The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

ah yes, this game. tons of great ideas for mechanics, there. not super crazy on the setting but a non-human protagonist vs humans is interesting.

lot of elements from deus ex, hitman, and AC. this was clearly made by people who've been paying a lot of attention to stealth games.

I've just started playing this, so far it seems quite nice. They really try to emphasize stealth gameplay.
Bonus is that they added a difficulty in which you die from 1 hit.

If it has potential for cool videos I'll try to make one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EpfWB0llWk

Prenatual recently did a Speedrun of the intro mission (Reminiscences) with all 4 insignias acquired. Goblin difficulty.

Insignias:
- Shadow: no alerts triggered (alert = red symbol above an enemy's head; yellow and orange don't count).
- Mercy: no enemies killed (kills that are part of an objective or unavoidable are not included here; there is one such exception in this mission).
- Swiftness: mission completed in 18 minutes or less.
- Thief: all tokens collected (there are 20 tokens in this mission).

Aside from the goals of 1) completing all objectives and 2) acquiring all insignias, there were no other goals or self-imposed restrictions.

Here are his comments on the game;
"Styx is on the same level of quality as the last Thief. If you liked it, you may enjoy Styx too.
Stealth is OK, but without any fresh ideas. You may want to try the game if you love collecting stuff and exploring, but otherwise -- ignore.
Personally, I'd rate it 2 out of 5. If I hadn't decided to do the videos, I would have played through it once and then forgot about it.

Positives/negatives:

+Level design is great. It's highly vertical with tons of different paths and secrets.
+The game is hard. If someone sees you from 5 meters away they detect in an instant. There are dozens of guards in each area and if you're caught by more that one, it often means that you'll soon be dead.
+The stealth system works similar to Splinter Cell: Blacklist — cover-based + shadow-based. Although, unlike Blacklist or Thief, shadows don't make you invisible, so you always have to be careful.
+While platforming in the game is not as complex as free-running in Assassin's Creed, you have to pay a lot more attention to where are you going. There are guards on multiple levels and they can easily spot you while you are climbing somewhere.

-Controls suck. They were the #1 reason why I got detected.
-Audio is unimportant. Enemies rarely make any sounds and their footsteps are too quiet to be useful. Crouching is silent and only slightly slower than running, so you can just stay crouched all the time. Also, there are random object in the environment (brooms, chairs, buckets) that go flying and alert everyone to your presence if you merely touch them. What's annoying is that it's impossible to tell if an object is a potential threat or simply a decoration.
-Distractions are very hard to pull off because you can't throw objects and don't have any noise-making gadgets. Most of the time your only two options are to either kill the guards one-by-one or find a way to climb around them.
-The loot is actually almost useless. You can't buy anything with tokens — they only give you a small number of skill points and ONLY if you get them all.
-It will probably get repetitive quickly. I completed two missions and it already feels like I've experienced 80% of the game. Skill upgrades don't offer anything new or interesting. Most of them just add extra lethal options.
-The writing is uninspired and the game world is just a standard-fare fantasy."

Jesus Harold Christo this is such a good game.

I always wondered what the H stands for.
Go on, Joey. What are the things you like about this game?

First of all, it's hard, but not frustrating. This goes for both stealth and fighting. Guards can see you in darkness, but only if they're a reasonable distance away from you (unlike some games where you can be in a shadow right next to a guy and he's completely oblivious). The detection system is similar to AC's, where the meter builds up from yellow to red, but once it turns red, everyone in the area knows where you are and sprints to your location. Even NPCs such as slave workers cleaning the floors will immediately call over guards.

Bumping into chairs, mop buckets, barrels, etc will alert anyone within earshot. You have to constantly be aware of your surroundings. They even put in the blessing that is walking on carpet to muffle your steps.

You get bonus points for making kills look like accidents (like dropping a chandelier on a guard to distract others). If you kill guards without doing this or disposing of the body, the game tells you the bodies are eventually found even if you complete the level without such a thing happening. This gives you less points for being sloppy, but isn't a huge negative as you just would've gotten more points for putting more though into it. It causes you to be wary of who you kill and where. When given an opportunity to eliminate a guard that's in the way of something, I've had to scan the surrounding area to make sure I could dispose of the body if I had to. Often this leads to secret passageways hidden by the basic structure of the place.

Going off on that note, the possibilities of getting through each mission is awesome. You can kill every person in the level, don't kill anyone, go the implied path, take a dozen secret paths to reach the target, etc.

The level up system doesn't overpower you. It just increases the skills you already have slightly. So far, the only additional skills that add to your arsenal are the air assassination and ledge takedown abilities. Otherwise, it's just things like increasing the amount of throwing knives/health potions/Amber by 1 or giving more time to use Amber Vision (Eagle Vision basically, but without seeing through walls and it's limited).

I haven't done all of the missions. Maybe 3 or 4 so far, but each level has been a good experience and they're huge. At my cautious pace, it takes about an hour-ish to get through each one (which explains why I'm so behind in progression).

Look at this sh*t.

Nearly an hour and a f*cking half of patience and caution (a few save point restarts as there aren't that many checkpoints to depend on). Zero alerts triggered, 23 guards killed (mostly grouped into "accidents") 166 enemies that never knew I was there, only 2 of the dead bodies were found after completing the mission, with 4 out of 5 mission objectives met (4 of those I didn't have to do).

By the way, the "Kill Owain and bring his body to Ozkan" bonus objective? That's not just a short little side event you do for a minute in the middle of the mission, you have to kill him in the last area and carry his body all the way to the end.

Plus the collectibles are very well hidden. I look in every corner I see for secrets of any kind and I still only got 7 out of 40. Lots of replayability with these missions.

The best way I can describe the feel of this game is Dark Souls difficulty and aggressiveness implemented into stealth. At least it is for me, since I'd restart my save point if I was detected. I can only do 1 or 2 levels per day. It drains me.

I want this game so bad.
I'm going to get it next.

So can we expect some awesome recorded gameplay from you, Joey?

If you like extremely cut-up footage, then sure! But seriously, I'm not skilled enough for this game. I'd need way more experience with it to think about doing things like that. Maybe if I get more time with it, but I think a lot of you guys would enjoy it.

This is pretty nice gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg5PF8WAtf0&list=PLXr7XRA1Hzn2-5icEfUleE...

It's a speedrun.