Styx: Shards of Darkness

dishonored's tight controls, phantom's pain mechanical responsiveness, thief's level design and blacklist's co-op all mixed and put together in a fantasy setting.
styx takes everything good there is an a stealth genre and sprinkles it with some edgy characters and quippy dialogue.
it's great.

Amazing coop stealth game that is very unique. Reminiscent of Aragami 1 and 2 excpet in this game the main character is actually hilarious with constant banter and whenever you die he roasts you or tells u this will take awhile so order pizza. At one point the game makes fun of Assassin's Creed as well by having the character ask where his conveniently placed haystack is. XD

In the end I decided to give this a 10/10 because I've played the game three times with three different people and each time the game has felt new.
There's so many laughs when playing together with someone and "oh shit" moments that cause absolute panic throughout the game.
I feel like this game is underrated and should have more eyes upon it!

Anyone want to play it a fourth time with me?

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☑ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☑ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ 10

---{ Author }---
☑

Has dwarves in the game, although you play with a goblin.
Best stealth game I played so far, really fun. The writing is funny, the art is astounding.
I barely know english anymore, but I think you get it.
Full price recommended.

This game is...Bizarre...........
also the co-op is very fun but very jank and inconsistent, if you're the client there's the likelihood that any progress you make in your friend's game may be lost if you crash or quit and when you come back all your upgrades may be gone, hours lost, really sucks, otherwise i love this game despite its flaws, new vocabulary and quotes will be burnt into your mind like CIA trigger phrases
probably not ideal for my review to be front-loaded with a big negative, but i promise, you see this game on sale for a few short dollars you buy it and you play it and have some of that sweet spot 7/10 fun
(also Master of Shadows is good too get that)

As someone who plays a lot of stealth games, I enjoyed it overall. It cleaned up some of the issues I had with the original game, but it did lose a bit in the process by tempering down on some of the rougher points that made the original feel unique.
-----
The core gameplay is largely the same as its predecessor. Styx: Master of Shadows. Styx is a pure stealth game and doesn’t stray into the trap of giving you stealth as an option while still making combat an equally viable option. You have to stick to blind spots and shadows to either slip past or kill enemies without being detected. Getting caught is practically a death sentence unless you’re able to escape quickly so keeping hidden is your only realistic option for beating the game. I really liked the mechanics of the first game and I feel the same way about this one too.
The biggest changes to the gameplay are with the items and abilities, though I’m somewhat conflicted on whether I like them overall. Rather than finding items across the map, you now find raw materials and can craft items of your choosing between missions or upon finding crafting stations. While this does give you more flexibility and predictability regarding what tools you’ll have at your disposal, it does mean there’s a lot less reason to conserve your items for a particularly tricky situation unlike the first game where they were a precious resource.
Likewise, the abilities are much stronger and provide you with far more options than before. You can craft better gear, reduce the sound you produce, kill in different ways, and more. While this does make a lot of the moment-to-moment gameplay more fun, it does reduce the tension since you have far more ways out of a tricky situation compared to the restrictions posed by the first game. While the gameplay does have some more polish around movement, climbing, and interactions with the physics that I appreciated, they add to the general feeling that the game is going easy on you by taking away the points of the first game that, while rough, contributed to the tension and restrictiveness of the stealth that made it such a good experience.
-----
Aside from the mechanics, the level and mission design has changed substantially. I like the levels much more this time around. While both game's levels are visually distinctive, the actual layout and gameplay ‘feel’ of each is much more varied in the Shards of Darkness. Each level feels like it's asking for a different approach thanks to the variety in environmental hazards, enemy types, and how both of these are placed throughout the map rather than just putting a different set of paint on the same challenges as before. The actual layout also has a lot more options for traversal which, combined with the polish to the movement I mentioned earlier, makes the stealth feel much smoother with more time spent on actions and less on watching and waiting.
By far my biggest issue with Master of Shadows was the repetition of levels in the 2nd half of the game. The entire back half (barring the very finale) was just a slightly tweaked replay of a level from the first half with some changes to the objective and enemies. It sucked and really made the game a chore to complete. But while Shards of Darkness does still repeat some (but not all) levels, it did a far better job of making them feel distinct from the first run. The missions are substantially different. Each level is large and you probably missed a lot of stuff in your first run. On the replay, the mission objectives will typically send you to the parts of the level that were the least important during the first run and often require different methods of traversal thanks to changed enemy placements and obstacles. So while the level itself is the same, your engagement with it on the gameplay’s end still feels fresh. While some parts did this better than others, I never felt like I was desperate for the level to end in the same way I did throughout much of the first game.
-----
The gameplay and levels are easily the most important parts of the game. But I should still at least mention the other aspects. The story is…. well it's not worth paying attention to. I didn’t mention it in my review of the first game but the story was actually quite good. Its narrow focus and integration with the gameplay made it surprisingly impactful and while I didn’t really value it as much as the gameplay I did at least appreciate that it tried to do something interesting. The sequel's story is uninteresting. Styx steals something, guy steals the thing from Styx, and Styx tries to get it back while getting involved with other important stuff in the process. It’s uninteresting and pretty detached from anything gameplay related so I choose to ignore it.
But even worse than the bland and forgettable story, this game made some noteworthy changes to Styx’s personality. In the first game Styx was a morose, selfish, uncaring, and generally bitter creature who doesn’t care about anyone or anything but himself. But in the new game, his personality has become even worse: he’s become cringe. Styx tells so many dumb jokes that all feel like they were killing me on the inside. Every time you die, Styx will break the 4th wall to berate the play and say you suck at the game. He feels like you took an outline of his personality from the first game and asked the marketing team to make him into something that 2010s teenagers will love (they won't, but marketing will think they will). The worst part of dying wasn't the knowledge that I would have to redo the gameplay, it was that I would have to put op will several seconds of the cringiest dialogue I've seen in an otherwise serious game. It's not a big deal or anything, but it's bad enough to warrant mentioning.
-----
Broadly speaking, I prefer the gameplay of Masters of Shadows and the levels of Shards of Darkness. This game simply lacks the pressure and tension that characterized the feel of the first game by making everything so much more smooth and flexible. But the relative shortcomings of the gameplay are outweighed by the improved level design, better handling of repeated content, and fixing all the jank and awkward flow of the first game. Both games are definitely worth playing, but I imagine most people will agree that Shards of Darkness is the better of the two. As long as you’re interested in stealth games then I would definitely recommend playing it yourself.

A truly great sequel, taking the original and just adding new features... additions, no subtractions.
More stealth, more tools to aid in your murderous activities, and even a few different knives and outfits to choose from.
Plus, when you factor in the co-op mode, it's a pretty easy must have.
If you enjoyed the original or just enjoy stealth games, I would highly recommend you pick this up.