The Thaumaturge review
The year is 1905. Wiktor Szulski sits on a train in Transcaucasia, now the country of Georgia. Pale and sickly, sweat dripping down the side of his face, he murmurs an apology to a ghostly figure across from him—a hovering skull draped in the cloak of an old nobleman, sword at its side and cane in its hand. Upyr is Wiktor's closest friend and confidante, a «salutor» that attached itself to him when he was young.
What is it? A singleplayer RPG set in 1905 Warsaw, with a dedicated eye to history and some fun spooky friends
Expect to pay $34.99 / £29.50
Developer Fool’s Theory
Publisher 11bit Studios
Reviewed on Windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? Nope
Steam Deck Unverified
Link Official site
Wiktor is a thaumaturge, a magician that can trap and command these salutors through the flaws they're attracted to. He's also desperately sick, on the verge of madness, and losing his connection to Upyr. His journey to heal himself, regain his power, and discover its limits will take him from the edges of the tsar's reign to his home city of Warsaw in Congress Poland, under the long arm of the Russian Empire. This history is both the basis for The Thaumaturge's story and the reason it unexpectedly bowled me over.
When Wiktor arrives in Warsaw, the tsar has just arrived, and it becomes clear that the city Wiktor has returned to is not the one he left. The tumult of this setting is a richly compelling backdrop for a story combining magic lineages, urban politics, and the oppressive hand of empire, though The Thaumaturge is occasionally weighed down by the RPG conceits it's beholden to, which end up feeling like more of a distraction than an enhancement.
Once I arrived in Warsaw I ran into fairly regular texture pop-in when loading maps, but otherwise my sojourns were technically seamless. The same unfortunately can’t be said for Wiktor’s neighborhood reputation, as he seems to have pissed off every asshole with a descriptor for a name
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