There are two tiers of soulslike games: those made by FromSoftware and everyone else. Many have tried to recreate the essence of those games but, almost inevitably, they all fall short in one respect or another which ends up cheapening the experience. Whether it be janky mechanics, broken builds, gimmicky bosses or any number of things it seems all those who attempt to create a true soulslike clone eventually end up failing in some important way. This is not to say they can’t be enjoyable, far from it, but I don’t know what it is about this genre where I have yet to come across a developer who’d consider on-par with the FromSoftware experience. Thymesia is no exception to this as well, being a short, strange soulslike game that carbon copies many things straight from the Souls series whilst trying to differentiate itself with some slight changes to the core mechanics. It’s a passable experience, but not one I’d be recommending to anyone but tried and true soulsborne veterans.
The Kingdom of Hermes was once a glorious and prosperous kingdom. Then the plague came, killing many and twisting those who survived into grotesque monsters with otherworldly powers. Alchemy was seen as the solution to the plague, and for a time it was, but the price that the kingdom needed to pay became too great and it was outlawed. This did not put an end to its use however and the black arts soon saw the downfall of the kingdom, the hope for a cure resting on a single person: Corvus. His memory though is scattered among the realm, unable to recollect the steps needed to create the cure. So you will no embark on a journey to recover your lost memories and, hopefully, find within them a cure for what plagues the kingdom.
Thymesia’s art direction is quite obviously inspired by Bloodborne, set in a Victorian-esque era replete the standard plague doctor outfit that your character wears. They also went to the trouble of making the graphics rather last gen looking, yet again emulating that FromSoftware aesthetic. Whilst this does translate into solid performance in most places there are a number of areas which are not optimised at all, dropping frame rates through the floor. I was playing this shortly after it released so I’m sure those areas will get addressed in future patches, but the stuttering I encountered served as a stark reminder that this was solidly in B-grade game territory.
The core game loop of Thymesia is a very close approximation to the standard soulslike formula. You’ll be put in an area, sent off to make your way through a number of enemies and will need to make it to the next checkpoint before you run out of health pots. Along the way you’ll unlock shortcuts that will make backtracking easier, something you’ll need to do as there’s no fast travel system in the game at all. Upgrades come in the way you’d expect: collecting “memories” which you can then use to buff one of 3 stats. You’ll also be able to unlock Plague Weapons by defeating enemies who use them, giving you access to an array of other armaments which are effectively spells since they need focus to use. Given the game’s (relatively) short length this lack of additional mechanics is deliberate, the devs not wanting to pack too much into the 8 hours or so you’ll be spending with the game.
Combat is a competent clone of the souls experience, although it relies far too heavily on enemies being able to attack faster than you in order to ramp up the challenge. Early enemies are slow moving and telegraph their moves as you’d expect. Later enemies usually have 2 or 3 moves which are almost guaranteed to interrupt you if you’re attacking or out of position with even blocking or countering not being fast enough to get you out of trouble. This becomes painfully evident with the bosses, forcing you to rely on dodging or out-ranging them until you get a longer opening in which to make an attack. Most of this stuff I could readily forgive though, if it weren’t for the fact that pretty much boss requires you to kill them 4 times.
You see all enemies effectively have 2 health bars: the normal one and the “wounds” one. If you do damage to an enemy, but not wounds, they’ll be able to regenerate their health back up to their wounds level. This means that all enemies, including bosses, have 2 health bars and one of them can regenerate infinitely. To be sure there are ways to make it easier for you to whittle both of them down at the same time (and to stop them regenerating) but pretty much every fight will have you burning down their health first before getting to work on their wounds. I’d be somewhat OK with this mechanic if it wasn’t for basically every boss fight being 2 phases, requiring you to go through the same burn down process twice. So unlike souls games where you can get clever with mechanics to make your life easier Thymesia instead relies on grind and repetition to keep the challenge up, punishing you severely when you get bored and try to end a fight quicker than the game wants you to.
This isn’t to mention how grindy the upgrade process gets after a certain point. To be sure getting memories isn’t too hard, especially once you get a few of the regeneration talents that ensure your health is topped off regularly and you have enough potions to ensure that you can clear out an entire level without resting once. Levelling up weapons though is a total chore, requiring you to find and grind specific enemies with them in order to get essences which you can then use to upgrade that particular weapon. For some common ones this isn’t too bad, but for the semi-rare ones it requires countless runs in order to upgrade them even half way.
Thymesia also suffers from a great deal of input delay which, I feel, is likely due to the input-reading required in order to make enemies react to your attacks. This makes combat feel far more sluggish than it should be given the game’s desired pace. This also unfortunately flows to other UI elements which, bizarrely, don’t respond to mouse clicks and can only be activated with key commands, These too are strange, with many keys serving dual purposes leading to ally manner of unintended actions on your behalf. Whilst none of these things are particularly game breaking they, once again, serve to remind you that whilst this might have the look and feel of a souls game, it’s not one of them.
The one thing that no one should copy from FromSoftware’s games though is the way they tell their stories. Keeping critical bits of information behind random items, long quest lines and all sorts of other nonsense don’t make for a great storytelling experience. Thymesia makes this mistake as well, keeping numerous crucial details about the world hidden in all manner of weird places and then it’s usually a giant wall of text that you’ll have to read through. Honestly for such a short game it wouldn’t have been too difficult to get most of this stuff fully voice acted either, but they instead opted for the much more JRPG like experience.
Perhaps I’m being too hard on Thymesia, given I played it not too long after finishing Elden Ring. But the whole time I was playing it I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the two, and saw just how far apart the two experiences were. I could be in the minority here too as it seems many people on Steam seem to love it. Maybe I needed more time between drinks on this one to appreciate what it gets right more than what it does wrong but honestly, for all but the die hard of souls fans among us, I can’t really many who’d enjoy what Thymesia has to offer.
Rating: 6.5/10
Thymesia is available on PC, Xbox One X/S, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch right now for $34.95. Game was played on the PC with a total of 7.7 hours playtime and 50% of the achievements unlocked.
