Which Styx game to buy, and how cheap each one gets

Cyanide Studio has now made three games about a two-hundred-year-old goblin who climbs towers and murders elves, and they are priced as if they came from three different industries. Two of them cost about as much as a bag of crisps. The third costs twenty times that. And the "collection" that bundles the cheap ones has never, in our record, been the cheap way to get them.

So which Styx game to buy is a genuinely awkward question, and almost nobody has written down the answer. Here is ours, built on our own price record rather than on launch reviews. Read on 12 October 2026, Playze holds 91 daily readings for Styx: Master of Shadows going back to 18 June 2026, and its floor across all of them is $0.87, touched on a single day — 23 June 2026. Over the same window the keyshop Styx Collection key has never once dropped below $10.76 in 101 readings, against a combined median of $3.39 for the two older games bought separately. The bundle has never been the bargain.

The Tower of Akenash is built vertically on purpose: almost every route in Master of Shadows runs up or down rather than along. (Official Steam screenshot)

Which Styx game to buy first: Master of Shadows

Start here, and not only for chronology. Master of Shadows (October 2014) is the one that establishes the whole conceit: you are weak, you cannot win a fight, and your powers are all about not being seen. Amber — a magical golden sap drawn from the World-Tree the humans and elves are guarding — buys you invisibility, a sort of magical echo-location, and the series' best idea, the ability to vomit up a clone of yourself and drive it into a room to see what kills it.

It is an infiltration game with RPG progression on top: experience points go into assassination, infiltration or magic, and the Tower of Akenash is a miles-high stack of levels you learn by failing in them. Steam reviews sit at 83% positive across 11,730 of them, with Metacritic at 71 — a spread that tells you exactly what this game is. People who want a stealth sandbox love it. People who want forgiving stealth find the detection inconsistent and bounce off hard.

The price case is overwhelming. 55 of our 91 readings came in below $1.50, so this is not a game you need to wait for; the floor and the usual price are a few cents apart, and the one day it hit $0.87 saved less than a bus fare. Check the live listings on the game page and buy it today if you are curious at all.

The 2014 launch trailer, mirrored on GameSpot's channel rather than the publisher's.

Worth knowing: Styx first appeared as a supporting character in Cyanide's Of Orcs And Men (2012), a conventional RPG in the same world. You do not need it, and our record has it even cheaper than Master of Shadows, but it explains why a goblin assassin exists in the first place.

Light and shadow are the whole interface in Master of Shadows, and braziers are doors you can close. (Official Steam screenshot)

Shards of Darkness is the better game, and the stranger price

Styx: Shards of Darkness (March 2017) is the sequel that got the budget. Unreal Engine 4, much larger sandbox levels, climbing and swinging as real traversal rather than scripted handholds, crafting for traps and tools, a bigger skill tree, and — the thing almost nobody realises — two-player co-op for the whole campaign. It carries the same 83% positive on Steam, from 7,038 reviews, with Metacritic at 72.

Shards of Darkness opens in an elven city built upward, which is where the engine upgrade shows most clearly. (Official Steam screenshot)

Here is the oddity in our data. Across 68 readings since 18 June 2026, the cheapest listing anywhere was won by Steam itself exactly once — on 24 September 2026, at $1.39, which is also the lowest figure in the whole series. On a game this old, the official store beating every key seller is rare enough to be worth watching for. Our median is $1.90, so the gap between "any day" and "best day" is about fifty cents.

Which means the honest answer to "which one should I buy" is both of them, because the two together have sat at a combined median of $3.39 for four months. If you only want one and you have played a stealth game before, take Shards of Darkness; if you want the series as designed, play Master of Shadows first and then this.

Co-op runs through the entire Shards of Darkness campaign, which almost nobody mentions when recommending it. (Official Steam screenshot)

Blades of Greed is the one to wait on

Styx: Blades of Greed arrived on 19 February 2026, nine years after the last one, with Quartz powers replacing Amber and a more open structure across the Iserian Continent. It is also the only entry our readers should actively hesitate over: Steam reviews sit at Mixed, 68% positive from 1,089 reviews, and the complaints are specific rather than vague. Stuttering and input lag at launch. Weaker AI than Shards of Darkness. And the series' signature exploding clone nerfed into a decoy, which is the sort of change that only annoys the people who already liked the games.

The supportive reviews are telling too — the most-upvoted positive one recommends waiting for a sale. Our record agrees with it. In 102 readings since 19 June 2026 the median sits at $19.84 and the floor is $13.48, at Keycense on 28 August 2026; that sub-$14 window lasted roughly a week in late August and has not returned since. Eneba has held the cheapest listing on 52 of those 102 days, more than every other seller combined, so this is a game where the key market, not Steam, sets the price.

Blades of Greed is the prettiest of the three and the most contested; the open structure is the main point of disagreement. (Official Steam screenshot)

Buy the first two for pocket change, play twenty hours, and you will know whether you want this at anything like its current asking price. Put an alert on the game page instead of buying on impulse — late August showed the floor exists, and nothing in the record suggests it was a one-off.

The Blades of Greed launch trailer, from the official PlayStation channel.

Skip the Styx Collection bundle

This is the part worth reading twice. The Styx Collection has no official store listing we can find — it exists as a Steam key sold by keyshops, and we hold only two live offers for it. In 101 readings since 27 June 2026 its lowest figure is $10.76 and its median is $13.13. Over the same period the two older games have had a combined median of $3.39.

Even if that bundle contains all three games, you would be paying bundle money for the two you can buy for a few dollars anyway. If it contains only the two older ones — which is what a "collection" sold at that price usually means for a series with a brand-new entry — it is simply a worse deal than two separate purchases, every single day we have looked. Read the listing's contents before you pay, and read are keyshops safe on what else to check. The general principle is in what a historical low price actually means: a bundle's discount is measured against list prices nobody pays.

If the goblin is not for you

Styx is a specific taste: slow, punishing, and happier to kill you for impatience than to let you improvise. If that sounds like work, Dishonored gives you the same verticality with the option to fight your way out, Mark of the Ninja is the cleanest stealth game ever made and sidesteps the camera problems entirely by being 2D, and Aragami is the closest thing to Styx with a gentler failure state. Thief is the ancestor all of them are quoting. More of them, with current pricing, in the best stealth games on sale and the best cheap PC games under $5.

And if what you actually want is a series to work through in order, we have done the same job for a franchise with more entries and more confusion in Prince of Persia games in order.

The bottom line

Buy Master of Shadows and Shards of Darkness together, today, without waiting for a sale — the floor on both is within a dollar of their everyday price, so patience buys you nothing here. Play them in that order if you care about the story, Shards first if you only want the better-built game. Wait on Blades of Greed until it is back near the late-August floor, and ignore the Collection bundle entirely. For a series this cheap, the only expensive mistake available to you is buying the wrong package.