Thymesia, described as a punishing action role-playing game, will be coming to PC this year and Dark Souls fans might have a good reason to be excited. This new title will drop players into a world of disease and fierce melee combat, fighting through a fallen kingdom and using a plague weapon system.
Team17, an independent games label, announced its partnership with developer OverBorder Studio and will be publishing Thymesia, the studio's debut title, by the end of 2021. Team17 has developed and published numerous indie games over the past few years but are best known for its artillery tactical series, Worms.
In Thymesia, players will take on the role of mysterious character Corvus in a world reminiscent of Bloodborne and Dark Souls. The game's Steam story section details a once powerful kingdom that has fallen to pieces and become overwhelmed with diseases and monsters where the player needs to piece together what went wrong. A partnership-announcement trailer that came out today (March 25th) has set expectations for the gameplay and shows intense combat with special plague abilities, the game's main character tackling an enormous monstrous bat and an overall deeply dark and gloomy aesthetic.
The official release date has yet to be announced but all signs point to this game being available to play by the end of this year. This will be the debut for Overborder Studio but just one of a handful of games set to be published by Team17 this year including Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos and Narita Boy. This mix of industry expertise and fresh perspective may be promising but information remains relatively scarce and a cautious optimism is probably the best approach for players until more is known about how the game will run.
Players who have enjoyed the brutal nature of FromSoftware settings and gameplay should be reasonably excited for Thymesia. All signs seem to point to difficult bosses, hauntingly beautiful scenes and an interesting and engaging combat arsenal ideally reminiscent of Bloodborne. The real risk here though, as with all games that garner comparisons to Dark Souls and Bloodborne, is the level of admiration FromSoftware releases have earned.
There is a legitimate reason why those games are the bar to which all other titles are measured and if Thymesia doesn't bring enough unique attributes to the table then it will fall into obscurity. Another potential issue is this title's usage of disease as a major weapon. As the real world still battles with the pandemic, the developer and publisher must be a bit worried that the game doesn't hit the wrong chord with players dealing with real-world issues.
Thymesia will launch for PC in 2021.