Download Styx

It was the time of ideas. It was the time of creativity. It was the time, when you needn't have great graphics, evil looking villains, sexy looking heroines... It was a time when a little game called Styx was born.

The game is purely brilliant. It's simple, addictive, fun, re-playable, challenging. You name a quality a good game needs, and this game has it (as long as your idea of a good game doesn't consist of high resolution graphic and studio-mixed songs).

You're a little dot on the outline of a screen sized rectangle. There's an assembly of stick moving around it randomly and you need to cut the rectangle in order to contain the sticks to only one part. While cutting the middle, you're very woundable. If you collide with sticks or if they touch the line you are drawing, you'll lose a life.

Once you take more then 80% of the rectangle, you proceed to the next, more difficult level. There is something like a snake chasing you, so watch out for that as well.

In the top right you’ll see the bonus mark. Blue color means 1X bonus, red 5X bonus and green 10X bonus, so if the territory is colored green you’ll get a much bigger bonus then if it’s blue.

You get to move in all eight directions. You control the dot with the numeric keys and you start cutting by pressing F1.

The game features very good graphics for 1983 (although they consist of nothing more then shapes and colors. The sound isn’t half bad either considering it’s coming from the speaker. It can get annoying though, the repeating hum (like that of a car engine) representing the fast moving sticks in the middle.

All in all the game is a great classic you shouldn’t miss out on!

To run the game you’ll need to change the machine settings on DOSBox from VGA to CGA and you’ll need to slow it down to around 500 cycles.