‘Thysiastery’ Teaches Valuable Skills While Dungeon Crawling

Thysiastery lets party members teach each other skills as they explore dungeons, letting you specialize in useful (or catastrophic) ways.

DIRGA’s Thysiastery is a stylish refinement of well-trodden paths, streamlining the classic party-based dungeon crawler into a sleek, stunning experience that not only reinforces the basics but manages to tweaks a couple of core tenets of the genre to keep things fresh.

From what I’ve seen of the game so far, it is absolutely stunning. It oozes style with its restricted, low-rez visuals and colour-capped palette (which can be changed between 12 very cool options in the settings). Add to this that the potential party-members strafe between a couple of moody art-styles while the dungeon’s denizens are (perhaps-expectedly) bizarre.

Defeating those denizens, though; that’s where it all gets quite interesting. Combat itself is quite simple, with a turn-order system weighted by character stats. You’ve got your standard health juice and ability juice, so nothing too out of the ordinary.

However, Thysiastery‘s killer feature is how you pass skills and roles around your party. Put simply, you can get any team member to teach one of their moves to another character. It takes a while for them to teach it, but beyond the time required for them to educate another there’s no restrictions. This guy isn’t too weak, or not magical enough — they can learn it.

This means that if you want to, you can teach everybody fire spells (or do as I did and teach every member of your party healing spells). This might sound a little bit overpowered, but the resistant/weakness system that enemies have toward different element types is so powerful that you can effectively optimise yourself into a corner if you push too hard in one direction. If the enemies in that floor are not only resistant to lightning magic, but actually heal from it, then spreading Jolt around your entire party is going to make that floor feel incredibly unfair.

This kind of thing makes an incredible amount of sense and it’s done in such a clean, matter of fact way that it makes me wonder why wasn’t this done before? The answer is that it probably has been done, but maybe it hasn’t been done in this exact way. For instance, you start with an incredibly limited team. However you can discover new characters chained up or enslaved throughout the dungeon, add them to your team, and they bring the random assortment of skills they’ve learned into the mix. This means that if you do lose a party member then they can have passed on their important skills before dying, and it’s not quite as fatal a blow as it is in traditional dungeon crawlers.

It also means that you’ll be able to finish Thysiastery‘s dungeon with a group of different characters than you started with, but with some of them having skills that were passed on through consecutive characters. That, for me, is unbelievably cool. I’ve always loved games where abilities can be taught and transferred (Vandal Hearts II‘s weapon skills being transferrable is one of my favourite design choices ever), and this game brings that meta-strategic layer in as a core design choice.

Thysiastery is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can add it to your Steam Wishlist.

About The Author

Dann Sullivan

After almost a decade of selling games, Dann decided to try his hand at writing about them instead. A few years in and he is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Big Boss Battle, where he and his team cover games of all shapes and sizes. When not in the role, he can often be found seeking out small, memorable game experiences.