The Thaumaturge Review

ign.com:

In a video game industry that often feels like it’s bloating into a monolithic, unsustainable beast propped up by annual staples and once every generation blockbusters, a small silver lining is that it’s still big enough for games like The Thaumaturge to exist. This mid-size RPG may not match the jaw-dropping scale of a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s still packed with atmosphere and good ideas that are mostly well executed. Aside from some buggy movement and odd voices, the turn-based combat is full of interesting strategic choices, and its great writing and story manage to punch up tried and true point-and-click clue finding and lore gathering.

You play as the eponymous Thaumaturge, a sort of Witcher/John Constantine mash up of a supernaturally gifted human and an extraplanar detective named Wiktor. His journey to uncover the circumstances of his father’s death often finds him plying his esoteric trade both in service of this goal, and as a distraction from it. The various intertwining stories of a Poland at the brink of revolution, as well as Wiktor discovering all the ways things have changed at home in his fifteen year absence, tie a compelling narrative knot across its 20 hour run time.

Though I found a lot of its main and side stories to be interesting, the slow pace does mean you’ll spend long stretches of time reading and listening before being given a chance to act. When you do, usually through dialogue options that can vary based on past choices or your own abilities, sometimes The Thaumaturge asked me to make assumptions about Wiktor’s life and old relationships that I had no context for. For instance, it regularly asks you to either be nice or a jerk to people who apparently know him, but doesn’t give you adequate reason to decide one way or the other. The voice acting can also be a bit shaky, with accents that are all over the place – more than one person that is supposed to be a native to the region sounded like I could have met them in a Wawa here