Thymesia: The Final Preview
It’s been a tough time to make a Souls-like action RPG these days. The market is stuffed to the brim with them, and standing out from the pack gets tougher and tougher every year. After six hours with Thymesia, the dark fantasy hack-and-slasher by OverBorder Studio, I’m not quite sure it will be the one to make waves. There are a handful of differences, both aesthetically and mechanically, that make it more than just a carbon copy of genre staples like Bloodborne, but they require patience and a lot of trial and error to truly discover in earnest.
As an agent codenamed “Corvus” you slice, claw, and stab your way through your own scattered memories of a kingdom that has fallen to calamity due to an alchemical plague. The location I explored, the plague infested Sea of Trees, was interesting if not a little familiar. The forest covered in boils and noxious gas made a striking first impression, but the winding tree paths rarely revealed anything new outside of its initial introduction. The vibes are spooky for sure, but “haunted swampy forest” is a pretty familiar trope nowadays.
Combat in Thymesia heavily favors aggression. Corvus is fleet of foot and quick with his blades, opting to overwhelm enemies with a storm of saber strikes and dodge out of range just before the enemy can strike back. There’s no stamina here, so attacking and dodging are limited by combo strings and animations. This can sometimes feel too limiting, because once you've started an action, you're committed to it until it's over. This is doubly the case for the deflect, your default defensive measure. In combination with its tiny effective window and its awkward wind up, parrying is a skill that takes an outsized amount of practice to develop. It was time
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