If you're a Souls-like guy or girl looking for more of the same, then this is probably a solid experience until the next big thing by Fromsoft or other studios. Thymesia is very focused on parry mechanics and has a neat little life system in which you first have to break the shield of an enemy until you can attack its real health bar. Unfortunately, while the combat is solid enough, it is let down by being very inconsistent with its hitbox, way to spam heavy with enemy attacks, and generally having low enemy variety. The bosses are good, though!

At the beginning, this game felt extremely rough in its fundamental mechanics. It felt like it wasn't at all good enough for the ridiculous precision some enemies require you to have with your parry timing.

I've now beaten all the levels, bosses and did all the endings. Now I'm definitely more positive on it: about 3-4 of the 8 bosses are actually quite fun to fight. Once you get into the flow of things with those bosses and get used to the mechanics, it can feel as satisfying as Sekiro. For a debut game from an indie studio, that is impressive!

Otherwise this game is just meh. The art direction is great but the level design is mediocre. The plague weapons are a cool idea but I never felt compelled to use even half of them for some useless bonuses. Also the claw mechanic, where every enemy has two health bars - and you have to first wound them with regular attacks and then use claw attacks - is a neat idea but ends up being tedious.


For huge fans of Sekiro, who simply want anything remotely like it, this might scratch that itch - slightly at least.

Imagine Sekiro but with Dark Souls II hitboxes and every time you parry you're off by 2 seconds because the animations are so low budget, janky, slow and simply not fluid enough for the combat. That's basically the Thymesia experience summed up.

I could go on to explain more of the mechanics and intricacies of the combat, but what's the point when it's not even enjoyable? That opening statement alone describes the experience pretty well and despite there being some cool ideas here and there and great design aesthetic (Though the level design itself leaves a bit to be desired), the gameplay mechanics just don't feel good and if the game wasn't so short (I beat it in 10 hours) I would've just dropped it all together so that should tell you all you really need to know about whether it's worth playing or not. It certainly doesn't help that the world and lore is so generic and boring and just feels like every other Souls-style game. The OST and art design are easily the two best things about this game and both are pretty solid, but too bad everything else is just a mess.

There's simply nothing in this game that you probably haven't seen done before and most things are just done much better elsewhere, so there's nothing here worth suffering through the janky combat even if the game is super short.

