Note: This Cloud Version of Thymesia was tested on 100Mb Superfast Broadband using both a 5G WIFI and wired LAN connection.

The Kingdom of Hermes has fallen into an age of calamity. In a world where the use of powerful alchemy was once widespread and welcomed, things have gone terribly wrong. The now blood-soaked streets are filled with plague-ridden monstrosities and it's up to you, Corvus, to take out the mutated trash.

OverBorder Studios' Thymesia is the latest in a long line of Soulslike experiences that attempt to capture FromSoftware's magic whilst adding a few of its own twists and gameplay wrinkles for good measure. As is de rigueur with the genre, we've got the same basic ground rules as usual at work here. Bonfires, now known as beacons, dot the landscape and provide a chance to rest and increase your stats whilst also regenerating all nearby enemies. Death sees you leave behind your collected memories, giving you one chance to return to collect them, and there's a central nexus, here known as Pilgrimage Hill, that you can return to when you want to wallow in the game's brooding atmosphere or have a disappointingly short chat with the one NPC who resides there.

Yes, if you've played any Soulsborne, you already know the general gist of how things play out in Thymesia, but this is a game that has managed to garner some extra attention in the run-up to its release because, well, it looks the business. There's a nice art style at work here, Corvus is a fast and flashy protagonist, and at first glance, the haunted forests and bloodstained streets that you claw and slash your way through give off a little bit of a Bloodborne vibe which, let's face it, is a vibe well worth giving off.

Further to this, the game's combat has got enough fresh ideas to warrant investigation. Corvus attacks foes with a combination of fast saber slashes and a slower, heavier claw attack. The general idea is that enemy health bars have got two elements that you need to work on destroying. Slash at them with your saber and you'll see the white bar turn green, indicating that you're inflicting wound damage. The white will regenerate and reclaim all of the exposed green area unless you then strike out with your claw, permanently removing the green portion and doing actual lasting damage on top of temporary wounds. Whittle the bar down to zero and your enemy will be opened up for a finishing move that's indicated by a glowing red spot robbed right out of Sekiro.

It's a system that encourages you to keep on the front foot, getting stuck into enemies with combos — there is no stamina to worry about here — in order to stop their wounds regenerating. On top of this, Thymesia introduces a neat plague weapons mechanic that sees you steal whatever weapon skill your current enemy is in possession of by charging up your claw attack and then unleashing it, sending Corvus driving forward to pluck the essence of their weapon from them for a one time use.

The plague weapons on offer give you plenty of options to play with, there's a total of 21 to collect, and they cover great big hammers, whips, swords, axes, scythes and more exotic blood-leeching fare, that add a layer of strategy as you blast through levels, collecting memory shards to beef up your stats and skills with an eye on the boss that lurks at the end of every area.

After a time you'll also unlock plague weapons permanently in your inventory, giving you the opportunity to set them to a second slot and affording Corvus a mix of permanent and one-time use plague weapons to play with. As you claw at foes you'll receive random drops of weapon-specific upgrade points which can then be used to strengthen the attack stats of your collection. Use your claw to attack a hammer-wielding foe and they'll drop hammer upgrades, sword foes drop sword upgrades, and so on.

With regards to upgrading Corvus' core stats, you only need worry about pumping your memory shards into strength, vitality and plague attributes and each level that you gain rewards you with a talent point to use in the game's talent skill tree. It's here that you can freely unlock and then reset various skills at your convenience in order to build a Corvus that best suits your playstyle. You may want to pump all your points into your saber, for example, ensuring it gives you lots of energy back as you attack — energy is what you'll need to pull off plague weapon attacks after all — and there are also upgrades for your claw, dodge, deflection skills, feather darts, and more general stuff like buffs to your attacks when your health falls under a certain level.

The core combat system here really is pretty solid and unique stuff, at least on paper. However, you may have noticed us mention feather darts, dodges and deflections in that last paragraph, and this is where things begin to fall apart somewhat. Thymesia has got far too many systems in play for its own good, some of which feel utterly pointless and most of which feel like they need some refinement and adjustment due to how annoyingly tight their windows of opportunity are.

Take the game's feather darts as an example. These are used to stagger an enemy's charged attacks and delay wound regeneration, and are deployed with a quick press of the left trigger. After being introduced to this mechanic in the tutorial we completely forgot about it. It just feels unnecessary, does very little damage — at least until you level it up — and simply dodging out of the way of charged attacks and then moving in for some saber and claw strikes feels like much the better option.

This same issue extends to the game's deflection system. Time your block with the left shoulder button and you'll deflect an enemy's attack. Fair enough. But the rewards for doing this aren't worth how difficult it is to master the extremely tight and tricky timing. There's no opening up the enemy for a fancy riposte here, and so you're much better off simply dodging out of the way.

