Thymesia

Pretty amazed with how this game turned out. Went into it purely with the expectation of this being a small scale, indie Bloodborne (which I still would've liked) and ended up finding something that had a ton of unique, creative ideas added to the mix to truly make it stand out in a number of ways. You've got your standard Souls feel all over the place of course, with how the combat roughly feels along with its narrative presentation mostly being kept in the background and explained through notes strewn about etc. but it still feels clear that the people involved were massive fans who wanted to put a real spin on things. This is mainly showcased through the variety of distinct combat systems that work together to inform the gameplay in a very nuanced, effective manner that makes for something that feels incredible once you get the basics down.

A significant way in which this is explored is through the way enemy health is handled, with the combination of wounds and proper damage making for a very dynamic and engaging experience. Rather than dealing straight damage to an enemy, hitting them with a basic attack will deplete one bar a certain amount with a 2nd bar underneath it being revealed in the process that can only be reduced with certain other attacks. This needs to be done within a few seconds otherwise the first bar will begin to fill and cover the 2nd one again, functionally causing you to have dealt no damage. This ultimately encourages an experience where the player is forced to carefully pick their moments in order to succeed, with an entirely offensive playstyle being required to actually get any damage in, but a defensive mindset also needing to be constantly considered to make sure you properly pick your moments and create openings to be able to actually succeed at doing this without taking hits in the process. The game also feels insanely fast paced for the most part, making a lot of these decisions increasingly intense considering you won't really have much time to properly consider things in the moment and just need to learn how to more intuitively alter your playstyle on the fly.

This is all further aided by the talent system in the game and the way it manages to be one of the only times where a skill tree has actually been interesting to mess around with. A huge reason for this is the way it affects so many fundamental aspects of the combat system to the point where even a couple of slight retoolings could completely change your optimal playstyle in the situation, but you're actually able to re-allocate these points at any time. This circumvents my biggest issue with a lot of of similar systems where it feels largely arbitrary to make the player have to commit to unlocking only part of their gear without really being able to properly contextualise what they could do with it, and instead it adds some nice extra depth to the game as you're now able to pick your compromises at almost any point while actually being informed about what you need (and if you end up being wrong it's no problem either because you can just move things around again and try out something entirely different). This also helps encourage the player to properly explore their entire moveset and just immediately fall into a reliance towards only an aspect or two of it, since they can mess around and test out these options at a high power to understand the potential they have rather than attempt to start using a new tool from absolute base level and inevitably dropping it.

This sense of versatility also carries over to the awesome plague weapon mechanic where players are able to steal weapons from the enemy and use it as a one-time effect, and eventually being able to have it as a permanent ability on your character, adding a sense of additional power and spontaneity to a lot of encounters. This wonderfully robust customisation allows the encounters to also be more specialised around specific playstyles without feeling downright unbalanced towards a certain crows, as players are given the option to essentially adapt their character to better fit the situation. This makes for a lot of situations that feel very focused as a result, since they don't all strictly have to cater for every possibility of the player. This especially plays a role in the varied and consistently excellent boss fights, where certain mobility options or methods of attack feel prioritised against certain other attackers, some being far more effective to parry, but some others having attacks that are much more suited to being dodged, as an example. There's some pretty great variety to the boss fights as well, some being your typical, fast paced humanoid encounters, but there also being enough more unconventional ones to keep things interesting, with almost all of them being really engaging fights in one way or another, especially with the final 3 being outright incredible.

The game's not all perfect of course, and there are definitely a few issues that stop it from being even more incredible in my eyes. The biggest complain of these is the enemy variety being pretty lacking even for a game as short as this, with the 3rd area having no enemy types that weren't just direct reskins of previous ones. This isn't as massive a deal as you might expect thanks to the short runtime of the game lessening grievances related to repetition and most enemy types still being great to fight, but it definitely hurts things nonetheless and makes it all feel a bit more homogenous than I'd like. Certain mechanics just didn't feel like they reliably worked, the feather counters being especially rough to the point of feeling more like a liability to use them due to inconsistent functionality and ended up taking me out of things a bit even though they ended up getting circumvented by just using one of the other many options at my disposal. I feel like the number of sidequests that just made you go back through the levels were also really lame, and while the atmosphere of them tended to be pretty spot on, it still felt pretty tedious and a bit pointless too.

A lot of other little issues such as the stiff camera controls, the lack of voice acting relegating every cutscene to having to read subtitles even during combat itself, the bit of a drop in quality of the 2nd main area and some janky animation work all made the experience feel a bit less polished in ways that it would've benefited from as well. That said, this game still feels remarkably impressive for something developed by such a small indie team, with it having so much going on that I'd usually only expect to see in a far bigger game with the budget to match. In the end, despite some shortcomings, Thymesia is a deeply engaging, short Souls-like that far exceeded my expectations and gives me incredibly high hopes for what Overborder studio will be able to do next.