The Thaumaturge Review
In the game The Thaumaturge you will find yourself in the role of Wiktor Szulski, a man who was shunned by his own father and left to wander Europe by himself. Wiktor is not your average person, but a Thaumaturge, an individual with the power to tame beings called Salutors. Salutors thrive on people’s “Flaw(s)”. These flaws can be broken into four different categories: Heart, Word, Mind, and Deed. Taming a Salutor is no easy task and can cause great strain upon a Thaumaturge, but if you can tame them they become allies that can affect the world around you.
For most of the game you will be moving around different areas of 1905’s Warsaw, Poland taking on plenty of side quests and interacting with notes, newspapers, books, and people’s personal items. There is a mechanism in the game where you can cast out a “search field”, in the game it sounds like a snap and red dust, only visible to you, shoots out. The red dust will lead you to objectives or highlight items that you can interact with. If you find enough items with a common link you’ll be able to find new side quests or unlock new dialogue options when interacting with characters. To be honest, I spammed this button from start to finish to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. I advise all who play this game to do the same, the reason is that you gain a little bit of experience with each thing you interact with (well the first time you interact with it).
You’re going to interact with quite the cast of characters in this game, and many of your dialogue choices are going to affect how your story will end as well as your relationships with those characters. Your main flaw, Pride, is also going to affect the world around you, and certain paths will be closed to you if your Pride is too high or too low. I’d like to think that my Pride level was somewhere in between, so I played it safe. I personally don’t think I would feel comfortable choosing the Pride option every time, but I’m sure there are those gamers out there that will take multiple runs at this game and will go the ALL PRIDE and the NO PRIDE paths.
There is also quite a bit of combat in this game, and there is more combat if you go on the Pride path. You’ll find that the combat is turn-based, and that certain actions will take longer than other actions. There is a timeline at the top of the screen that will show you when actions will be taking place. The more Salutors you have at your disposal, the more havoc you can cause during combat. The reason I say that is because certain enemies have attributes that make them more difficult to kill, however if you have the Salutor that affects that attribute you can make your life that much easier.
I put some serious time into this game, and although there were a couple of times where emotionally I had to struggle through a decision, I enjoyed the game. There was a strange visual bug that crept up a couple of times when I was inside buildings, but a quick V-Sync enabled fixed the issue. If you do pick up this game you’re going to find a certain historical figure that you’ll have to interact with throughout the game. You’ll have to interact with them more often if you try to collect all the Salutors, but I feel like I should leave who they are as a surprise for those on the fence. Perhaps doing so will get you to pick up the game.