Styx: Shards of Darkness' launch trailer makes time for a dig at Assassin's Creed

One game that seems destined to be lost in the extraordinary March rush is Styx: Shards of Darkness, Cyanide's sequel to its goblin-based fantasy stealth game that's releasing on March 14—so next Tuesday. The first game garnered fairly solid reviews, and sequel Shards of Darkness seems to offer more wacky, light-hearted, third-person-stealthy shenanigans, but this time with added two-player co-op.

Of course, it's not a proper game release without an accompanying 'hey, this is out soon' trailer, and the one Cyanide and publisher Focus Home has put out is...well, it's not your usual launch trailer, I'll give them that. As a YouTube commenter points out, protagonist Styx is basically the goblin version of Deadpool: he makes a crack about Assassin's Creed at one point here, with a zany, fourth-wall-breaking sense of humour that will probably become insufferable five minutes into the game.

In short: Styx sounds like a right prick. However, after the deadly serious Dishonored 2, I like that Cyanide's game isn't taking itself entirely seriously.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.