The Thaumaturge

This game was such a breath of fresh air. A great plot, told through excellent writing, with striking visual style and some really cool game mechanics. I want to specially congratulate whoever was involved in making the UI for this game, because it is one of the most fluid and helpful I've ever seen. The combat system shows you the projected impact of your actions, including things like "ok if i cast this spell that does X to Y damage, theres a Z% chance of it killing the enemy", and so many more small touches that let me focus on planning my moves, rather than evaluating possibilities, without any clutter. The game also always lets you change your loadout before starting fights. In addition, the writing is also great, especially for the object descriptions, I really liked the flavour they bring to the story. While the gameplay part of it is just "click all the things then talk to everyone", if you do stop to read things you will get a much more complete picture of the characters (duh), without being a Kojima lore dump menu. I felt like the choices I made were relevant to the story, and I could probably squeeze two, maybe three, more playthroughs if I was a "re-play" kind of person. I did try some of the endings that were available given my choices by loading a save near a important choice, and yeah, they give you the freedom to contradict your character, there is clearly one correct ending for my playthrough, but I think there are at least two "good" (in quality) endings, but the others also make sense. It does feel like the developers made full and well-chosen use of their available resources. It is a game with three cool ideas, that clearly is built to deliver those ideas as clearly and entertainingly as possible. But it does feel like the game deserved a litttttle bit more budget: Some animations are rather janky, especially on the fat characters. Some cutscenes are clearly building up to some impactful moment and then there's a time skip that leaves you blue (especially the ones regarding catching Salutors, it feels like the character doesn't really "do" anything to them to tame them). Some dialogue trees rejoin rather messily, especially towards the end of the game. The progression is very flat, there really isn't much difference your stat tree will make except at the very start and end of the game. The music is competent, but not particularly memorable or impactful. While the combat music is good and never became grating, it was clearly repetitive since there is just 1 track for the whole 30 hour game. (that, to be fair, is composed mostly of non-combat time) Performance wise, my computer is overbuilt for this game, managing over 100 FPS for most of it running at 4K, with only a few spots in the end game causing it to dip below 60, and even then it was in the high 40s which is way more than enough for this kind of game. I did binge it, and the game becomes unstable after about 8h of continuous play and crashed a couple times, but if you have a bit more of a life than me, you'll be fine. If you are looking for a purchase recommendation: Hell yes, go for it. Even if it doesn't quite sound like your thing as was the case for me. That said, this is the kind of game that could really use a Definitive Edition type deal to close some of the loose ends I mentioned, if that is financially viable for the studio: The final product is unequivocally great, but I can see the scars of the things they left out. 9/10!