Stygian showed much potential, which made it all the more disappointing what this game became. It's clearly unfinished, sporting a massive amount of bugs and a rather abrupt ending. Thus I cannot recommend it in good conscience, which hurts me as a Kickstarter backer, hardcore gamer, and Lovecraft fan.

Speaking of bugs, this game has it all: I've had my main character just randomly drop dead while I was searching for an item in the inventory (!), random loss/gain of health and/or sanity points, seemingly random development of (pretty debilitating) mental conditions on my main character, quests lines that broke and/or never got cleared or otherwise properly removed from the quest journal, a travel screen that simply stopped working altogether (forcing me to reload an earlier save game), characters I've dismissed from the party long ago doing and succeeding skill checks for me (!), also going by Forum posts, there's at least one game-breaking bug regarding the mandatory Arkham Stabber quest still in the game. Even something as trivial as (re-)loading your save game makes the game increasingly unstable (honestly better to just quit to Steam and completely restart).

While Stygian prides itself on not holding your hand, some game mechanics never get properly explained ingame and many items seem to have no uses at all (which, considering the limited inventory space, is not a good thing). In a game whose balancing is totally off and aimless experimentation usually has dire results, trial-and-error is simply not fun. Speaking of game balance, take the combat system for example: Yea, I get that you're supposed to feel weak and "insignificant" against the horrors of Arkham, but, COME ON, in some battles (which I suppose are mandatory or can only be avoided by highly specialized characters) success depends entirely on who rolls good initiative and goes first, or else your main character is on the receiving end of up to 6 ranged attacks (because depending on the viewpoint, the AI is either extremely stupid or pretty clever and most often completely ignores the other party members), which your main character is unlikely to survive. Tough. Game Over. Repeat. Same result. Despair.

Depending on your knowledge of the works of Lovecraft, the Cthulhu Mythos in general or simply your common sense™, you might want to role-play not to accept / complete certain quests (*cough, cough* The Whisperer in the Darkness quest *cough, cough*) or to not make certain choices. Problem is, the game doesn't offer this kind of freedom, since most of the quests tie in to the main quest line and/or the outcome is always the same anyway.

But it's not all bad, I love the atmosphere, the art direction and the sound design.

The game is currently on sale for ~4€, which is fair considering you might get ~20 hours of play time out of it (if you manage to put up with all its faults). I'm sorry to be so blunt, but the game is simply not worth the ~20€ full asking price.

Also, I'm pretty pi***d that Cultic Games didn't even get my backer credit right.