I'm really mixed on this game. The combat itself is fantastic, it feels responsive, deflecting feels satisfying and different special attacks you can have are great. But where this system suffers is with the lack of enemy variety. You'll be facing the same knight with the spear or sword and they'll sometimes have little health or they will be powerful. The bosses are also for the most part pretty underwhelming, except for the first boss and one late game boss. The game has some great theming but the levels themselves are way to liniar. I guess if you are looking for a short soulslike than this game might do that.

Não tenho parâmetro pra falar de soulslike pq esse aqui é o primeiro que eu consigo terminar, mas eu curti bem. Os bosses são desafiadores mas conseguiram me deixar motivado a entender o moveset e analisar a melhor estratégia para atacá-los, a história me parece qualquer coisa mas o combate é bem gostoso de se jogar. O jogo bugou no final e eu não vou conseguir ir atrás da minha platina, por isso e pela falta de no mínimo uma legenda PT-BR e alguns bugs aqui e ali, a nota ficou menor do que poderia ser

My experience with Thymesia was not up and down, but down-up-down.
When I first started it I thought it felt maybe a bit off, as these non-FromSoft souls games often do. But after playing it for a bit I got used to the mechanics and started being able to customize the playstyle a little bit, which I thought was great. I thoroughly enjoyed the intro section and the first area. Considering it's a very vertical area, it doesn't feel cumbersome. The level design is good and shortcuts back to the chairs (bonfires) are well-placed and feel like they come just frequently enough. Unfortunately, when I got to the first boss, the cracks really started to show. The low- and mid-tier enemies I could adapt to, but the boss clearly showed the game's flaws. If a game is going to have a boss that kills you in 2 hits, it needs to have extremely precise controls so that you can face that challenge with as much fairness as possible and overcome it through your skill, without the controls getting in the way.

I think that they had some great ideas, pulling all the good mechanics from multiple FromSoft games. It's a Seikiro-like more than anything. Combat requires parries, dodges, and dealing with certain undodgeable attacks which can be dealt with by throwing a feather dart (kind of a combo of Seikiro's undodgeable attacks and Bloodborne's gun counter. All these actions (except the dodge) inflict "wounds" which knock off a white bar which sits on top of their actual green HP bar. In other words, in order to actually hurt the enemy you have to cause wounds to reveal their HP and then actually damage the HP. If you leave the enemy without taking damage for a time, their wounds will heal up to their current HP again. So it is a two-part process of causing wounds and then solidifying that progress with HP damage.

Wounds are dealt through any of the above methods plus just regular attacks. Regular attacks to a small amount of HP damage but the primary method of HP damage is the claw. This is one of the parts I really liked in theory but not in practice. I feel like it should have been the opposite. That regular attacks do minimal wound damage but high HP damage, so you have to do parries, counters, and heavy attacks to inflict wounds and then use regular attacks to knock out their HP. Having to use the claw for a good chunk of the HP damage felt very restrictive.

I really loved the skill tree system that was surprisingly robust and really allowed you to customize your playstyle in a lot of ways. Some skills added more regular attacks to your standard combo, some changed your claw from a slow, lumbering attack to a quick, weaker one instead. Another skill made counters easier, and another one gave you the ability to do a spear-step counter to the unblockable attacks if you really want to pretend you're playing Seikiro, or you could get a skill that allows you to hold the button down to guard if you want to pretend you're playing Dark Souls.

Lastly, the game just felt unfinished. The music and sound effects are very minimalistic but don't feel like they're a stylistic choice so much as they just didn't get around to them. The cutscene for the first boss has no sound effects and there is subtitled dialogue but no voice acting. This isn't enough to ruin it for me, but it does threaten to knock the rating down. That being said, I'm keeping the rating at 2.5 because I really wanted to like this game. So sad.

Overall, I feel like Thymesia has a lot of really cool ideas and level design could have been top-notch

Played on Amazon Luna streaming service (November monthly free access to this game for Prime members)

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

Big "meh". I definetily was buyed because of art-style - like "Wow, Bloodborne-like on PC? Gimme two!". In geneal it's not so bad starting game for studio, and definetely it's not something special.
Interesting ideas about bosses, not so ideas regarding skill-tree and character abilities.
But all in all it's very-very repetative for souls-like game - sad to say that they make you to replay each levels for 3-4 times (and some level runs is literally backtracking just to grab some story-item) just to make this game longer. Closer to finals all I wished for is to just end this game as quick as possible.

One of the more enjoyable souls-like, this game combines Sekiro parrying and Bloodborne movement into one and my god it's satisfying. Me being a Sekiro Fanatic just parried my way through the game and the game does a good job of utilizing its main cores. Dodging and parrying, it lets you adapt and choose your own playstyle with the Plague arts or whatever they're called and differentiates the way you approach things with the plague weapon and plague weapon steal mechanic. Parrying in itself is less valuable then dodging unless you upgrade it so if you're a bloodborne fanatic, I'd recommend you dodge through the game. Nonetheless, boss fights were fun and areas were cool. Recommend

legitimately a better game than Sekiro.

-EDIT- i was a stinky smelly wrong boi. i'm sorry.

this game is still great. in fact, beating this game is the reason that sekiro finally clicked with me going back to it. if you don't like Sekiro, honestly give this game a go. it's worth it. it's a better tutorial than the tutorial for Sekiro. great shit. the devs should be proud.

As someone who is not typically a fan of souls-likes, I found this game quite fun. It's a simplified version of the genre which probably helped me, but that simplicity does have its flaws, especially for those who do enjoy the genre.

The combat is nice though repetitive over time, yet it feels tight and responsive. I found the sub quests being different routes through the same map to be entertaining and a good use of the budget, finding doors that were sealed before opening to a new area and having that, "Oh, this is where I am" moments.

Bosses, save maybe 2, are quite easy and uninteresting themselves. Wihtout voice acting, it was hard to read whatever they were saying during their fights. Story is pretty much entirely text through documents because of this.

The world itself is... I'm not sure, empty yet stylish. I was looking forward to seeing the next maps aesthetic and environment.

Overall, I can recommend this for the 20$ price tag, especially since you don't have to replay through the whole game for different endings, assuming you've fought every boss.