I wrote my initial thoughts on this game in a huff after getting stuck on the first boss for quite a while, but I have persevered and made it over the hump and completed the rest of the game without too much trouble. Having passed that initial frustrating barrier, my opinion has softened considerably.
The good:
The combat systems are cool and fun. I like the health/wounds system, I think that's neat and pushes you to play aggressively and mix up saber/claw attacks which is fun. Unlocking ingredient slots for your healing potions to give them extra effects is a cool idea. I like the various skill trees. I was a particular fan of the one that turns your claw into a shorter-range weapon with a fast combo, and once you get max Offensive stacks it heals you a bit. It reinforces that fun rhythm, of building up wounds and cutting them down with the claw, making sure to keep your stacks topped off and giving you chip heal. It all feels very good once you get everything flowing.
For a while I wasn't using the plague weapons much but eventually experimented until I found some I liked (knife ended up as my go-to!) which made everything feel even better and more fluid, and I’d encourage people to try them out as you unlock them and find one you like.
It’s also easy to reset all your talent points to try other builds which, frankly, I didn’t really do (it seems like the most significant of these would be going down the other claw upgrade path and doing deflect damage instead of window increases) but it does mean that if you allocate points weird or decide you want to do something else, it’s not a problem to fix.
I like the speed of the execution moves you do (in contrast to Sekiro where they take a second) but I would have loved for there to be some special animation for it. As it stands you just kinda nondescriptly lunge through the enemy and that’s it. Something flashier – even if it was just added particle effects – I think could have felt pretty cool.
Several of the bosses are great.
The bad:
There are times when the game throws multiple enemies at you and I never found a way to handle that gracefully. Every time there was a miniboss and a random trash mob with a spear at the same time, it was a nightmare. The bow knights are also annoying – they don’t swarm you with overlapping attacks like multiple melee enemies do, but the sound of them firing is EXTREMELY quiet, and they would almost always hit me at least once before I even realized they were there. I would have liked maybe a louder sound when they draw their bow to give you a second to prepare.
The targeting system often didn't feel quite right when attempting to switch targets; it wouldn't change, or I'd kill an enemy and the next enemy would be right behind me and it wouldn't want to acquire it. Dodging out of knockdown effect also felt like it sent me in a strange direction some of the time.
Some of the minibosses are a pain – the dual sword wielding knight attacks almost constantly and likes to jump away once his combo finishes which makes it harder to retaliate. I probably just needed to slow down and get a firmer grip on his patterns though.
I mentioned several bosses being great, and they are – unfortunately, there are some gimmick bosses that feel rather tedious. There’s one that places an environmental hazard down that kills you almost immediately, and I could never avoid it entirely, I ended up having to time several heals just right to survive until I could run out of it. Not sure what was going on there.
Another thing is that the sound seems weird. It's... muffled? Sometimes it's an enemy grunting through a mask or helmet which makes sense but the whole thing sounds a bit like you're hearing it through a pillow.
There were also a fair few times (especially with the aforementioned bow knights) where I would have an execution move queued up for an enemy that was near a ledge, and I would do it and Corvus would step too far past the enemy afterwards and fall down the ledge. This is only ever an annoyance, but it IS an annoyance. When this happened, and I fell off a ledge with enemies waiting for it at the top (or even when I just saw one of the bow knights in general) I really wished I had a sort of grappling hook that could pull me towards the enemy like in Spider-Man.
There’s not too much enemy variety. It’s mostly okay – it’s a short game, and giving you enemies you’re familiar with is an easy way to make you feel like a champ when you obliterate them – but there is one boss that, in Bloodborne parlance, is more Bloodstarved Beast than Father Gascoigne, and it worked pretty well! So I think some more non-humanoid enemies could have been nice rather than more spear guys or sword-and-board guys.
And, this goes for almost all games, but I hate clicking left stick to sprint. I don’t know what the solve for that is, I just think it feels bad every time and eventually I just stopped doing it. It doesn’t even feel that much faster honestly.
Overall, I think the combat systems here are pretty exceptional even if they don’t always jive with the times when the game throws multiple enemies at you. I would love to see my issues with targeting and dodging smoothed out even though my feedback probably is not specific enough to be helpful. I think this was pretty solid and I hope that we can eventually see more of this – maybe a little more refined, maybe a little more varied, but the core mechanics and systems are really very good.
Oh, also, my advice for someone struggling early on as I was is to put points into the talents that increase the Deflect window asap, and then spend a couple boss attempts just sitting back and trying to deflect stuff. I was going in way too aggressively and it made learning the patterns very hard. They don’t actually have that many attacks!

thymesia, um irmão perdido de bloodborne (ou talvez só da eileen), que trouxe uma proposta muito interessante aos olhos do pessoal que curte jogos soulsbornelike.

a questão é, ele é muito divertido e traz o melhor das mecânicas dos souls para dentro do jogo e ainda inova com algumas mecânicas novas, que transformam completamente o combate. porém, ele é muito curto e as suas "fases" são meio genéricas...

ainda assim, é possível se divertir por algumas horinhas dentro desse mundo. e a platina não é nível souls de dificuldade (talvez só um troféu... aí realmente, boa sorte).

A short fun indie experience that has fast paced combat and very few glitches. The experience is fulfilling and the story is...mediocre. It has to be said that for a gae that follows the bloodborne/sekiro version of combat, the fights get quite easy towards the end and some of the bosses are laughably weak. But the overall experience is very enjoyable and the movement and attacks are satisfying es[pecially the clinking parry.
The story though is nothing to write home about and can make you feel like "let us just get this over with already " at times, which is a weird feeling to have a game worth less than 10 hours.
Still a good game and the combat is worthy enough to carry the game.

On the surface level, Thymesia seems reliant on its obvious influences pulling in interested parties. But the game has enough interesting ideas, and executes the most important elements well enough, to make it a gratifying and worthwhile game to check out.

