The Thaumaturge
Review
A fun, narrative-driven turn-based RPG with a few devilishly-clever tricks and turns...
by Dan Lenois
reviewed on PC
Home sweet home...
The player takes on the role of Wiktor Szulski, a lone detective returning to his hometown of Warsaw after having spent several years roaming abroad. Your supernatural abilities have allowed you to take control over a spectral familiar, and as your power slowly grows, your command over the underworld and of occult magic likewise surges.
Using both your wits and unorthodox abilities, you make your way through an extensive and elaborate series of intertwined mysteries. The narrative here isn't exactly complex. However, largely thanks to the well-crafted dialogue and superb voice acting, even the more tedious moments are still more than interesting enough to keep the player engaged through to the end.
Getting your bearings...
The gameplay formula largely revolves around a few core mechanics, which are rotated out in order consistently enough that you rarely get fully bored with one before your attention is smoothly diverted toward something far more interesting. The player will need to familiarize themselves with the layout of the somewhat open world.
The Thaumaturge is not inherently an open-world game, but its story structure does allow players to occasionally abandon the main quest line in favor of going off the beaten path every now and then, usually to chase down a specific side quest or two. Certain side quests are even hidden, and only reveal themselves when the player uses their investigative and supernatural skills in order to connect the dots.
The game is afoot...
Investigations are another core element of what makes this game tick. The problem is that mechanically, they're neither very complex nor particularly interesting, outside of the cinematic cutscenes they contain. Performing an investigation almost always consists of running back and forth around a specific room and clicking on a handful of highlighted objects that reveal themselves as soon as you pass nearby.
You don't even have to connect the dots yourself. The game will do all of that for you automatically once you have found these objects. An investigation is, in actuality, little more than a real-life easter egg hunt. You collect the clues, then collect your reward. No assembly required.
Facing your fears...
Combat scenarios are one area where The Thaumaturge really shines. Everything, from the combat animations, the variety of the attacks themselves, the incorporation of your spectral familiar as an indirect combatant, and even the unorthodox boss battles, are a joy to play through.
While the developers do explicitly allow you to speed up and potentially skip attack animations, I was more than happy to let everything play out at normal speed. Watching that final blow or shot take its toll on my enemies, or the stress of running the numbers in my head to determine which was the best move for me at any given time, made what could have been a very generic showdown into something really special.
A hindered performance...
Even weeks after the initial release, there remain a number of extremely-odd graphical and performance bugs and glitches throughout the campaign. One clear-cut example of this is a very strange graphical bug evidenced throughout most of the in-game rendered cutscenes.
Pop-in is an issue that is sometimes known to happen in a lot of games, especially at the beginning of a cutscene or at the start of the gameplay, where models, textures, and other assets are still loading in, and they appear to suddenly pop into existence after the player is already beholding the gameplay or cutscene in question.
However here in The Thaumaturge, this doesn't just happen at the start of a cutscene, but instead consistently occurs every time the camera cuts to a new shot, even within the same cutscene, almost as if the models here are rendered per shot, rather than per scene. It's very annoying to see this pop-in like 20-30 times over the course of any prolonged cutscene with a normal amount of back and forth hard camera cuts between characters. Is this kind of issue game-breaking? Of course not. But when you've just had to watch the ninth consecutive instance of pop-in in a single cutscene, it becomes downright irritating.
Overall:
The Thaumaturge is a very strange title, both intentionally and sometimes unintentionally as well. On the surface level, it's a dark, narrative-driven game filled with morally-ambiguous choices which will oftentimes influence specific events in the story.
However, when you scratch a bit deeper, you end up finding yourself playing a rather absurd game of Pokémon, where you run around encountering powerful entities in challenging combat scenarios, only to then effectively enslave them for the explicit purpose of using them to fight other powerful monsters as you progress through the campaign. However, if you accept the fact that this game isn't quite as serious in tone as it presents itself in its marketing material, then you'll probably end up having a fairly good time throughout.
7.5
fun score
Pros
Rich story, good VA, fun combat scenarios
Cons
Boringly simplistic investigation mechanics, odd performance issues
