Corvus - 2:32 LVL1, No Dodge/Buffs/Plague Weapons/Talents
[WORLD'S FASTEST] [HITLESS]

Varg - 2:23 LVL1, No Talents/Buffs/Plague Weapons
[WORLD'S FASTEST] [HITLESS]

Urd - ? LVL1, No Talents/Buffs/Plague Weapons
[WORLD'S FASTEST] [HITLESS]

Imma be real, I don't care about the story here at all. Not even because it's bad, I couldn't even tell you if it was, I just wasn't gonna do all that reading. And while there's strong art design and level design here, the game still has that vibe of an indie studio's first attempt at something at this scale.

But none of that matters because this is one of my favorite souls-likes of all time. The combat here is the exact style of melee I prefer from games like this. I enjoyed my 40ish hours of Elden Ring, and I like the little I've played of Bloodborne and Dark Souls. But I grew up on Platinum games, like Bayonetta and Nier Automata. These titles NEVER make you wait for an animation to play out. The animations are the point of many Souls-likes, but after falling in love with The Surge 2 way back when I was made aware that this does not have to be the case. This is the first souls-like I've ever played that is similarly satisfying to play.

The combat is a mix of Sekiro's parrying and the perfect dodges of something like Bayonetta. And enemies have two health bars to deplete, or really one with a layer of armor on it. Your main dagger does damage to the white bar, which reveals a green bar underneath that can only be damaged with your secondary claw attack. Instead of fights feeling stretched out due to this, the balancing of bars forces you to keep the pressure up, because the while bar will cover back up the green if you don't keep applying damage. However, perfectly dodging or parrying can also keep the white bar from returning as well.

There are also a number of plague weapons/abilities you can use as well. You have a separate meter that allows the use of a giant axe swipe, scythe swing, hammer smash, arrow throw, life leech, or other abilities ever so often. Think of these as ultimate abilities that you need to earn the right to use with successful hits, parries, and dodges.

Also, there are a BUNCH or upgrades. You can bump up your core attributes like health, and you can even upgrade the number of healing charges you have, as well as how much they heal and what additional bonuses they can give you. They even give you multiple types of healing charges to equip, so you can spec for faster, smaller heals or longer, bigger heals. A lot of this game shines due to its customizability. The skill trees let you spec out towards a slower combat pace or a faster one, and when you hit the end of some of these trees, you truly feel powerful.

Now as for why this game rules so much. This game is all about animation canceling, especially after you amass later upgrades. There's not even a stamina bar, so you can really just go ham on your actions. Every time an enemy got a hit on me, it ALWAYS feels like my fault because I'm paying for a mistake I made milliseconds ago rather than several seconds ago. It makes the call and response of combat feel much more immediate, and frankly, more friendly towards spamming. Because you can parry and dodge so fast, I often was able to avoid entire attach strings just by keeping my parries and dodges going constantly. And thank god for it, because just standing back to avoid damage will put you out of melee range and make it harder to keep that necessary pressure up.

But the combat itself couldn't hold the game up alone without great enemy design. Every single fight is worth engaging with, especially after you level up and gain some perks. Once you do, fodder enemies could refill some of your health on execution. And there are a regular amount of more intimidating mini-bosses that all test your skills in new and intense ways. And the bosses, the bosses! All of them are incredibly fun and even the hardest ones were difficult for fair reasons. I never felt like the game was cheap, I could always immediately tell the ways in which I messed up, and it made me even more excited to jump back in to try again.

I just really dig this game. I do feel like it is very gamey, in a way that might be off-putting to people who crave the immersion of Fromsoft worlds. Unlike many of their games, there's less of a sense that upgrades are optional to the experience. You could, in theory, beat the game with just the base character. But many of the unlockable abilities, like counterattacks and new melee moves, feel vital to the experience. In a game like Dark Souls, the core of combat stays the same, but your stats increase and the variety of ways to respond to strikes increases. Thymesia is, on paper, the same, but it doesn't always feel that way. But this is one of my favorite things about the game, as that's an approach more common to the character-action games that I love.