However, even dodging has its issues, feeling unrefined — especially in this Switch Cloud version, which we'll get to discussing in just a bit — and for the most part we chose to hammer the dodge button rather than trying to get into a rhythm of perfect escapes.

It all results in combat that feels loose and baggy on the defence side of things, never reaching a place where it makes the player feel they're in total control, weaving in and out of enemy attacks and delivering ripostes when the opportunity arises. In short, on offense, Thymesia feels fine for the most part, but outside of this it's a messy mix of mechanics that could, and should, have been streamlined. Take out the feathers and the deflection and just give us plague weapons, saber/claw attacks, and a dodge and this may have felt much slicker overall.

Outside of combat, well, you have to take Thymesia's indie nature and budget price point into consideration here. There are just three distinct areas in the game, with a small hub and a final small boss region to bulk things out a tad. Not too much in the way of variety all in all. You'll run through an area once and face off against its boss, then you'll be offered a series of sub-quests that see you return to a slightly different version of that same area to collect something or battle a secondary boss. This amounts to a lot of backtracking and repetition in both scenery and enemy types and it's an issue that's exacerbated early on by a first major boss we needed to grind for a good few hours in order to beat. Not an ideal start.

This early-game grinding didn't just leave a bad taste in the mouth either, it also resulted in us feeling entirely over-levelled for the rest of our adventure, making for run-of-the-mill enemy encounters and boss battles that felt much easier later on in the campaign than anything we encountered in its opening hours. Or at least it would have done had we not been in a constant struggle with terrible input lag, image quality issues, artifacting, and other issues related to this being a cloud version.

We've had good experiences in the past with the likes of Hitman 3 - Cloud Version, and yes, we've had serious issues (Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy: Cloud Version), but here things are at their worst. Due to the fast, combat-heavy nature of Thymesia's gameplay and the tight windows of success for deflecting, dodging and attacking successfully, the input lag and image quality issues here result in an experience that really is borderline unplayable on Switch. Consider making your way through Dark Souls for the first time with very heavy lag, unresponsive controls, and attack animations with completely messed up timings and you get the general idea of how this one works out.

Of course, we're aware your experience may vary depending on your internet set-up, but we tested this game on a very capable 100Mb 5G WIFI and a wired connection with very little success. You only need glance at the screenshots throughout this review to get an idea of how blurred and unreadable this game looks in combat. Muddy image quality and compromised inputs in this type of exacting, action-heavy game, just isn't something we can live with, unfortunately.

In the end what you've got here is a very poor version of a game that's already a pretty average experience, even when playing on hardware that can run it perfectly. Thymesia's combat is a mixed bag, its level design is fairly bland and its lore underdeveloped. Had it run well on Switch we'd have recommended it only to the most ardent of Soulslike fans. However, with the performance of this cloud version proving so intolerably poor, this is a version of OverBorder Studio's indie adventure that we advise you steer well clear of.

Thymesia has all the ingredients necessary to make for a solid indie Soulslike, but falls short of greatness due to messy implementation of mechanics, bland level design, weak lore, and issues with difficulty balancing. Add to this the fact that we experienced serious performance issues with this Cloud Version — problems which fundamentally hampered our timing and control input during combat, ruining the most promising part of the game — and you've got a Switch experience that's best avoided at all costs.

Scoring Policy Review copy provided by Team17

Liquids, solids and the occasional gas

Cloudy with a chance of consumer disgruntlement?

Is it bad that I feel good when cloud games fail?

Cloud games succeeding will mean the eroding of game ownership as I've grew up with it and enjoy it.

If people think that cloud gaming is "the future" then they are deluding themselves, especially in an age where data centers are forced to use tens of millions of liters of water to cool in times of extreme heat.

Here's some advice for developers looking to make cloud games for Switch:

Another one bites the (dust)cloud.

@Slowdive While you make a strong point - how many liters of water/units of electricity does it take to manufacture, ship and sell 100s of 1000s of physical video games vs. housing them in a data center?

@Sonos There's no getting around it; every form of consumption is bad for the environment.

@Slowdive There should be a way to compare and contrast - besides the fake "carbon neutral" thing companies are buying into now. Sadly, t won't happen company's must confuse the public to create.

It bothers me when cloud versions run poorly even with good internet because I am wondering if devs tested anything. There are games that run ok in the cloud for switch so it isn’t like it can’t be done. Streaming isn’t an alternative if devs don’t make sure it works.

If we're talking about portability which the Switch is for, then CLOUD IS NEVER THE FUTURE. If I'm buying a game, its because I wanna play it anywhere where I won't need the internet.

I’m getting the physical version on the Xbox down the line so no skin off my back. But these Cloud versions continue to not make a compelling sales pitch to even bother with them.

