Thymesia is a shadow. It’s a word which doesn’t just describe its raven-like plague-masked protagonist Corvus, but its beholden nature to the many Soulsborne games which have come before it. It functions, moves, sounds, and reads like those titles in myriad ways, but absent of their artistic detail, careful environmental storytelling, or meaningful depth. What’s left is a bare outline, a third-person action RPG with a minimal skill tree, a slew of broken mechanics, a paltry roster of enemies, and some atrocious boss fights.

A brisk tutorial section introduces Thymesia’s basics, which combine the parry-reliant gameplay of Sekiro, the Victorian plague imagery of Bloodborne, and that weighty deliberate Souls combat we’ve all come to learn and enjoy over the past decade. That Corvus appears similar to Eileen the Crow seems no accident, just like how the somber thematic tones of the script echo the Soulsborne games, though Thymesia’s lack of new weapons and equippable items removes the opportunity for tucked-away inventory lore. Even the game’s sound effects are predictably Souls-esque.