It took me many months to finally beat this one, despite reaching the end in less than 10 hours. It really is challenging, and I took many breaks and backtracked into remixed versions of previous levels to farm more memory shards and upgrade materials. But even when I was away from it, I found myself craving its combat. I really can't wait to see what these devs do next, because this game shows that they are really cooking something special.

Although the concept is inspired by Bloodborne, it seems like the game hasn't quite decided what it will be. Bloodborne-looking Sekiro? I mean, I've seen something similar to this recently in Lies of P, but Lies of P was a production that was just like a real Soulsborne game with its gameplay and level designs. The parry system feels bad, and most of the time you don't even know whether you parry or not. Movements and combat feel cumbersome, which is the biggest minus in a soulslike game. Although the character's ability to steal his opponent's ability with his claw is cool, your job is done until you use it during the fight due to the slow animation. Although the level designs, hub section, graphics and lighting are nice, the game could be much better if it had more enjoyable and satisfying gameplay. Still, it's one of the indies you can try as a soulslike (and especially if you're a PC player waiting for Bloodborne to come to PC :P)

the level design in this game is not good, everything feels like it loops around on itself for no reason and everything kind of looks the same so i found it hard to navigate my way around.

that said, aesthetically it's super cool and while i was ready to drop the game, something clicked after i beat the first boss and i got super hooked. some of the smoothest souls-like combat i have experienced so far, the parrying felt super responsive and it's just fast-paced and fun. honestly very worth going through just for the combat, some really good bosses in there too. i'd love to see more from this dev team

This game don't want you to have patience, but to have Perfect Dance!
let me clarify you what do i mean by that.
A lot of people saying this is Souls like or being cheap copypasta to souls games i don't know if they either trolling or blind of the basics of the game
which is the important fact that this game don't have any Stamina and it is a big factore of how the combats completely different to souls games and,
like with souls games they are basically punishing you most of the time of being impatience, thus why you have to be patience and memorize the bosses moves to dodge the their attacks
and the perfect time to attack them without getting punished, which force you to be a passive player... with thymesia its the opposite. yes im not denying that you also need to memorize
boss attacks and when to attack but its not enough and the most important factore for you to win is basically having a good reaction to dodge the attacks.. with Odur you always need to
have perfect dodges to wreck him, being while i do that i felt like i was dancing against the boss which is very unique to experience, one of the best first boss of entire souls-like games, in my opinion that this style does have a higher skill ceiling than souls games, and more fun to me.

which was enough to convince me to give this game 3 stars which is very good to me, the missing two stars was everything about this
game other than the combat system, like the unfairness of some attacks of the boss which basically you cannot dodge it no matter what, which is very silly idea to put in, and the lore items, this is
something that a lot of indie developers misunderstood Dark souls fans... which was putting all their lores into book items, maybe people dissagree with me but
like jeez man im sorry but you are not Mayzaki i will not bother myself to read all of this shit so i understand the story because i don't know if its worth it or not, and also
because im here to play not to read a bible... and there's so many of book items which was very annyoign cuz you end up being dissapointed every time you gather something, takes long to realize that
game does not have armor or weapon stuff, its very lame, should have instead of the books, put the lore on weapons and armors, and also it does have cool cinematics for an indie company but no environmental storytelling
which is dissapointing because to me this is one of the coolest ways to show the lore which is by the way one of the strongest points of what makes Mayazaki an excellent storyteller.
eveything about this game are very flawed except of the combat which was perfect to me.

A very short and not very pleasant soulslike game, that has an atmosphere, but not much else.

The combat system is flashy, but not very good, the bosses are cheap, and the hitboxes, yet again, are not very good.

A meh experience.

Overall, it's a commendable effort with ample room for improvement in a potential sequel. What I highly commend is its Bloodborne-esque gameplay, which is more aggressive. The bosses are well-thought-out and fairly challenging. The levels are a bit matchbox-sized; however, they have enough complexity to capture that essential soulslike feeling where roaming around and pathfinding is a significant part of the game. It could benefit from more uniqueness, and the parry mechanic needs to be reworked for better effectiveness when granted.