While I didn’t have high hopes for The Thaumaturge, it seemed potentially interesting. The setting, the time period, the topics and how mystical dark fantasy story could be integrated in all of that was promising. And the mix of story driven adventuring with turn based battles had a lot of cool ideas about them. But, unfortunately, the end result is quite underwhelming for the most part and outright bad in a few spots.
As mentioned, the concept is strong. 1905, Warsaw under Russian Empire control, rise of the Rasputin cult presented on the edge of history and dark fantasy. With everything being dramatic and also veiled in the mysticism of “thaumaturgy” and people who practice this magic. As a result you get a cool mix of historic drama, Witcher-like demon hunting and Sherlock Holmes-like case solving. It’s all played from the top down perspective, controlled similarly to a point and click adventure or RPG in the vein of classic Infinity Engine titles or the far more recent Disco Elysium.
You spend most of the time running around huge maps that represent different districts of Warsaw, finding people to talk to, items and collectibles. You’re also constantly clicking the right mouse to reveal the elements in the locations that have strong emotional traces that are usually tied to either minor collectible quests or to main or side quests, where they provide you with additional information and alternative means of dealing with obstacles, usually in the form of unlocking new dialogue options. To give the developers credit – they put quite a lot of big and small variations in their quests that lead to unique consequences and callbacks later on. Which mostly works fine, with only some “seams” being quite obvious.
Sadly, in practice all of this is quite uninteresting. For example, the game often provides you the connections and conclusions for finding different items and traces and it really tries to emulate an almost investigation/detective game feel. But everything is so streamlined and automatic, that it’s faster and sometimes outright more beneficial, to just click past all of that until the game gives you a new trail to follow. For one, despite the overwhelming amount of the conclusions and items, it always boils down to 1-3 simple choices they unlock. For two, even then the game gives you a name or an address to follow there’s nothing on the map to use this information on, so you still have to follow the objective marker instead of using your head. And for three, clue items and collectibles simply do not exist until the game brings them into existence somewhere in their gigantic maps, leading to pure pixel hunting. The more I played, the more similarities I saw to Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One, a game I worked on. One that, I think, turned out quite well, but also one that could be improved in a number of ways. Yet everything The Thaumaturge borrows, it does much worse…
At least the combat seems very promising in the beginning. The idea here is that of turn based combat where each action has a certain time for activation and may have additional effects of delaying or outright cancelling turns for the target. There are no items, no equipment and health is always reset to full at the start of the fight, so everything is always decided via smart usage of said actions. And as you get stronger and get more salutors, your abilities increase, leading to different strategies for battle – focusing on damage over time, making enemies scared, dealing pure damage, varying types of actions or building combos. Combat system is pretty cool on its own, but a lot of the time battles seem to exist just to “spice up the story”. And in those cases, combat is rather tedious, while the only narrative reasoning for it is that some random people come up to you and say that they don’t like your face.
Biggest disappointment, however, is the story. For how cool the premise is, for how interesting the setting is, the resulting tale is just a messy “nothing” in the end. It does have highlights and better written characters, some moments and scenes are genuinely well delivered. It’s just that most of the time you go through the game, both gameplay-wise and story-wise, on complete auto-pilot and it’s hard to care about what’s going on. It does look nice and the music is quite pleasant. At the same time, however, the usage of Unreal Engine 5 here is quite unrefined and even ignoring that, the game can be quite buggy. I got stuck a few times, requiring a reload and crashes are also a possibility.
While there’s nothing outright bad with The Thaumaturge, there’s very little genuinely good about it either. Almost every cool idea that the game has, remains undeveloped or taken in a direction that feels unsatisfying. While the ending of the story is presented as if there could be a sequel, I just don’t see why anyone would want it. That said, a new take on this idea could be interesting – one that could be more refined, even if that would require the game to be slightly less ambitious.