The Thaumaturge – Rasputin Forever

It’s time to travel back to early nineteenth-century occupied Warsaw – specifically to a weird alternative version of our timeline where demonology is an actual thing. An interesting thing about The Thaumaturge is that it’s listed as an RPG. After playing it, a more apt genre description would be an ambitious point-and-click adventure, or maybe an avant-garde walking simulator if I’m going to be mean.

Rasputin is here
Being somewhat anchored in history there are a lot of historical figures to meet and interact with, and Rasputin is one of them. This is one of the few interesting parts of the story, a story thanks to its extremely uninteresting gameplay drags it down into the world of the lethargic. Now, the narrative is not completely uninteresting since I did finish The Thaumaturge after all. The setting is pretty cool, being set in a historical location that at the time was filled with strife – being an occupied city and all. This manifests itself in the tale of Warsaw, but how it goes about it is pretty dreary and overly verbose at times.

You play Wiktor Szulski, a Thaumaturge down on his luck, being sick from some kind of after-effect from harvesting demons. You meet Rasputin who soon after some initial quest-resolving helps you to get rid of this sickness. This is the start of a friendship with Rasputin that I think played out rather well for the duration of the game. You can, of course, deny or just outright mock his friendship since the game rests and prides itself on its C&C (choice & consequences). I picked comradeship over making an enemy with the Rasputin.

However, soon after this initial tutorial segment, the story sort of takes a break for hours and meanders along at a snail’s pace. It feels even slower than it needs to be because you have to run everywhere with a lot of back-and-forth included. See, as a Thaumaturge you are somewhat of a Pokemon collector of demons that all will give you different abilities. Many of these demons you pick up from doing sidequests that range from semi-interesting to absolute dullness. Lots of these missions are there to provide background lore to the general setting, the city of Warsaw, and your own personal history, but it never feels truly earned. While I do find the premise interesting, I never felt very invested in anything – thanks to the formerly mentioned braindead gameplay. This leads me to…

Clicking for demons
The gameplay consists of three fazes – abstract demon vs. human battles, snapping your fingers to show stuff to collect, and endless walking with nothing happening. Now, these things don’t sound that bad for an adventure game perhaps, but considering it’s branded as an RPG, I can’t help to feel a bit fooled. However, the truth is, even if we go by the genre description point & click adventure, the gameplay still isn’t that much to cheer for.

The combat is one of the strongest parts if we go by interactive elements. You fight in turn-based mode, and it works like a JRPG in which you stand still and look at each other menacing before slapping each other silly. You take turns picking between your human abilities and your demonic talents. Your human abilities are unsurprisingly mundane compared to the demon skills. Your demonic abilities all depend on what skills you upgraded through the XP gained, and what kind of demons you have collected. The system is fine for the most part, and there are a lot of different synergies to discover between the skills. However, it suffers from two things. It’s incredibly easy even the hardest difficulty setting. I think I died three times in the game, and it was all to the same enemy.

The second issue is that it’s highly abstracted going by how the story is told. You get shot, stabbed, and sliced, while you do the same to the enemy, and it’s never clear if these things actually happen or if it plays out on some other dimensional plane. It shouldn’t though, going by how it is presented to the player. Also being a Thaumaturge with access to demons is a rare thing. Most people you fight are just regular blokes, and it’s shown as being events that happen at that actual location the fights take place in, in the normal world. I don’t know what to make of it, because eating rifle round after rifle round is an oddity, when knives, guns, and bullets are deadly for everyone outside of the combat when it touches the story through cutscenes. I know you have to accept certain things when playing games, but this one confused me.

Another part of the gameplay is the endless walking in combination with the “snapping of the fingers” which makes up for the majority of the interactivity. You snap your fingers to send out a demon sonar signal to spot things that might help you in your investigations. You will be doing this a lot since every quest ends up in this way – scavenging locations for clues to put together. This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so simplified and wordy. Every little note has some kind of anecdote, and there is no way to sort out the nonsensical stuff. What makes this worse is that the conclusions are automatic. You never have to figure something out, because Wiktor will spell it out when you have collected enough clues. It makes this part, which makes for about eighty percent of The Thaumaturge, incredibly boring and an absolute drag, hence braindead activity. You need to do it too, as all the quests require it, and you need the XP you gain from finding random stuff – otherwise you will fail in a lot of late-game skill checks. 

It’s such a drain that it makes the overall narrative suffer. What happened in my case, was that I just clicked past it all eventually, requiring me to only read the conclusion. At large, stuff didn’t matter, because most texts outside the conclusions are just fluff. Thanks to the meandering nature of the story, with its poor mix of gameplay, I constantly forgot important plot points and characters. It made it very puzzling when it came to making the hard choices since I couldn’t remember who was who.

1905 Warsaw
The Thaumaturge looks great with its isometric graphics, and the visual style is realistic and gritty, which I like and enjoy. The animations are okay too. Most stuff looks good or at least passable, but they do come through as a bit stiff at times. The monsters are probably the best looking and have the best animation set. However, what got me since I know this isn’t true to real life, was how ugly all the women were. Not one single looker, so don’t go expecting The Witcher 3 female beauties in The Thaumaturge. 

The sound and music are adequate. But I did find the voice acting somewhat lacking, outside the main lead and Rasputin. The heavily accented people might be good for immersion, or I think that’s the thought at least, but I don’t think it works that well when you make a game where the characters are speaking English. There is just a lack of sincerity in the lines spoken. The game would have been better with professional English voice actors than hiring locals with heavily accented English, considering how much dialogue there is in the game to listen to.

In conclusion
The Thaumaturge isn’t entirely bad, the setting is interesting, and the story has its moments. The C&C (choice & consequence) is expansive, as it seems there exist a lot of different variables and outcomes for quests. However, I’m not sure I can recommend it. It’s not really an RPG, it’s a very fancy adventure game with gameplay that quickly starts to drag thanks to its repetitive nature. It could have been something else if it didn’t take the CYOA (choose your own adventure) so close to its heart – just like Colony Ship and Disco Elysium. I don’t like being tricked into playing RPGs when they are clearly not. Devs, please stop that.

Thanks for reading.

/Thomas