Every time I see "Cloud Version" I just scroll directly down to the score, hope it's bad and mark the game as another "Won't buy, ever." I really want cloud versions of all games to fail. Requiring internet to play and the imminent shut down of the servers so you can't access the game you paid for are all signs of the end of ownership. As long as I can, I'll collect physical games and only buy digital versions of games that aren't available in physical form, or games I know I'll probably only play once, like a lot of story driven indie games.

Am I the only one who doesn’t hate Cloud versions? If they didn’t exist, this game, GotG, Hitman 3, and other games wouldn’t even be on Switch, and the games warn you before buying how Cloud versions work, so you don’t need to buy the game if you don’t want to. But if you only have a Switch, you can at least play these games if you really want to. In some cases (like Hitman 3), it’s actually good. Everyone says they hate Cloud versions because they’re going to be “the end of gaming” and soon all games will be cloud games, but there’s no sign that that’s actually going to happen.

Obviously, Kingdom Hearts is the one exception to all of this.

I think cloud games can be ok if there’s no chance of getting it to run natively; it’s better than nothing.

Thank god No Man's Sky is going to run natively.

@Munchlax would rather have nothing Cloud gaming is a cancer worse than micro-transactions.

Pushsquare gave it the same score and that's the native version. Looks like it's just not a very good game to begin with, cloud or otherwise.

@KryptoniteKrunch I was just getting ready to say this when I saw your comment. When the NATIVE version on PS5 gets the same score as the cloud version on Switch, I think you know its the game that's just...bad. Sounds like the game is just very poorly optimized and badly implemented overall. Its just EXTRA janky on Switch thanks to it being a cloud version.

Switch 2 now. Switch 2 now. Switch 2 now. It couldn't be more apparent.

@BabyYoda71 no you are not. I am fond of cloud gaming personally but hate to see it as an afterthought.

Why am I not surprised that this game stinks?

@BabyYoda71 I don’t hate the idea of them at all- I welcome it when it comes to games that just have no chance of running well (if at all) on Switch. I just loathe that they’re being sold as if you’re getting the same experience as other platforms when you’re absolutely not.

If you pay £50 for a game on Xbox either physically or digitally you’re going to have full access to that for the foreseeable future (it’s not likely they’re going to kill support for updates or downloading of games for a very long time), but buy that same game as a cloud version on Switch for the same price? They can kill the servers whenever so you lose access forever, if there’s a problem server side you’re gonna have to wait until they fix it so you can play, problems with your own internet access are going to affect your experience/whether you can play at all at certain times. Above everything for me it’s the issue of ownership which is already shaky when it comes to digital downloads but is just straight up removed when it comes to cloud games- you only “own” it until they decide it’s not viable for them to keep paying for the servers for you to stream from. If these cloud versions were priced as they should be- as rentals, because that’s really what they are- I’d be a lot more receptive when they show up and would have already played a few games like Control and Guardians of the Galaxy on Switch that way if that were the case. I’m not paying anywhere close to full price or even half of what they’re asking for any of these versions though, no chance.

Stop bringing these cloud GARBAGE to Switch. They make it harder for us to find the actual legit native ones.

Not much better on Xbox, according to Pure Xbox. But NL has to pretend it's the Switch's fault this game isn't very good.

@WoomyNNYes yeah but you'll get switch only players screaming about ignoring the 110 million or so userbase when developers don't release any version of a game on the switch & then when they do a cloud version you'll get them screaming about how lazy they are the real solution would be for Nintendo to actually make a home console with modern specs lol

@Would_you_kindly If Nintendo ever makes a console that has the power to play both modern games AND Nintendo titles, my money is ready!

@larryisaman Something I think a lot of people don’t realize because they don’t go anywhere near cloud versions is the eShop gives you very big warnings before buying a Cloud game. I think if you press buy, before you pay, it tells you exactly how Cloud gaming works, so nobody should buy a Cloud version without knowing how it works. However I agree that them being the same prices is a bit stupid.

@Serpenterror No they don’t? There’s only 8 Cloud games on the eShop by my counting, so they shouldn’t hog your attention too much.

Also, fun fact: did you know Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey was released as a Cloud edition in 2018, but only in Japan? I find that very interesting, because it just became a mainstream thing last year.

@IronMan30 I wrote both of the reviews.

@PJOReilly fair enough and I guess you did write this...

"In the end what you've got here is a very poor version of a game that's already a pretty average experience, even when playing on hardware that can run it perfectly."

@IronMan30 No worries at all! It's a shame it turned out so bad for Switch.

Hopefully people keep voting NO to cloud-based games with their wallets. Publishers will eventually get the hint and stop pushing these RENTALS on us as "the future of gaming."

