Styx: Blades of Greed Beginner's Guide: How to Not Die Instantly
If you try to play this hardcore stealth game like a traditional action RPG, you are going to spend your entire weekend staring at a game over screen.
Styx has finally returned from an eight year hiatus, and the foul mouthed goblin has not learned how to take a punch in that time. Blades of Greed is an unforgiving return to pure stealth. You are weak, enemies hit like freight trains, and the world is packed with heavily armored guards who want nothing more than to turn you into a green smear on the cobblestone. I spent my first few hours getting absolutely clapped because I forgot how demanding Cyanide Studios makes their detection mechanics. It is not Assassin's Creed where you can just parry an entire army. To save you the frustration of endless respawns, I put together the exact strategies, mandatory upgrades, and dirty tricks you need to survive the Iserian Continent.
Save Scumming is Mandatory
I usually hate relying on quick saves in modern games, but Blades of Greed essentially functions as a trial and error simulator. You will execute a perfect drop assassination, only to realize an archer you never saw is currently staring directly at you. The game features an autosave system, but it is wildly unreliable when you are experimenting with patrol routes.
Hit F7 on your keyboard or click the left thumbstick on your controller constantly. Do it after you clear a room. Do it before you attempt a risky jump. If you want a more lore friendly safety net than mashing a button like a lab rat, spend a single Talent point to unlock the Cocoon Crafting Recipe. This costs four Solid Ambers and four Roabies Larvae to craft, but placing one down gives you a physical respawn point. When you inevitably mess up and catch a sword to the face, you pop right back out of the cocoon instead of reloading a distant save.
Combat is a Trap
Drawing your dagger in a face to face fight is the absolute worst decision you can make. The combat system wants you to lock on like it is Dark Souls, except it absolutely is not Dark Souls. If you get spotted by a group, do not try to be a hero. Turn around and run. Styx is incredibly agile, and you can easily slip into crawlspaces, scale chimneys, or dive out of windows to break their line of sight before they skewer you.
You need to rely entirely on assassinations and environmental hazards. Sneak up behind standard grunts and hold the attack button to ensure it is a silent kill. Brutes and fully armored inquisition guards cannot be assassinated from behind. If you try, you will only scratch their armor and instantly trigger an alert phase, effectively ringing the dinner bell for every guard in the zip code.
Instead, look up. The game is littered with heavy chandeliers and suspended cargo crates. Wait for a brute to walk under one, cut the rope, and let gravity do the heavy lifting. You can also poison plates of food or sacks of grog. When an armored guard takes a break for lunch, they will unknowingly ingest the vomit poison and drop dead a few seconds later. Just make sure you do not trigger an alert phase before they eat, because frightened guards lose their appetite and will ignore the food entirely.
Tools of the Trade
Your inventory is your best friend when brute force fails. You unlock new items by finding blueprints hidden throughout the map, and you should be crafting them whenever you have the resources. Throwing sand at torches to kill the lights is a great way to force guards to investigate the dark.
My absolute favorite toy is the Acid Trap. Large enemies are impossible to carry and hide once they are dead. If another guard spots the corpse, the whole base goes on high alert. Placing an Acid Trap completely solves this problem. Any enemy that steps on it is instantly dissolved into a puddle of goo. No body, no crime, no alert phase. It makes the cleanup crew in Hitman look like amateurs.
See the World in Purple
Goblin Vision is your most critical tool for navigating the massive honeycomb maps. Hitting the vision button highlights enemy sightlines and shows you exactly what direction they are looking. Hostile enemies glow red, while nonlethal targets glow pink.
More importantly, Goblin Vision highlights interactable objects in blue and key items in purple. If you see a purple glow, go grab it. These items are usually blueprints, money bags, or quest items. You also want to equip the Dee Rune as soon as Wren hands it to you. This specifically allows you to see hidden runes through solid walls, saving you hours of mindless searching.
Emblem Hunting and The Point of No Return
The main collectibles in Blades of Greed are Emblems. They look like glowing scarab beetles, and collecting them feeds you a massive chunk of experience points. You need these points to unlock the Talent tree, so ignoring them is a great way to stay hopelessly underleveled.
There are 100 Emblems total. You will find 50 in The Wall and 50 in Turquoise Dawn. You will not find a single Emblem in the Akenash Ruins. Grab the Raven Rune from the Harlow Shop in The Wall as soon as possible, as this makes the Emblems glow purple through walls.
A massive warning before you progress too far. Act 5 features a hard point of no return. The game will explicitly warn you before you travel to the Akenash Ruins. Do not ignore this warning. If you go to Akenash, you are locked into the endgame sequence. You will completely lose access to The Wall, Turquoise Dawn, your side quests, and any Emblems you left behind. Clear your Ubisoft-style checklist before you get on that Zeppelin.
The Quartz Powers You Actually Need
As you progress, you unlock powerful Quartz abilities that completely break the standard stealth rules. You can unlock them in any order, but you should prioritize a specific few to make your life easier.
Goblin Reflex is easily the best combat safety net. It gives you a reliable dodge during active combat, but the real benefit is the projectile deflection. When an archer takes a shot at you, hitting the button at the right time bounces the arrow right back into their skull. It removes so much frustration from the finicky combat system.
Mind Control is the most entertaining tool in the game. For two Amber points, you can literally possess a guard. Use them to walk into heavily restricted areas and scout the layout without risking your own skin. If you upgrade it with the Suicidal Impulse talent, you can force heavily armored enemies to jump off cliffs to their death. It is incredibly dark, incredibly funny, and extremely effective.
Time Shift is your final mandatory grab. It slows down the world for roughly four seconds while you move at normal speed. If you accidentally walk into a room with three guards facing the door, pop Time Shift and sprint back into the shadows before their detection meters fill up. If you upgrade it with the Slowdown Exploit, you can actually use that frozen time to rip the armor off a brute before they can react.
