Timecia is like the soul you see playing as Corvus, an amnesiac reincarnation warrior. You are led by a ghostly face on a mission to uncover a secret.
The Trappings of Souls title is rich, with lanterns that act as bonfires, spectral home bases to upgrade your character, and a maze-like level design littered with shortcuts. The four levels are fairly small, and each successive one gets smaller. However, each area has side quests that add a little extra content. Toxic forests, bloody caves, abandoned villages. Each level has its own visual twist. The forest has an itinerant circus that leads you through a series of arboretums to a bloody cave, but nothing entirely original.
The gameplay offers a mix of hack-and-slash combat and the in-depth attack and evasion schema you’d expect from Dark Souls, but it has its problems. A combat system like this requires precision that Thymesia doesn’t have. Input doesn’t register often, daggers used to counter critical strikes are more likely to pierce enemies than hit, and many enemy combos last so long that dodging is pointless .
All of these flaws are further amplified between bosses that require more precision than there. The challenge is front-loaded, and leveling up and unlocking perks doesn’t increase the difficulty much, making the second half of the game almost easy.
Minute-by-minute combat with regular enemies is a ton of fun thanks to one of the best ideas in the game: leaving. It’s a well-made system that steals the enemy’s special move with a charge attack. It integrates well into the flow of combat, chaining combos is satisfying and, more importantly, fun. Maybe.
The end result is a small-scale game with lofty aspirations that fall short of their goals. Stealing the special is great, but everything surrounding it is unimpressive.
