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Styx may break your bones: Cyanide’s Dishonorable stealth game trailered

Styx may break your bones, if you happen to be a hapless guard.

Ubisoft think they’re good at branding, but they called their Great War game Valiant Hearts and not Sassoon’s Creed.

There, that’s my Assassin’s Creed joke. Cyanide Studios have entitled their new Styx: Master of Shadows trailer ‘Assassin’s Green’, which is a second-rate pun if you ask me. But it does go some way to communicating Styx’s goblin-based stealth and verticality. Take a look.

Cyanide might be namechecking Ubisoft’s bestselling sneak ‘n’ stab series, but the portrait orientation of Styx’s levels actually recalls Dishonored better than Assassin’s Creed. And its obstacle-strewn playgrounds are best played like Splinter Cell: Blacklist’s.

Our emerald protagonist exploits occasional pauses behind cover and – what else – x-ray vision to gather as much information as he can about his surroundings. Then, once the guard count gets a bit heavy, he relies on his ability to improvise (and, occasionally, to turn invisible) to survive.

There is, I regret to report, the odd hit of the lack of polish that’s plagued Cyanide games in the past. Typos in the subtitles, and an apparent shortage of sound effects: a goblin landing on a man at the bottom of a fifty foot drop doesn’t deliver quite the satisfying FLUMP expected.

But it’s really nice to see a new name enter a genre mostly sewn up by sequels and reboots. Cyanide have always made precisely the games they wanted to, and their reverse Shadow of Mordor is more than welcome.

Styx is out on PC in October. Maybe you’ve a hankering for a game more committed to sneakery than Assassin’s Creed Unity?