The Thaumaturge

I must say I am surprised this game doesn't get more attention, because while it's not perfect, it's 100% one of the better ones. I will start by mentioning I got this at a pretty big sale (I got it for 13,99€) so my review and evaluation of this game are given that price. Strengths: 1. World building imo is the strongest aspect of this game, but be warned, it does depend on actually doing most of the urban secrets and sides and reading the associated documents, I would also recommend playing with the polish voice acting and maybe even some additional bg music (I left the Warsaw Village band) as the soundtrack can sometimes fall short (more of that later). With these "warnings" out of the way: . The setting is already among the more unique, a very organic insertion of the supernatural in 1905 rWarsaw. The game doesn't shy away from integrating this grim reality and foreshadowing and even more of its real future and our past. I was constantly amazed by how well our protagonist's story got integrated in real events. . While the world is not as directly interactable as other similar in mechanics games, it never feels empty. The amount of carefully chosen details as you walk around the env, from the citizen behaviours to the circulating tram, the changes from different times of the day and the optional letters, newspapers and other documents to read, etc.... it actually manages to feel among one of the most alive worlds in video games i have experienced. . The thaumaturge interaction with the world itself, sensing leftover feeling from the world around and it is so well done and integrated in the world. It ads so much more complexity and nuance to the chracters and the world itself. I very rarely see such an in depth exploration of characters (but again, it does require actually paying attention and reading everything). . The observations, with sketches that you get to read do not feel boring or excessive, they are that well written and relevant to understanding the world. . The urban secrets (with associated photos and sketches) I found to be a clever way to round and soften this grim setting with simple joys people may have had in those times. They really brought a smile to my face. . The collectable music was very nice, wish there was a little more. 2. I liked the combat (it's not perfect, more later) and the entire salutor/thaumaturgy system. Salutors also had very nice combat animations. 3. The entire art direction is very good, goes hand in hand with the genius wolrd building. 4. With all of the above mentioned, it's obvious the story is also very good. Both main and sides are for the most part nicely written and done and Wiktor's pride system offers a more unique role playing approach versus the good/neutral/evil/lawful/chaotic classics in conversations and choices. No matter which choices you make, it never feels out of character and overall place Wiktor in a very neutral position, around which you can oscillate, but ultimately there is no ultimate good or bad approach. Maybe for some this would be a minus, it will make them feel constrained, but at the end of the day you play Wiktor much like in Witcher you play Geralt and similarly, while your choices matter either for main or side endings, you are still that chracter (with either more or less ass*ole tendencies). 5. I found myself liking all major chracters, even the "bad" ones, because as a natural conclusion from above, they were all flashed out and interesting, very human. 6. (Polish) Voice acting was so good. Weaknesses 1. Pet peeve: i loved the urban secrets, but the waiting for the right hour was overused for something that is not main or side.... 2. Combat felt repetitive by the end, due also to lack of enemy trait variations and attacks. Pretty soon there were some clealry right combos and upgrades. Perhaps I would have experimented more with that despite that if changing upgrades wouldn't have been so tedious.... a system that saves a few configs that youn can roate around would have been so much better and generally the upgrades felt unfinished and dissproportionate to number of skills. Would have loved if maybe you could also choose different base skills along with what i said before (there were a lot 1lvl ones and even by doing the sides and getting optinal salutors you don't get a lot of 2nd lvl or 3rd lvl options), etc.... So yeah POTENTIAL and if you plain just main and a few sides, you probably good to go.... but for me by the end i started to see the way it lacks. 3. Some weird visual artefacts here and there in animations. 4. Performance.... a trip (CachyOS, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8-Core Processor, RAM 30GB). Startup performace tanked the more saves I had (? i assume that's the cause) the menu was barely functioning on startup by the end (it always righted itself if i exited back to it) and I had quite a lot of complete freezes (it never crashed and like the menu, it got back on track if i waited some). Played with max graphics setting btw. 5. With so much detail during... the ending felt rushed. Not bad and i don't mind not having perfect endings (wouldn't have fit teh setting anyways), but just very short. Both the final scene for the coterie ending version i got and the ending slides felt devoid of the details i have gotten spoiled with. 6. The barber and dress system was very meh. Collected eveything, but outfits ( aside from a story related one ) where pretty much just different chromas and changing hair in fixed locations for a game as short as this does not bring that mucch value when the options are nothing that wild or funny. Overall, I think it's a MUST PLAY, but full price would have been too much for me. One playthrough with all optional stuff done is under 30 hours (time also spent just vibing with it and reading everything). I am aware you could play a few more hours for some different choices using some key saves, but if you eliminate most optional stuff and reading that still does not add that much more and combat and skill system is not developed enough to have what I consider actual "builds" so not that much replay value I would say.