preferred fewer handholds and more original ideas.

It doesn’t help that the level design can be predictable: you often see what the game is setting up, and you can guess what the “approved” route will be. That’s not always a dealbreaker, but in stealth games the magic fades fast when you can read the designer’s intent too easily.

When stealth isn’t a choice – it’s an order

The levels are packed with holes, gaps, and crawlspaces that make no real architectural sense – they exist solely so Styx can slip through. Huts, camps, even caves often feel “bent” around infiltration, as if the whole structure is there to force the approach. And that’s where I started losing my patience: I don’t like it when a stealth game screams that it’s a stealth game, and when the mechanics and the level design together push one behavior so hard that it stops feeling like a decision.

Fire up Metal Gear Solid V and the systems and environments let you imagine it as a shooter, or as a quiet infiltration playground – the game gives you room to decide what you want to be. Styx: Blades of Greed, by contrast, keeps asking: why aren’t you sneaking? Everything is built to serve that – the routes, the passages, the “convenient” handholds, and unfortunately, the enemies too.

Guards often behave in an overly rule-bound way: they conveniently turn their backs at just the right times, they move on very specific scripts, and their AI is frequently easy to bait, predict, and “trigger” on your terms. Toss a bottle nearby and they can act like the noise isn’t an alarm, but a philosophical riddle – turning, stopping, then staring at a wall as if the answer is written on it.

The same rigidity shows up in movement. Styx is surprisingly athletic – he even has a double jump – and the game loves verticality: lots of beams, ledges, perches, and climbable surfaces. But the fall damage rules are brutal: misjudge a drop and it’s instant death, no buffer, no “you lost half your health.” You die, and you’re dumped back to the autosave. That drove me up the wall because jumping down is often the logical, fastest option – yet I kept feeling like the game simply wouldn’t allow it. By the end I was making jumps without honestly knowing whether they were survivable or an automatic game over.

Your real weapon is the save button

That’s why Styx: Blades of Greed practically forces you into heavy manual saving. And weirdly enough, it started working for me right after I accepted that – after a rough early stretch. It doesn’t help that this entry runs on Unreal Engine 5, and the tech isn’t always clean: textures can pop in late, and a few cutscenes stutter or break in odd ways.

The cutscenes are also full of moments you’d happily skip because they feel more like padding than drama. The story isn’t especially strong, and the way it’s told doesn’t really hook you. Listening to Styx is fun – he’s the one character worth hearing out. Most of the others fade into background noise.

My turning point was letting go of the idea that this is a “free” stealth sandbox and treating it like an experiment-driven puzzle – kind of the way many of us handled stealth in Skyrim. You look for the route the level wants, you use invisibility, cloning, or cocoon abilities, and you build the choreography the game is hinting at. You fail, reload, refine. And you realize that the semi-open structure is often just that – a structure. There are lines you should follow, and lines the system will simply reject.

I’m not excusing it – I’m saying that’s what the game is. Trial and error on a board-game-like map where your pieces are stealth. Levels are stuffed with barrels, hiding spots, and props that can feel artificial, but they’re there so you can outplay an enemy system that often behaves more like moving obstacles than real opposition. Autosave pushes that idea to the extreme, until the fun becomes assembling the cleanest “run” possible – enjoying what the game allows, and also learning what it refuses.

Not flawless, but it can be a good time – if this is your thing

Because yes, the problems are real: it’s rigid, it’s strict, and if you get caught you’re usually done, since Styx is basically a decorative item in a fight. The story is mediocre, the narration didn’t work for me, and the stealth isn’t subtle – there are too many visual cues telling you where targets are looking, and you will hit moments that make you want to scream. Still, if you like this particular “hard stealth” flavor – where staying unseen isn’t optional, it’s the point – there’s a good chance you’ll find your own enjoyment in it. I did, and the whole time one thought kept coming back: making a truly great stealth game must be brutally hard.

If you played the earlier games, you’ll also appreciate that it doesn’t ditch its world and tosses in plenty of nods to past events. For some players, Styx: Blades of Greed will be a solid stealth game. For others, a small guilty pleasure. I’m somewhere in the middle, because I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it – quirks and all. Personally, I liked how it reminded me how much I enjoy juggling saves, experimenting, and polishing an infiltration until it finally looks “clean.” And that greedy, crafty mindset really does fit Styx perfectly.

-Gergely Herpai „BadSector”-

We received the PS5 review code for the game from Magnew Kft.

Publisher: Nacon
Developer: Cyanide Studio
Genre: Stealth action-adventure
Release: February 19, 2026