Thymesia

For me personally, something about this game just clicked. The art style, music and story just mesh so well together. I'm not normally a fan of 'souls' games, but this one grabbed my attention and i'm glad i picked it up. I know that the amnesiac protaganist is an overused trope, but it's well used here and it doesn't cheapen the experience. Also I've not encountered the bugs that seem prevelent in new game releases in general, so kudos to the devs for that.

This game was made by a team of 7 people, so don't go in expecting something huge. It's a short game with Sekiro-like (not Souls-like!) combat. Parry timing is not as instant as Sekiro and so takes a bit of getting used to. The game has a Nioh-like mission structure including side missions that take place on variations of main mission stages with different objectives. The combat is mechanically generally solid though I did have some issues with the game overall: 1) The "feather crit parry" is really flakey (or poorly explained). Sometimes enemies will just poise through it and hit you anyway. The winged slap variant is better but generally I found it better to ignore this mechanic in favour of the "Step and Jump" (Mikiri) counter that works fine. 2) Even low-level enemies have a bit too much poise. Plague Weapons with the "break Super Armor" ability are OP. 3) Some minor spelling errors (e.g. Geenhouse Key). 4) Enemies clipping into walls during execution animations. 5) Story is told predominantly through loading screens and bits of paper scattered around levels. And FYI there's no voice acting (I personally don't mind this but YMMV). Overall, I really enjoyed it. Want more! Would of liked to see some kind of extra boss rush missions.

As other reviews mention, it is a nice Sekiro-Soulslike which is a little short on content. # Summary: The combat is fluent and fast with a focus on reaction parries. This is a stark contrast with Dark Souls combat, which is very slow and essentially based on memorizing enemy attack patterns. It is very short, especially if you don't like the side quest revisiting old locations. For me, the interesting combat makes this quite ok. But more locations would have been better for the price (€25). # Special remark: Posture damage and regen The best thing about the combat is their take on posture damage (as Sekiro called this). It may be a love-it-or-hate-it feature, but I am in the love-it camp. Essentially, all enemies have health regen and you have to keep attacking or he/she regenerates. However, all attacks slightly lower the max health as well, whereas Claw damage can lower max health significantly for every hit. This means that you have to alternate between normal attacks and the special attacks (lowering max health) to prevent regen. I liked this, as you have to think about this mechanic when developing your character, as straightforwardly upping saber damage when leveling, will leave you struggling with this health regen. There are different options when building your character to counter this mechanic (upping special attack (claw) damage, mikiri counter, plague weapon, etc.), so you can pretty much change your combat flow in this way. # Technology-wise: - Unlimited framerate; Much better than the 60fps cap of Sekiro. - Widescreen supported (at least my 21:9), again unlike sekiro. - The game works out of the box-ish (proton/wine) on linux

I personally love the Souls-like genre, but in my opinion Thymesia is missing a lot of systems that makes it a Souls-like. That's not a bad thing, rather it takes far more from Sekiro where you must learn the combat, use your skills very wisely and learn to master the art of deflecting and dodging enemy attacks to come out on top with what limited tools you have. That's not to say having limited tools makes your options limited, far from it, levelling your character just right and using the appropriate plague weapons and talents that fit your playstyle can really change the game up in some interesting ways. You're still deflecting and melee fighting but how you go about achieving those wins that can vary quite drastically on your preferred playstyle - thus giving the player more freedom than they would in a game like Sekiro. All of that makes the combat so satisfying to me and is easily the game's biggest strength, backed up with some interesting levels and some very unique and stellar boss fights that will really put your skills to the test. The challenge becomes utterly brutal at times, but never once have I ever felt the game was being unfair, it's giving you all the information you need and enemies behave very consistently, making everything learnable and exploitable - it's always your fault if you fail due to poor execution or failing to learn attack patterns and enemy behaviour. It is what one might call a hearty challenge. It's not perfect though, performance can range from good to awful, especially in the Sea of Trees with its frame drops, micro stutter and hitching. Lack of enemy variety is annoying, as some enemies are overused while some interesting ones only appear once or twice in the entire game. The side content is also hit or miss, with one side quest level being very dull in its level design and one optional boss being quite buggy, making Corvus glitch in spots. I strongly recommend overall and it lasts as long as it needs to, short but sweet!