Thymesia

Thymesia is one of the now-many third person soulslike action RPGs. It's from a small Taiwanese developer OverBorder Studio and turned out to have even lower production values than I had expected -- the game features no voiced dialogue in any language. However, even if modest in its scope, Thymesia was reasonably entertaining, its gameplay feel solid enough for a good time.

We have Bloodborne at home (?)

English localization in texts leaves something to be desired; the extraneous use of the definite article caught my eye in particular. And numbering notes in their title is not very in-universe: "Plague victim's final journal entry 02". It's probably there to help with collectible hunting but it's definitely not the best way to do it: kind of pulls you out of immersion. The notes are also written as partial sentences enclosed by ellipses on both sides. Maybe that looks more sensible when written in kanji. There isn't much of a reason to pay attention to the notes: I picked up enough of what was going on by just skimming what the few characters of the game "said" when asked about different items.

You play as plague-masked Corvus, armed with a saber and dagger. (The saber's handguard is a bit problematic in its design because in real life the tip of the S-curve would dig into the wielder's wrist: the S should be reversed to face up on the wielder's side.) You can also equip plague weapons: either as one-time use when hooked from an enemy or as energy-consuming permanent attack when crafted from parts.

Attacks mainly cause wounds that enemies will heal unless you hit with your magical claw attack for permanent health loss. I think the mechanic is copied from Bloodborne -- which may have been the source of inspiration for Thymesia in general. I'm not the biggest fan of the "wound confirming"; it seems just a way to lengthen the time to kill. Parrying too wounds enemies and it's just annoying to have to claw them afterwards for actual damage -- it doesn't seem to add anything worthwhile. I think some sort of eventual stagger effect from parrying -- like in Lies of P or The Surge 2 -- would be more rewarding.

Parrying is fairly easy, especially if you take the perks to increase the window. Alternative perk chain allows you to hold down parry for partial damage blocking but I never tried it. I had real trouble parrying only few enemies -- including one boss -- that wail on you with 5+ attacks lasting combos. I eventually stopped engaging with the nonsense and just kept dodging out of the way.

Short and sweet 100%

It appears to be somewhat common for soulslikes to feature an unbeatable boss in the tutorial. Thymesia has an achievement for depleting the first health bar of its tutorial boss. The biggest challenge comes from the game progressing forward if you die before the boss's health bar is gone. Thus you'll probably have to save scum unless you want to run through the whole tutorial repeatedly. That achievement took a few attempts to unlock for me but fewer than I had expected. When encountered properly later, the boss, Varg, is also good for the Piece of Cake achievement that requires you to beat any boss without using your potion. His attacks are clearly telegraphed and reasonably effortless to parry. In his second phase, you do have to watch out for his ultimate attack which can't be parried.

Thymesia was relatively easy to 100%. You merely need to do a thorough run: defeat every boss, pick up every collectible (which are easy to spot), craft every plague weapon, etc. A thorough run means also getting all the different endings which are based on the combination of the two cores you use in the plague cure you'll brew. The endeavor is a bit silly, considering the cutscene is the same for each. At least you don't have to back up your save because the game asks afterwards if the ending was your final choice, allowing you to go for another. That unfortunately does require beating the same final boss again -- for five times in total.

A shortcut to max level

The game has an exploit that allows you to easily accrue infinite memory shards which are the leveling currency. It's not available immediately: you'll have to first find enough potion upgrades to unlock all ingredient slots for one. Each ingredient adds an additional effect and certain combinations of three are recipes with a bonus effect. Mint, rosemary, and thyme makes the potion to also increase the amount of shards looted by 25% -- which is a pretty damn high compound interest rate: the bonus applies also when looting shards you yourself dropped upon death.

Park yourself next to a beacon, end yourself with the bloodstained dagger in your inventory, use your potion after resurrecting, loot the dropped shards, and repeat. Thymesia has a level cap of 50, however, so there's no infinite power to be gained from the exploit. Perk points also stop coming after level 25.

The exploit doesn't seem like a hard thing to patch but that seems to have never happened. Controller vibration to be toggleable never seem to have made it to the Steam version either even though OverBorder did patch that for consoles. That is why I ended up playing on mouse and keyboard -- I found rumbling to be quite distracting. I switched the key bindings for Claw and Parry; it made more sense for parry to be on RMB and Claw on F. I also switched dodge from Space to LAlt -- that felt better for some reason with the other bindings.

Thymesia runs on Unreal Engine 4. Similarly to Mortal Shell, the game is quite foggy, its view distance limited. In this case that does seem to have at least resulted in great performance: I could run the game at maxed settings in 1080p without issues.