The Thaumaturge (PS5) Review – A Promising RPG Practice Run

In 2022, CD Projekt Red announced a remake of the first entry in The Witcher franchise was in the works at developer Fool’s Theory, to which many fans replied, “Who the heck are Fool’s Theory?” The Polish developer has actually been around for a while. They made the interesting sandbox cRPG Seven: The Days Long Gone, although that happened seven years ago. Since then, they have mostly supported other big projects like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Silent Hill 2.

Earlier in 2024, Fool’s Theory finally released a new title called The Thaumaturge, an isometric RPG set in early-20th-century Warsaw. The game has now made the jump from PC to current-gen consoles. Does The Thaumaturge prove Fool’s Theory is ready to tackle Geralt’s debut? Or is this history-based RPG better left forgotten? Time to see if this one’s got the magic.

The Thaumaturge primarily takes place in and around Warsaw in the year 1905, which was certainly a heady time for the city. The future capital of Poland was on the western frontier of a crumbling Russian Empire, socialist and nationalist movements were gaining strength, and various competing ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic groups were vying for influence. Fool’s Theory further complicates things by adding a dash of magic to this powder keg.

Players take on the role of Wiktor Szulski, a sort of dark magician known as a “thaumaturge,” which this game depicts as being relatively common in early-20th-century Polish society (enough so that most of the regular folk you meet know what a thaumaturge is). Wiktor draws his power from “salutors,” creepy folklore-inspired entities only visible to thaumaturges that attach to specific personality flaws in people. Wiktor uses the power of these salutors to peer into people’s minds and ultimately control them, although the power comes at a price, as mastering a salutor means taking on the flaw they’re attracted to.

The Thaumaturge opens with Wiktor struggling to control his salutor until he gets some help from an oddly charismatic backwoods mystic named… Rasputin. Ruh oh. Just as Wiktor strikes up an unsteady alliance with Rah-Rah-Rasputin, he’s called back to Warsaw for the first time in years to attend the funeral of his father, who was also a thaumaturge. Despite not being on the best terms with his dad prior to his death, Wiktor inherits his powerful Black Grimoire, or a least he’s supposed to, as the book has gone missing.

Searching for your rightful inheritance forms the main spine of The Thaumaturge’s story, but you’ll find yourself pulled in a number of different directions along the way. Rasputin has followed you to Warsaw and is brewing up some sort of devious plot, revolutionaries are eager to recruit you to their side, other thaumaturges want to establish a new coterie, your sister is trying to carry on your father’s business, and to top it all off, somebody has decided to send a golem after your family. Despite throwing a lot at you, The Thaumaturge rarely feels overwhelming or confusing, except perhaps right at the end when the story sprints to its conclusion a bit too fast, but even then, most should keep their footing without too much trouble. The rock-solid core of the story is Wiktor himself, who’s a bit more reserved than most modern gaming protagonists but generally likable, interesting, and consistently portrayed.

Wiktor’s core flaw is pride, and The Thaumaturge lets you push and pull his personality (within limits), making him either a polite and conscientious protagonist or a bit of a pompous ass. Either way, his essential nature remains the same and rarely if ever did one of his responses during a conversation strike me as off. Beyond tinkering with Wiktor’s personality, the game provides many opportunities to make decisions that meaningfully change the course of your story, leading to one of a dozen-or-so different endings. There’s also plenty of substantial side content, much of it as compelling as the game’s core missions and often rewarding you significantly with things like new salutors or buffs.

Again, there was ample opportunity for such a multilayered story set in such a specific point in history to come off as dry or alienating, but Fool’s Theory does a fantastic job of creating an absorbing yet approachable world that changes in subtle ways as you play and rewards you for straying off the beaten path (I love how the game gives you experience for nearly everything you do – every note you read, landmark you discover, clue you find, etc.) The Thaumaturge quickly set up shop in my head and didn’t vacate the premises until the credits rolled.

So, The Thaumaturge weaves a fine story, but how does it play? Most of the game’s quests follow a similar pattern — some aspect of Warsaw society is being unsettled by a wild salutor and you have to find the person with a flaw they’ve attached themselves to. This involves bopping around various sections of the city, asking folks questions, and doing a bit of detective work. At certain points, you’ll make use of Wiktor’s special thaumaturge perception, which lights up various objects that carry “traces” left behind by key characters. Wiktor can sense what a person was feeling or thinking when interacting with an object, but he doesn’t always immediately know who that person was. Interact with several traces and they’ll connect to create a coherent vision of who was previously in the area you’re investigating and what they did there. This, in turn, will open up new dialogue options or perhaps an “Ah-ha!” moment that will lead to the next step of the quest.

To be honest, The Thaumaturge’s detective gameplay isn’t particularly complex. You just interact with the spots in the area and the game links everything together for you with no real logic required. That said, I still enjoyed unraveling the world of The Thaumaturge, thanks to the game’s solid writing. The combined traces often reveal rather unexpected things about characters and the game’s quests present you with a wide array of settings and scenarios – you’ll find yourself doing things like attending a seance at a fancy soiree, going on a bar crawl through Warsaw’s underbelly, or even tracking down a serial killer.

These varied settings are brought to life via visuals that are decent enough, if not exactly mind-blowing. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5 and looks quite nice when exploring the overworld, with lots of fine detail, moody lighting, and little touches like reflective puddles bringing scenes to life. Unfortunately, the game’s character models and cutscenes are hit-and-miss – Wiktor cuts a fairly dashing figure, but most NPCs look like refugees from the PS3. Frequent visual glitches hurt immersion at times, although, thankfully, I never encountered any serious gameplay-affecting bugs or crashes. The PS5 version of The Thaumaturge offers visual details comparable to the PC and a fairly sharp image, and while performance is solid most of the time you’re actually playing, bad stuttering following loading screens and fast travel contribute to the overall feeling that the game could use a bit more polish.

And yes, The Thaumaturge does have combat, although it’s fairly limited. Battles are turn-based affairs with the player choosing actions for Wiktor and one salutor at a time, which you can quickly switch between without consuming a turn. A basic Active-Time-Battle-like system is in place to determine turn order and combat revolves around depleting enemies’ focus in order to launch powerful attacks and using specific salutor abilities to exploit enemy weaknesses.

And that’s about all there is to it. There’s no inventory, no real way to alter your character build aside from assigning buffs to some of your attacks, and damage and effects don’t carry on from battle to battle — win, and you’re completely healed. There’s not even a level system per se, with XP simply unlocking points for a skill tree. Perhaps most limiting, the only thing you fight in the game are an endless array of regular folks (soldiers, gangsters, thugs, etc.) wielding blunt instruments and maybe the occasional gun. Even the game’s scattered “boss fights” against a wild salutor just consist of the beastie sitting in the background while a bunch of thugs are summoned to do their fighting for them. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t say combat in The Thaumaturge is bad, but it’s just odd that a game about demon-powered magicians sticks exclusively to such mundane enemies. Combat works well enough, but it’s unquestionably the weakest part of what is, overall, a fairly compelling package.

Thankfully, you won’t get too tired of The Thaumaturge’s combat, or really any part of the game, as it doesn’t overstay its welcome. A focused player can wrap up the game’s core campaign in around a dozen hours, although those looking to clean up as much of the game’s side content as possible could take closer to 20 hours. The game’s genuinely open-ended story will mean dedicated players will also want to take on multiple playthroughs just to see what different decisions result in. It’s really up to you how long you want your trip to Warsaw to last.

This review was based on a PS5 copy of The Thaumaturge provided by publisher 11 Bit Studios.

8.5

WCCFTECH RATING

The Thaumaturge