Attention all Dark Souls players, and generally any gamer who is looking for a challenge, this game is for you. Full disclosure, Nick (the guy who wrote this masterpiece and platinumed Elden Ring) was unavailable to write this review, which means I was the next man up, and, after sinking some serious time into this game, boy was I seriously reminded that I am not as good at video games as I think I am. Now for readers of this website, you might be thinking that Thymesia sounds familiar…well that’s because they are the first game developer we have ever had the privilege of interviewing. For those that have yet to hear of Thymesia, it is an action RPG from developer OverBorder Studio and the game plays very similarly to a FromSoftware game.
In Thymesia, you play as Corvus, a mysterious character that is on a quest through his memory to retrieve memories that were lost. The idea of playing through Corvus’s memories is the entire basis of the game and in doing so you earn more pieces of the actual story and get a better understanding of what this plague is and why you are doing what you are doing throughout the course of the game. The story is told strictly through random documents scattered throughout the world as well as the very rare piece of dialogue that you get after beating a boss or finding a unique document.
Corvus is equipped with a sword and dagger as his standard weapons throughout the campaign, but what makes Thymesia unique is the addition of plague weapons. Plague weapons can be obtained in two different ways, either by defeating enemies with certain weapons and hoping they will drop enough shards for you to unlock a permanent plague weapon or you can reap a plague weapon from an enemy that is already wielding one allowing you to temporarily use it against them. A unique concept in this game is that enemies require you to hit them with two different attacks in order for you to execute them. You need to utilize both your standard attacks (your sword and plaque weapons) to lower an enemy’s health as well as use your claw attack to prevent enemies from healing and to take away their secondary health bar, which represents the max health they can heal to. This does add an extra level of difficulty to the game as you can land a solid five-hit combo on a boss and take his health down before dodging backward to avoid their counter just to have more than half of the health you just took out be restored.
Now for the breakdown of the game’s graphics and overall smoothness of gameplay, it is important to note that I played Thymesia on the PlayStation 5, and the game graphically looks good and plays very smoothly. A negative of the game though is that the various environments that we see throughout the game do not offer a lot of differences besides the colors/lighting and slightly different structures. Similar to the environments, the character designs also lack variety and very rarely force you to change your approach when battling, outside of the boss fights. The game is open world in the sense that you do not have to follow one single path, but they essentially drop the player in a level designed similar to a maze that, regardless of which way you choose to take, seems to always lead you to where you are supposed to go. The sound throughout the game is pretty basic and doesn’t have anything that stands out with the sounds of the attacks or even within the soundtrack of the game, which the game relies on a lot since there is no voice acting. Due to this, I think the basic and unexciting sound of the game takes away from the game drastically.
This game, just like all other Souls-like games, requires the player to learn patience and accept dying because of the small nuances in the mechanics. Thymesia‘s mechanics for blocking and parrying are not perfect as blocking is quickly forgotten after upgrading the dodge ability and the timing for parrying is far too quick to be utilized in the fights you need it in most, even when upgraded. Dodging in this game is definitely the way to approach dealing with enemies’ attacks, but the enemies’ attack radius is sometimes impossible to predict and it seems like, despite dodging, they are still able to attack you. I will say that my previous statement may be something that is due to my inexperience with these kinds of games, but I am basing this off of the fact that the distance I see between myself and the enemies is much greater than the weapon that the enemy is wielding.
Overall, this is a great debut game by developer OverBorder Studio and I did enjoy playing the game and found it to be a nice challenge, but I quickly became disinterested in the story and ended up playing most of the game with headphones on listening to music or a podcast. The highlights of this game are definitely the gameplay and graphics, but it falls short in many other key areas that are important to consider, such as story, character/level design, and soundtrack. Thymesia will be available for purchase ($29.99) on August 18 on PS5, Xbox Series S|X, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A review code for the game was provided by the publisher.
Top ,.. top top … post! Keep the good work on !