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)
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)