Thymesia Review – Innovation or imitation? – Checkpoint

The game has everything: a world built upon Colossal Trees, a plague, a blessed flame, alchemical healing, and ‘beacons’ used to respawn. At times, it certainly felt derivative, but also somewhat comforting to know that there are some staple elements at play to lay the foundation for some hopefully satisfying gameplay.

The game is smooth as butter and the animations are fluid and well executed. Graphically, the game shines, and is a sterling example of a modern “indie-ish” title that really commits to visual and mechanical excellence. Thymesia truly presents as a game with a high-end budget.

Where I can heap praise upon Thymesia for interesting combat and creative systems, I can also heap criticism on the fact that none of this feels like a leap forward or true innovation for the genre. While the cliche use of adjectives and certain pronouns to set up the world and environment is comforting on one hand, it is also a symptom of a genre that is failing to move past its, admittedly immense and impressive, roots. Instead, like so many before it, by the end of Thymesia I really felt like I just played through yet another imitation, albeit one that flew fairly close to potential greatness.

It feels like a game that was intended to be much longer and deeper than the final product. There are seeds planted early in the game that never really come to fruition and leave me wondering if something occurred during development that halted fleshing out more of the game’s hanging threads. I would have loved to have seen more of the world, more of the lore, and more degradation of the world to witness the vile and grotesque results.