It is fundamentally in line with other Souls-likes, but the main twist is that enemies have two health bars overlapping with each other, and you need to deplete them both in order to kill them. You have regular sword attacks that will mainly deal damage against the main health bar, and claw attacks that will only deplete the secondary bar. There's also plague weapons, which are secondary weapons that has different damage properties depending on the weapon. This system is the very basis of the game's aggressive and ferocious feel, since the main health bar can regenerate according to the secondary bar if you don't damage the enemy for too long. Most of your moves are also not limited by a stamina/energy bar (only plague weapons), which only supports that feeling.

The game has limited character customization, in exchange for progression systems that feel closer to hack and slash games like Devil May Cry. There are skill trees that provide ways to tailor your abilities to your sensibilities. For example, widening your deflect/parry timing period in exchange for lower damage against enemies, or choosing to double down on your deflect damage instead. You have many plague weapons to choose from, like a scythe that can heal you when you hit enemies with it, or a whip that can help you close the gap against enemies. Even the Estus Flask equivalents here are customizable, being able to switch different potion types and add ingredients to introduce extra effects. In my experience, these systems are quite flexible in letting me play how I wanted to play, and making the game bend to my will is very satisfying. It helps that you can freely unlearn skills, which lets you experiment to find your favorite way to play the game.

Unfortunately the levels and environment designs are not as well done. The level design is just mediocre, nothing really sticks out in my mind right now. There's some atmospheric environments that are quite nice to look at, but most of the time it fits the bill of a "generic dark fantasy world on a low budget" world too well. Same goes for the enemy designs (although mechanically they're varied enough for a game of this length, about 10 hours for me, I got all the endings) and soundtrack. At least the bosses are pretty damn good overall, especially the optional bosses, with the exception of one terrible gimmick boss.

The story here is pretty decent, it definitely won't be the main driving force of your experience. It's mostly told through text logs without any voice acting, which isn't very exciting, but I do appreciate its relatively straightforward nature. Find enough of these logs and you should have a good grasp of the story, the game isn't very vague about this.

Overall, Thymesia delivers on its intent of an approachable and reasonably sized Souls clone, while still managing to provide a challenging and aggressive combat experience. But it is let down by visibly middling budget, low production values, and a general lack of memorablity.

Very few games have frustrated me so much, so quickly. After understanding the mechanics , I had some fun with the game, even though the armour system is atrocious. But then came the first boss. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I can't understand how the dodge work. Feels extremely random: sometimes it will be flawless, other times the boss decides he wants to hit me. Perhaps, if I put more effort into it, I'd eventually learn the dodge, but I didn't find the motivation to keep playing it. It's unfortunate because the team clearly cares for the Souls subgenre, which is a subgenre that I also like a lot. Hope their next game will hit the mark.

Decent but it looks like an early access game.
Positive:
You can see that the creators love the souls games, the whole genre. They implemented a lot of great ideas, but they gave their own creativity to give a bit of twist to the genre.
The combat is complex enough, and it's really enjoyable. Sometimes it feels sloppy or inconsistent, but I liked it really much.
There are also some creative bosses.
I liked the initial ideas for art design, and the dark fantasy story.
Negative:
Too short, basically only a few maps, and you can see the budget wasn't much, because of the reused assets and other parts of the environment. It wouldn't be much to use at least some UI improvement (e.g. dark font styles or something), because it feels so generic.

Summary: If they would make a sequel, keeping the core combat mechanics, but with more levels, bosses, and abit more budget, and more attention to detail, I would definitely buy it!

Edit: I gave it a few more hours and got plat trophy! Altough it was repetitve, I enjoyed the combat so much!

Aún me falta el boss final (mañana me lo paso)
Como primer intento de souls de un estudio indie no está mal, pero tiene muchas que no me gustan.

-La cantidad de hyperarmor sin sentido de la mayoría de enemigos
-Encadenar varios parrys seguidos es menos recompensante de lo que debería en un sistema de este tipo
-El parry en sí no es todo lo preciso que debería ser (aunque le acabas cogiendo el ritmo)
-Los bosses y algunos enemigos élite tienen demasiada vida en mi opinión
-La mecánica de heridas y vida, que aunque es original y a ratos divertida, a veces resulta frustrante

Y más cosas realmente, pero tampoco quiero quedarme solo con lo malo. Hay una buena base y los entornos y la atmósfera son buenos, así que solo espero que la experiencia haya servido para lograr algo más pulido en el futuro