The Thaumaturge

An interestingly structured game with turn-based combat and card game elements. A very heavy emphasis on RPG aspects, where choices have a real impact on the course of events and endings, which I think is great. The combat itself is just a matter of practice and understanding the individual salutors. If this were a movie, every school would take their students to see it. The depiction of interwar Warsaw from the perspective of a thaumaturge is interesting and unique. The game has a few glitches and crashes, but it is definitely worth playing.

Great game. I'll only talk about the SMALL things I disliked FIRST. LOVED the game. Fast Travel - in some places there aren't enough. I know it's stage coaches and you're taxi'd to other maps but the issue is there could be a few posts in convenient places. It took me 27 hours to finish the game and I'd say 3 of that was walking. Yes, I understand what I'm saying, I did a lot of circling around and switching quests so some of it is my fault. Quests - The quests should be organized by location. I'd like to know if I pick up a bunch of quests in different districts that it's organized by district so I can finish them all out in one place and move to the next. I got lost (in the good sense) in the game and picked up about 10 quests and spent an hour running to different districts, mix this with limited fast travel in places and it became annoying by mid game. Difficulty Spike - I played on Balanced at the start of my first playthrough. I enjoyed it, until the last fight with a specific person. I didn't understand the instructions at first (obviously my fault.) Then when I did understand the instructions, I felt like the last group of 4 enemies was TOO hard for "balanced" difficulty. I hadn't died one time on it in the game and I spent 4 hours on the final boss fight. I can't spoil it but essentially I had up to about 8 debuffs at a time and one made it so I took DOUBLE focus damage, DOUBLE damage under half health, I'd lose 1 hp based off of how much Focus I lost, I'd take DOUBLE the time to do 1 action above half health. All this made me lose time on this particular boss (I can't say who the boss is cuz I'm assuming there's a few final bosses, I'm currently on my second playthrough.) It would be nice to get a notification that this is the FINAL encounter of the entire game. This way, I can feel confident in "letting the debuffs go." I used that particular wording on purpose. If you've been there, you know it and once you get there, you'll understand it. Now for the Positive things I loved. Quests (Positive.) - Quests gave me the time I needed in the world. It's a fantastic story and the game itself was so well written. There's different categories Landmark, investigations and fashion. The fashion and Landmarks are the easiest, you just go there and interact with stuff. Investigations are a bit more involved, there's one investigation that needs you to start it in act 1 and it finishes in act 2, This was the ONLY quest I was slightly confused about and had to google. The game marks quests as "disappearing soon" and it gave me anxiety so I just had to google some stuff to put my mind at ease. I usually do 1 blind playthrough for achievements then a deep dive second playthrough. Characters and NPCs - The Salutors were absolutely amazing. Every one of them were not only unique but had a very interesting playstyle. Most main characters had unique faces including the main character and Samira. I LOVE the unique faces, they don't stand out in the sense that they look like they belong in that time period and they're not SO unique that every other face in the a crowd of people is bland comparatively. This being said, there were some NPC faces reused which is fine but you'll notice it pretty early on. Gameplay and RPG elements - It's not exactly the deepest combat system but it feels correct in the context of the game. You eventually get a gun and all hell breaks loose with enemies using muskets and officers wielding sabers. There's 8 Salutors (demons) You start with none and get into a few fist fights to introduce the RPG time line based battle and the salutor and thaumaturge "school" leveling. Once you figure that out a miracle is performed and you get your first Salutor. You almost immediately get a second one, the others take a bit of time but by this time you have all your 1st level attacks. It makes you WANT to seek out more Salutors and do side missions to get a deeper combat system. As it is, looks like enemies level with your Salutors, mid to end game fights aren't long but they require you to either "break" an enemy or use a specific salutor school and level to break them automatically. RPG choices - I fed my pride and by the end of the game, I was no longer making decisions. I LOVED that. I was focused on getting not just achievements but acquiring all of the salutors. I made a LOT of bad decisions. I'm a goody-two-shoes in games, can't find myself taking the evil or mean route. This game framed it as neither. it framed it as Ambition, a lust for power. The consequences were always JUST out of reach. You weren't told your decision was going to make the situation worse or that you killed a character because of your choices. You make a choice and the consequences happen minutes and sometimes hours later. There was never a character that told you your decision was a life or death situation, it just happened. One example, of rippling consequences, I asked someone to help me in a fight. We were all arrested, they were killed in an interrogation and it gave other characters the caution to not be stupid at the end of the game. I wish more games were written like this. Final Thoughts - This is such a unique game premise, while it does have super traditional RPG elements, it doesn't feel like an RPG. It feels more like a Sherlock Holmes type of investigation game, You can't exactly get things wrong unless if you literally skip some parts of the game but a lot of it will be investigation and fist fighting. I absolutely love this game and I'm already on my second playthrough. All the negative stuff really is small in comparison to how robust the game is and the amount of choices and consequences. I need more games in this universe. More Characters, another Thaumaturge. Maybe the protagonists father in his earlier years. Maybe family secrets that were lost in this game. Look I don't care, just give me another game.