I remember experiencing Demon’s Souls at E3 well over a decade ago, and later reviewing the game when it came out. It was innovative, and would go on to spawn many sequels and clones; imitation is the best form of flatter, they say. Still, I vividly remember struggling with the difficulty — respawning enemies every time you save or die, having one chance to get back to where you last died to reclaim your experience points, precise timing and agonizing upgrade decisions — it was stressful, but enthralling, and still remains a somewhat disagreeable formula for me. I loathe re-playing portions of games, there just isn’t enough time and too much else to do (or play). However, as anyone who has played in the genre Demon’s Souls created knows, these games take a certain gumption, a commitment, to get into and prevail. In my relatively limited experience with these games, there is a stout and often frustrating learning curve for that first half-dozen hours or so, but if you can stick with it through that, you’re likely going to have an overall wonderful time. Anyway, let’s take a closer look at a new game in the genre, Thymesia.
With Thymesia, we have what I would call a “AA production.” This game is not on the scale or quality of your AAAs, like From Software’s games, Elden Ring, Sekiro, or Nioh, but nevertheless, for a small group of developers, Thymesia is pretty great. It lacks polish in some areas, and leaves a lot of potential unrealized, but it was one of those games that got me hooked early and kept me playing through until the end. This isn’t a particular long game compared to many others in the same genre, expect about a dozen hours out of it, but all things considered, it was a really entertaining ride.
Thymesia is not a game that you would play for the story and characters alone. This is one of the areas of the experience that could use some tuning, and I hope that Overboard gets another crack at Thymesia with a sequel or major DLC in the future. The story is presented in fragments and it’s hard to get a good feel for what exactly happened and is happening. We know that the protagonist, Corvus, is a skilled fighter, but we don’t know why or what his involvement is, or why he uses a raven’s fighting tactics and appearance (reminds me of Batman though, which is cool). The levels that you play through are an opportunity for him to replay memories, to help him remember what is going on. Brief level descriptions and notes and letters and things you find throughout the levels fill in some of the gaps, but even these are usually in choppy sentence form. We know that there is a kingdom, Hermes, where the game takes place. This kingdom exists inside of a massive tree, and there is a lot of alchemy involved, for better or worse. Pure blood and vile blood are oft mentioned and pertain to the nasty mutations and devastation that much of this kingdom has suffered through. A mysterious character named Aisemy helps Corvus by appearing at beacon sites at which players can rest and level up (more on this shortly). Emerald, another NPC, appears sometimes in stages to give you more cryptic feedback on what’s going on. At the end of the game, players make a decision that alters the ending, but I didn’t feel properly equipped to understand the gravity of this situation. Oh, and everything is text-based — there are no voiceovers in Thymesia at all, which isn’t to knock it, but it does point to the AA caliber game this is in most every respect. I found a few spelling mistakes in the menus for some of the Plague Weapons and Items, too, pointing back to that over-arching idea of a little bit of lack of polish across most of the experience.
The story concerns aside, let’s look at the level design and game structure. The game is split into three distinct chapters, or levels, depending on your nomenclature. Each of these is part of the Hermes kingdom, but the setting, enemies, and general atmospheric vibe of these levels is a bit different from one another. The first level is mostly browns, and there’s a ton of wood — wooden ladders, doors, floors, boxes, barrels (I broke 1,000 of these and got a Trophy). The second level, the Royal Gardens, shifts the color tone to more blues, reds, and purples, but maintains a sort of haze that reduces your viewing distance. The differences between the levels isn’t massive, and the design is pretty good, but not great. I found myself getting turned around at times with the ‘hallway and ninety degree turns’ design found in some areas. Also, one-way doors and ladders that were sometimes hard to spot at first didn’t help. Still, even with no in-game map, players shouldn’t get lost much at all. The size of the levels is also not conducive to getting lost, either.
At the end of the first stage within each level/chapter is a boss fight, and after that, new stages within the level get unlocked which I thought was pretty cool. These extra stages provide you with a remixed level design, such as letting you go through doors that were previously closed or otherwise get to areas not previously reachable. There is also a new objective to these extra stages, or Recalls as they’re known in-game, too. For example, in the Royal Gardens, your first goal was to defeat The Hanged Queen, but one of the other Recalls within the Royal Gardens is to seek out and fight another huge boss that is far underground..
