I streamed this game for this review. The link will be below.
Theia: The Crimson Eclipse will hit you right out of the gate with some beautiful art. The game has superb presentation, but unfortunately that nice coat of paint is hiding some of the deeper problems.
It's unfortunate that the game makes use of a lot of ripped assets. It unfortunately brings into question how much of the beautiful coat of paint is the hard work of the developer of this game and how much of the hard work was done by someone else. Though I don't have a qualm with folks using ripped assets (so long as the game is free and they make that clear) it does unfortunately greatly harm the perception of the game.
As for the game itself, it lacks information to inform players what to do. For example, the very first game play section, I didn't know what to do because apparently I interacted with the story progression thing in the wrong spot, leading me to believe that was not the right thing to do.
Once the obligatory JRPG lore dump came on screen things really started to fall apart. It was far too long winded with way too many unpronounceable names. The names of people and places in this feel like a joke sometimes. The nice thing is that it can be skipped and for those of whom who play this game I highly recommend skipping this lore dump because it doesn't serve much purpose to the game itself. It could easily be summarized to a few lines, but instead it was needlessly long winded. The reason I chose to read the lore dump (despite not wanting to) is that this was for a review, and I worried that by skipping it, there is the potential of missing something important.
From there, things fall apart further with inconsistent game rules and just poorly thought out levels.
After waking up in a grassy area a small cliff impedes you from jumping down, despite our main protagonist displaying the ability to jump earlier in the game. An outcropping the player can pass under is the actual solution, but just like the interactable object at the start of the game, there really is no indication you can go under it. In this 2D space, it just looks like a cliff face.
The rules the game establishes for itself are quickly broken and only utilized when the game feels ready to use those rules.
I didn't get far into this game as I ran out of time to give it on my stream, but overall I was beginning to lose my patience as cracks in the design began to show slowly over that course of play time, I can only imagine how things might get worse were I to play longer.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.