@BabyYoda71 I’m not saying that people don’t know how it works, I’m saying you shouldn’t be charged the same going rate to play a cloud version as a native version because of how it works. Even if you buy these versions and don’t have any of those other problems, everybody who buys a cloud version will eventually face complete lock out of the game they bought. You can say the same for digital downloads and even physical nowadays but there are ways of preserving those- there is no way to preserve a cloud version. You’re renting it and you shouldn’t be charged full whack to rent it.

@larryisaman My reply wasn’t aimed at you specifically (I’m about to go on a rant, and again, this is not aimed at you), I’m just saying I’ve seen a few people on this site (even just in this comment section) complain specifically about how someone could purchase it without realizing it’s a Cloud edition, which isn’t true. People who are saying it’s going to take over the gaming industry (Ratchet916) and there won’t be any more native games (Serpenterror), are also wrong, because so far we’ve only seen games that wouldn’t run on Switch at all natively (once again, KH is an exception). Most people who think Cloud editions are inherently bad seem to me like they have Switch and XBox and/or PS, they have at least two consoles. They assume everyone does even though that’s not true*, and Cloud Editions are a good thing for people who only have Switch and really want to play these games. Even if most games become Cloud editions: 1. It won’t be for another many years, even decades. 2. They will have to increase how long the game will be available for, I’d bet the life span of the console, because they’ll want to be selling the games for many years. My guess would be (if these were all Cloud versions) Splatoon 2 would end around now, BotW would end when BotW2 comes out, 1-2-Switch would end when Nintendo’s next console comes out, games like Kirby and the Forgotten Land would maybe last for a bit longer since they came out later. Still not great, but better than it could be.

Plus, Nintendo said Switch was halfway through its life cycle in Feb2021, which was about 4 years after it came out. So the Switch will probably exist until about Jan2025. The Assassin’s Creed cloud game I mentioned in my last post came out in 2018 and is (I believe) still running, which means most of these cloud games will probably be running until when Nintendo’s next console comes out (coming from a hardcore non-Switch Pro believer). So really the worst part about cloud gaming for casual players is technical problems.

In conclusion, I’m not saying cloud gaming is flawless (mainly the full price at this point), but it’s probably not as bad as people think it is. There hasn’t been any cloud games that have stopped running yet, so no one can truthfully say they’re going to end soon. The technical problems are unfortunate, but not really helpable. Some people would risk it if they wanted to play GotG.

*EDIT: Also, I just checked, and there’s no cloud games on XBox or PS, so calm down, this is literally only so these games can run on Switch. It’s not taking over gaming anytime soon.

@BabyYoda71 Please don't drag me into your bout with someone else as a reference, thanks. Besides, you assumed an awful lot based on a 2 sentence comment.

@Ratchet916 Like I said, wasn’t aimed at one person, it was aimed at everyone who talks about how cloud games are going to be “the future of gaming”, including your comment. But fair enough.

Tap here to load 35 comments

Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...

Sega Launches 'Ultimate Sonic Bundle' On Switch eShop, But Something's Missing

Actually, several things are missing

Review: Kirby's Dream Buffet - A Delicious Spread To Put You In The Party Mood

Review: Cult Of The Lamb - Animal Crossing Goes Bad In This Satisfyingly Stressful Sim

Yooka-Laylee Developer Playtonic Warns Of 'Lil Gator Game' Scam

Round Up: Cursed To Golf Reviews Signal A Potential Masterpiece

Sounds like a hole in one!

Review Wave Race 64 - A Thrilling Racer That's Still Deeply Impressive

Review Kirby's Dream Buffet - A Delicious Spread To Put You In The Party Mood

Review Cult Of The Lamb - Animal Crossing Goes Bad In This Satisfyingly Stressful Sim

Review Blossom Tales II: The Minotaur Prince - A Cute Zelda-Like Adventure That Lacks Fresh Ideas

Review Thymesia - Cloud Version - A Soulslike That Shows Some Promise, Just Not On Switch

Pokémon Sword And Shield Codes: Full List Of Mystery Gif...

Every Nintendo Switch Online N64 Game Ranked

Nintendo Switch Online - Every NES, SNES, N64 And Sega Ge...

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Walkthrough, Tips And Hints

SEGA Genesis Mini 2 Games List - Every Mega Drive And SEG...

Kirby And The Forgotten Land Codes: Full List Of Kirby Pr...

How To Redeem Pokémon GO Promo Codes

Best Nintendo Switch Micro SD Cards - Cheapest Memory Car...

Pokémon GO Spotlight Hour Times: This Week's Featured Po...

Pokémon GO Twitch Codes List - Pokémon World Championsh...

Review: Wave Race 64 - A Thrilling Racer That's Still Dee...

Nintendo's Latest N64 Game For Switch Online + Expansion ...

Join 1,335,604 people following Nintendo Life:

© 2022 Hookshot Media, partner of ReedPop. Hosted by 44 Bytes.