It’s all very cool and very emo, but I struggled to invest in the character or the world much. Your character is Corvus, an alchemist and warrior with a plague doctor’s mask and a cloak of raven feathers. There’s nothing wrong with simply telling a story with a cohesive through-line, even in a Soulslike, but here we are. It has reached a point where this is eye-rollingly frustrating. As is de rigueur, most of the world-building is left to flavour text, some of which works and some of which is sort of just there.

The story itself is disjointed and sparsely told. The citizenry is little more than a mob of mutated monstrosities marauding through moonlit hollows, beholden to powerful entities presented with all the aplomb of Bloodborne’s bosses but none of the context. Characters talk about vile blood and pure blood in a story that deals with a kingdom in the grip of a terrible plague. In fact, it goes so hard on some of Bloodborne’s themes that I had to re-read some of the flavour text to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood. It is, however, one of the few Soulslikes to model itself after Bloodborne instead of Dark Souls. Like Mortal Shell and The Surge before it, Thymesia is a Soulslike that introduces a lot of new ideas, even innovates at times, but can’t quite go toe-to-toe with the past masters. Chances are good that the younger brother had his elder’s swagger but none of the charm, and it’s often the same with games that glide into the limelight on the strength of their genre-mates. Unfortunately, though, credibility freely given and not earned is rarely real or long-lived. The term “Soulslike” seems to carry with it a certain amount of instant kudos, like that kid in school who was automatically cool because his older brother was.

Thymesia securities