When I first stumbled upon Thymesia, I honestly didn’t know that it was going to be a Souls-like game. What I did see was a strange world filled with dangerous creatures, a mysterious protagonist, and stylish combat techniques. On those things, Thymesia definitely delivers, but it quickly became apparent that I was just scratching the surface when it came to the game. Thymesia is a game developed by OverBorder Studio, an indie studio based out of Taiwan, and published by Team17. Team17 has been on a roll with curating a library of published games that are well-received and this first entry by OverBorder Studios doesn’t disappoint.

In Thymesia, you take control of a character known as Corvus who is stuck in a dark and desolate kingdom that has been ravaged by a mysterious plague. Everything as far as the eye can see has been corrupted by this plague, potentially even Corvus, as he has no memories at all. Nevertheless, things are not all bleak as Corvus can use the plague within each enemy to his advantage by making what are called Plague Weapons. With this special ability and a mysterious spirit trying to help Corvus recover the lost memories, you must discover the truth of what happened to this kingdom.

Thymesia seems to be a more forgiving type of Souls game, despite the fact that the official website for the game calls it: “A dark, challenging, souls like ARPG,” but that is not a bad thing to me. I always remember seeing my friends rage and curse at every Souls game they have ever touched, and it always made me think that this wasn’t a genre to necessarily have fun with.

With Thymesia, there was definitely a bit of a struggle that I had in the beginning, but that had more to do with getting used to the unique aspects of the combat that are introduced. The two that tripped me up were the Plague Weapons System, which I will explain more in the next paragraph, and the Feathers that you get to deflect “unblockable” attacks.

The Plague Weapons System is the unique gameplay cornerstone of Thymesia that sets it apart from the other Souls-like games that exist currently. As I explained earlier, almost everything that you encounter has been corrupted by the plague. Corvus has a unique ability where he can use the plague that is within enemies to create weapons and drain them of life.

Using this ability allows you to gain shards from certain downed enemies that can be used to craft plague weapons at the rest points. It can also allow you to perform an execution on an enemy or just knock them down a bit more so that you can finish the fight a lot quicker. The downside of it, however, is that this attack typically takes a bit of a wind-up, which can leave you vulnerable. So it is not always best to use in a sticky situation.

The thing that mainly kept me coming back to Thymesia was the story. While you are initially just dropped into the world with no explanation of where exactly you are and with only a faint idea of the past of this land. It becomes very clear that you need to piece it together yourself with the other characters of importance that you find and the notes hanging around.

For me, this is absolutely brilliant because it made me feel like an active participant in putting together the memory of Corvus rather than just waiting for cutscenes to jam information into my brain. On the other hand, I can easily see someone skipping by all of it and thinking that this is a rather bare-bones plot overall. The only gripe I really have about the storytelling is that there really isn’t any voice acting for the few lines of dialogue that are given to you. It seems odd, but I can understand with this being from an indie studio why voice lines weren’t recorded.

Overall, I had a really wonderful time playing Thymesia. Whether I’m able to finish Thymesia is still debatable, but I imagine that if the game begins to truly beat me down that I can always hand the game over to one of my souls loving friends. That way they can rage and cry while I just look on in amusement.

A PC copy of Thymesia was provided by Team17 for the purposes of this review.

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Thymesia

$24.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Eases You Into Game Mechanics
• Fascinating World
• Different Combat Options

Cons

• Some controls are strange
• No Speech Audio