Styx: Blades of Greed – A Goblin’s Vertical Playground

The goblin stealth series makes a bold leap into semi-open world design with Blades of Greed, and somehow, miraculously, it works. Nine years after Shards of Darkness, Cyanide Studio has refined the formula while maintaining the punishing verticality that made Styx a cult favorite among stealth enthusiasts.

The Vertical Playground

The three massive maps in Blades of Greed sprawl in ways that make Dark Souls’ Blighttown look positively flat. The Wall—a tumbledown city built into the arches of a towering viaduct—became my favorite haunt, with its tenebrous upper reaches offering countless opportunities for vertical murder and escape. Turquoise Dawn, a verdant swamp expanse once dominated by orcs, features monolithic trees and even taller strongholds that beg to be explored.

What’s remarkable is how these environments feel simultaneously open and meticulously crafted. The maps are designed like sprawling honeycombs, with crawlspaces connecting chambers that are also linked by rooftops, windows, corbels, and pilasters. When a guard spots you, the escape routes feel almost too generous—you can crawl up a chimney, parkour down a rope, leap through a window, and cut a throat from behind before they even know what happened.

Metroidvania Meets Goblin

The addition of traversal upgrades transforms exploration from a simple joy to an absolute necessity. A hookshot lets you reach otherwise inaccessible heights or bypass staircases entirely, while a parachute allows you to ride wind columns like elevators or break your fall from terrifying heights. These aren’t just convenience items—they fundamentally change how you approach each area.

By the five-hour mark, Styx himself takes on an expressive fluidity that makes the game almost more fun when you’re caught. The cat-and-mouse gameplay becomes a dance of death, with multiple viable routes through every encounter.

Stealth with Bite

Let’s be clear: you’re still a piddling goblin. Direct combat is possible but inadvisable. Styx can engage in melee, but he’s squishy, and enemies hit hard. The game demands the kind of careful planning and execution that stealth fans crave, with a variety of tools to help you along.

Your arsenal includes the returning temporary invisibility cloak, enemy possession, clone creation, and time-slowing abilities. There are also more offensive upgrades, though I found the stealth-focused abilities better suited my playstyle. The RPG-lite progression system lets you tailor Styx to your preferred approach, whether that’s pure sneaking or more brazen tactics.

A Living, Breathing World

The Iserian Continent feels alive in ways previous Styx games never achieved. Giant insects with brilliantly attuned hearing patrol certain areas, dog-like ferals explode upon approach, and swarms of pests will devour Styx upon contact. Pustulent green plants can wipe out three-quarters of your health if you walk too close.

Most encounters involve semi-intelligent beings rather than wildlife, which helps maintain the roleplay of being a murderous little grunt. The Inquisitors’ forces include standard guards, heavy variants that complicate murder-and-hide impulses, and other threats that keep you on your toes.

Story and Structure

The main quest involves hunting for Quartz—powerful slabs of gleaming blue rock that the Inquisitors are using for their diabolical political ends. At first, the “go here and find three Quartz” structure seems repetitive, but Cyanide has embellished each hunt with puzzles and amusing obstacles that make every search feel like its own discrete stealth narrative.

The semi-open world structure hasn’t fundamentally changed the Styx formula—it still feels like a sequence of tightly constructed missions—but now you have much more choice in how you approach them. There are big set-piece oriented missions, but much of the game involves moseying around the three main maps, which somehow never feels like padding.

Technical Performance

Performance was stable but occasionally hairy on my RTX 3060 laptop, with frame drops typically occurring in busy bug-ridden interiors rather than the vast exteriors. The game is quiet and exacting enough that these issues rarely impacted gameplay significantly.

I encountered some bugs that undermined confidence: keys that couldn’t be picked up even when nearby enemies weren’t alert, entries that were sometimes accessible and other times invisibly blocked, and a quick save that only worked 95% of the time. These issues were frustrating but not game-breaking.

The Goblin Himself

Perhaps most surprisingly, I didn’t hate Styx by the end. Blades of Greed shaves away some of his most tedious misanthropy and has him traveling between missions with a varied cast of fellow adventurers. This sounds like it could be even more punishing, but the wider color gamut and tonal variety actually work in the game’s favor.

The game feels like classic 1980s dark fantasy in the mold of The Dark Crystal or Return to Oz—a grimy, dangerous world where even the protagonist is kind of awful, but you’re invested in seeing what happens next anyway.

Final Verdict

Styx: Blades of Greed is a really good stealth game set in a meticulously detailed fantasy world. It’s not perfect—the bugs and occasional repetitive structure hold it back from greatness—but it’s the best the series has ever been. For fans of vertical stealth gameplay, metroidvania-style exploration, and dark fantasy settings, this is essential playing.

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