These other stages give players more time to hone their skills and collect Memory Shards and various weapons upgrades. One of the best elements of Thymesia and my biggest reason for continuing to play is the combat system and all of these subsystems that players use to customize their experience. Combat in Thymesia is intense, close-range melee. Usually, these battles are one on one, but you can get yourself into some one vs multiple situations as well. Often, you can run passed enemies as they tend to only patrol a certain area, but I rarely took this approach unless it was my umpteenth time trying to pass a mid-level boss and I didn’t want to re-fight the same low-level enemies for the tenth or twelfth time, whatever the case might be. As is typical with the genre, you have to get back to where you last died, lest you give up all of the experience that you had earned since your last save. I literally lost over 10,000 experience points dying in the God of the Fools stage, and that was really annoying. With experience points, you can’t “bank” them — you have to spend them or lose them. However, before too long (maybe six hours in or so), prices of upgrades get so high that it takes 8,000 or more points/Shards to unlock anything. I would have preferred a method like Lords of the Fallen had where you could take whatever points you had and safely ‘bank’ them at checkpoints, but I digress.
So, the combat — Corvus holds sabers, and can rapidly slash these by pressing R1. You can deflect with L1, and timing those deflections is a huge and essential part of the combat. Dodge is performed with Circle, it’s also vital to success, and Corvus can also throw (or shoot, really) sharp feathers with L2. His raven claw, used by pressing (or holding) R2, is so cool. The Claw is used to Reave weapons from enemies, and there are about twenty of these Plague Weapons to discover and upgrade (they can be upgraded 5x each). Plague Weapons take the form of handaxes, knives, whips, great swords, darts, and other things. Some of these I didn’t really use at all, like the dust (its actual name eludes me) that you get from beating the first main boss, Odur. Others, like the handaxe, I upgraded completely early-on and used often for the entire game — and man, when you get the Great Sword fully upgraded, look out! Players can carry two Plague Weapons into battle, which recharge with their respective cooldown timers and use up a certain amount of your Energy meter (which refills by attacking with the sabers, mainly). You can also Reave weapons out of enemies as well and use them throughout the battle. The combination of saber attacks, feathers, the claw, and the Plague weapons gives Corvus a really potent arsenal that’s a treat to use.
This arsenal is going to be tested, though, as the enemies in Thymesia range from the super-easy to the very hard. Not all bosses are hard, mind you, I actually beat at least two of them on my first try, but the first boss was quite hard. Even before him, there were about three mid-level bosses (that, thankfully, do not respawn when you die or save) that took me quite a few tries to beat. Enemies have super armor, which is the white meter on their health meter. Underneath this is a green meter, which is their actual health. You have to break through their super armor obviously, and if you’re slow about it, it can replenish. The Claw, though not great at breaking armor, is excellent at taking life, while other weapons, like the Great Sword, are great for both. Mixing up Corvus’ arsenal is engaging, fun, and exciting as you get into some real nail-biter fights. Timing a perfect deflection or double Claw strike elicits a great sense of triumph, especially when the execution animation and sounds play.
As you gather Memory Shards from beating enemies, and finding little consumable Shard boosts, you can boost Corvus’ Strength, Vitality, or Plague stats. The Plague upgrades give more damage for Claw attacks and increase your energy meter. Upon upgrading the character, you’re then given a point to spend in upgrading Talents, which is a pretty large skill tree that covers a variety of offensive and defensive aspects about Corvus — sharpened Sabers for more damage, increased timing for deflection, reduced charge time for your feathers, a variety of feather and Claw attacks, and much more. I was impressed with the creativity of the various Talents and the choices can be agonizing at times because if you go down one upgrade branch, others can be closed. However, you can reset/unlearn skills at your leisure (well, as long as you’re at a Beacon), so it’s not too stressful because if you find your previous choices aren’t working for you anymore, or if you just want to experiment with a slightly different playstyle, you can.
In addition to character and talent upgrades, players will also unlock and upgrade about twenty plague weapons and three different kinds of health potions (though you can only carry one type of these at a time). The Plague Weapons can only be found and upgraded in battle (at times, enemies will drop upgrade points for their weapons), and potions can only be upgraded by finding certain ingredients and alchemy materials (that, as you might expect, only the mid-level bosses and higher carry). Much like the combat, I found these layers of upgrading and customization to be entertaining and one of the best parts of Thymesia.
Bottomline, Thymesia does not stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the giants of the genre, but it’s a great game in its own right. Though it falters some in areas like presentation, story, and level design, the combat and upgrade systems are a lot of fun, even if the enemy variety gets to feeling a little thin by the end. Personally, I hope we see a lot more from Overboard Studios and Corvus in the future as there is a lot of potential to be realized yet.
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