The Thaumaturge is an RPG where you collect monsters and use them to fight. This might sound like a certain other game, but this is set in Warsaw in 1906, the monsters are all horrific demons, and it heavily features the real-life fascinating weirdo Rasputin. So, there are a few differences, not to mention the bleak, melancholic tone and the fact that some of the people here are worse than the monsters.
If you’re curious, a Thaumaturge is someone who can sense emotions and intentions that have been imprinted onto items using the help of salutors – those demonic monsters. As you can imagine, this makes them an investigative force to be reckoned with, as all you have to do is touch a couple of things and everything you could possibly need to know presents itself. This is convenient, as it turns out Warsaw happens to be full of unrest, so there’s an awful lot of mysteries to be solved as desperation, greed, and betrayal are everywhere.
Enter Wictor Szulski who, at the beginning of the game, is looking for the famous faith healer Grigori Rasputin to help him regain control over his Thaumaturgy powers. Naturally, he is successful just in time for Wictor to have a dream about his father’s death and return to Warsaw. Rasputin, ever the mysterious weirdo, tags along and you find yourself in Warsaw in the early stages of a revolution.
The story and setting here is the highlight of the game. Rasputin in particular is a confounding presence, exactly what he wants is a complete mystery until late in the game and it’s the thing that I kept thinking about whilst I wasn’t playing. He’s portrayed well too, featuring all the weird cult-like behaviour you’d expect from a charismatic faith healer, whilst he himself is adamant he’s just helping people. He’d fit well into the right-wing manosphere these days. Outside of Rasputin, every character here has their own motives and feelings just waiting for you to find them imprinted onto a discarded onion or something, which is great – the writing can’t really be faulted, but sometimes its delivery falls a little flat.
There’s a bit at the end of the prologue that was a bit unclear and I had to go back over it in my head to piece it together, though perhaps I missed something. At one point I was also kidnapped, tied up, and interrogated by someone who turned out to be a childhood friend and the fact that Wictor just casually assisted this kidnapper in a fight afterwards and continued to associate with him is just flat out crazy.
The bigger issue with all the investigating is that, as you’re a Thaumaturge, you press R2 and Wictor clicks his fingers, giving you a trail to follow to the selected objective. You can’t fast travel within areas either, so you spend an awful lot of time running around following a trail of particles, pressing R2 again every few seconds because the trail constantly disappears for no good reason. It soon starts to feel less like investigating and more like fetch quests, but you’re fetching people’s secrets. I forgave this issue pretty quickly though due to the strength of the setting and writing though, especially once I started collecting salutors in the city.
Salutors latch onto people with flaws – Wictor’s flaw is Pride, for example, it drew his main salutor, the Upyr, to him when he was young. Thaumaturges can tame and use salutors, but for everyone else a salutor influences the environment around the person with the flaw. When Wictor finds one, he must discover who has the flaw so he can bring it out into the open, which allows him to fight and then capture the salutor. Wictor normally wouldn’t be able to manage this, but with the help of Rasputin he can master multiple salutors. From the Upyr, through Djinns and all the way to Golems, the designs for the many salutors are excellent, if not entirely unique.
They’re not just for investigating either, there’s a combat system in this game that is quite unique. Each round, Wictor and a salutor have an action, and you can switch between any salutors you’ve unlocked at will. Actions take a certain amount of time – a short action takes one round, whilst a long one takes two rounds. The same is true of each enemy and you can see what order they’ll be attacking and what they’ll be doing at the top of the screen. Your attacks have a variety of effects in addition to dealing damage, such as lowering an enemy’s focus, causing bleeding damage each round, and so on. Some attacks can slow down or even cancel an enemy’s planned attack if you’re lucky. If you remove all of an enemy’s focus, they’ll cancel their planned attack and be open to an extra powerful yet very quick attack as well.
On top of this, each of the salutors have their own attacks that vary wildly. The weird chicken one, the Lelek, is excellent at removing enemy focus whilst giving you some bonuses, but doesn’t really deal much damage to health, whilst the Djinn is rather powerful but its attacks have a cost as well. It’s a system that’s deep and unique enough that it takes a while for it to click, but once it does it’s very enjoyable and very adaptable, especially with the ridiculous amount of salutors you end up with.
It’s a little unbalanced though. If you do side stuff you’ll either find the story quests to be too easy when you return to them or sometimes bump into a side quest that’s a bit too hard for you. It’s also weirdly underutilised, to the point where you can go a few hours without a fight and then the game will come up with an absurd reason to make one happen, one so transparently an excuse that it isn’t even mentioned after the fight. Not a big problem, but a little immersion breaking.
Crucially for a game with a lot of talking, the voice acting is mostly good, with only a few slightly off-kilter moments. The music is fantastic too, hosts of melancholic violins and the combat music is still stuck in my head. It’s a pretty good looking game as well, though character’s face movements and expressions look a little too muppet-y sometimes, but the environments are detailed and the game runs well throughout.