Thyria Game Review
General Thoughts
The first time I launched Thyria, I didn’t like how its glossy art style reminded me of the old flash games I used to play back in the early 2000’s. But once I got into the skill customization and combat aspects, I completely forgot all about that part of it.
Following the art style, its tutorial was the next thing to turn me away from enjoying Thyria. All it did was put a static image up on the screen with some arrows pointing from one thing to the next. But since I had no idea what anything was to begin with, it just looked like a jumbled mess of imagery. On top of that, its menu is visually disguised as a room. So instead of clicking buttons with words that tell you what it is, you’re clicking around on the screen as if you were playing a hidden item game. Even after a few hours of play I still don’t fully understand all the aspects of what I can or should be doing there. And I wasn’t ever confident that I’d found all the different menus. But thankfully I’ve been playing video games for a long time so I was able to put 2 and 2 together for the most part and I think I at least figured out the basics of it all. I think.
Moving past what I didn’t like, there are 2 aspects of Thyria that stand out as the best parts of the game. And they are your Guardians ability customization and the day/night cycle that’s built into its combat system.
Every ability has a day and night version of itself. And your entire hotbar of skills/abilities on every Guardian (what your characters/heroes you control are called) changes whether it's currently day or night. So when you’re out on the adventuring part of the game, the day/night cycle greatly impacts what you can do in combat. And sometimes this can even happen in the middle of battle.
One of the mirror world bosses was giving me a particularly hard time with its heavy amounts of damage and the hypnosis effect one of its minions kept applying to my guys. I was positive that I was going to lose. But then mid combat the cycle changed to night, changing all of my abilities. Now that it had switched to night I had access to healing and singular focusing attacks that dealt more damage so I was able to turn the combat around and bring home victory a few rounds later.
Although there was also another time where I was constantly generating corpses with one ability and then reanimating them with another. Those reanimated corpses were the only thing keeping me alive since the demon I was fighting was targeting those first before me. But then when the day/night cycle changed, I lost the ability to generate more corpses and then the battle turned against me fast.
Times where the cycle shifted mid battle are some of my most memorable moments playing this game. For better or for worse ha ha.
Favorite Mechanics
The next part of what makes this so special is that you have full customization of the skills your guardians have in combat. Like mentioned above, every ability has a night/day version of itself, but you also can mix and match the day/night versions with each other. Any day version of an ability a guardian has, can be attached to any night version of an ability that the guardian has. There is complete and total customization and control over what guardians loadouts become.
Pair this with all the 16 different kinds of guardians you can have (I'm pretty sure it’s 16) and it feels like there’s an infinite amount of ways you can mix and combine your team compositions. I could load into the dream overworld map with the exact same team as you, but we could have each of our guardians interact in completely separate ways because of the abilities we chose. I love it so much.
Where it Struggles
In my YouTube review of Thyria, I mentioned that I didn’t like the lack of story elements that were present and that I felt that way because of how it teased us with interesting lore elements when first starting a new game.
I wanted some sort of personal motivation as to why we were doing what we were doing. I wanted a reason to become invested in why I was saving people beyond the basic idea of “I help these people because it's what I do.”
I wanted something more than that. Maybe something where I was searching for lost information or a specific item. And I needed to help the people because they’d help me out after or because whatever was affecting them was related to what I was searching for. But all I ended up getting was an old man asking for help and the main character saying “sure. I got you.”
Even after defeating the first boss, it teased me with some more story but all it ended up being was “Oh, people are still sick. Guess I better keep doing everything I was already doing.”
It was a little disappointing. Especially when the core concept of the game is built on lore surrounding the world and character.
I enter the minds of people that sleep to defeat the demons and nightmares that plague them.
How cool does that sound?
And then other than the story, the only other area that really deserves a little more love is crafting. Making more guardians was simple. When you combine one element crystal with another, it makes a guardian. But everything else seems confusing. I was supposed to be able to make equipment that I could equip to my guardians but all I ended up getting was accessories. I had no idea what I was doing with those. But I think that’s partially due to how the tutorial was delivered. Something a little more in-depth for the crafting would be nice. Not that I really needed any of the crafting items. For the most part I made it through battles pretty darn fine.
Closing Remarks
All in all I’m pretty happy with Thyria. And I’m glad my initial impressions were wrong and that it’s got some nice solid foundations with its skills and combat. I still can’t get over how cool the day/night cycle is because of how the guardian abilities work. But unless some more happens with the story, I don’t really see myself picking up the game again.
Although if you’re reading this right now and know more about how the story plays out. Don’t tell me how it plays out, just let me know if its worth it to go back and play more xD
That’s all I have to say on my Thyria game review. So I now turn this back around to you!
Is there an indie game you enjoyed where your initial impressions lead you to believe you’d hate it? And if you’ve played Thyria, do you have a favorite guardian? Mine’s definitely Rayna.