The Thaumaturge

The Thaumaturge transports you to Warsaw in 1905 - then a part of the oppressive Russian Empire - where you take on the role of the bourgeois Wiktor Szulski. Wiktor is a thaumaturge, burdened with the ability to perceive ethereal demon-like beings known as salutors. These salutors are attracted to and haunt individuals who bear Flaws, spiritual and psychological deficiencies that cause extreme behaviour both in the afflicted individuals and their local communities. For example, a salutor attracted to Recklessness haunts a man with a death wish (his favourite game is Russian roulette) and causes everyone in his street to act stupidly and violently. Wiktor can absorb this Flaw, relieving the individual in question whilst also taming the salutor for his own ends. In addition to salutors and Flaws, Wiktor can detect an individual’s Trace - a sort of supernatural ‘scent’ of thoughts, feelings, intentions, words, and deeds that people imprint on objects. Linking a paranoid lockpick to a nervous coat proves the identity of a thief, for instance, whilst the love and concern in a sealed letter attests to the sincerity of the affection within it.

Wiktor’s own Flaw is Pride, and choosing to feed or resist this trait serves as the game’s main binary choice mechanic. But this is greyer than Mass Effect’s Paragon/Renegade system. A Prideful Wiktor becomes cocky and arrogant, but also courageous and able to decisively resist bullshit - polarising, endearing. Besides this, though, you are given plentiful choices, particularly with regards to how you shape your relationships with several key characters. People will remember if you treated them with respect, broke their trust, or honoured their wishes and preferences, which makes the otherwise flatly-acted Wiktor feel more like a breathing person. And relieving individuals of their Flaws is not necessarily the altruistic act Wiktor might want others to think - a thief’s Audacity is all that’s keeping their younger sibling fed, for instance.

These choices do feel tough and they are frequently thought-provoking. For an audience fatigued by shallow ‘choices matter’ RPGs, this will be a breath of fresh air. The investigation mechanics are a mixed bag - you simply find highlighted objects, read their excellently-crafted descriptions, generate a conclusion, and then employ this in conversation. It’s a fusion of The Witcher 3’s awful ‘Witcher Sense’ with Disco Elysium’s brilliant Skills; uninteresting and repetitive as a mechanic, but executed well in writing and, therefore, a resultantly worthy companion for this journey. The combat - wherein you employ fisticuffs, a pistol, and your pet salutors, who look truly terrific - felt fairly novel to me. It’s a straightforward turn-based affair with health bars, status effects, and unique traits, but you can mix-and-match different upgrades to your base abilities and thus adapt your strategy (and are prompted to do so before each combat - brilliant!). Your actions can be quick or slow and timing things well and performing them in the right sequence and in keeping with the flow of the combat is key. Unique though this may be, I found a winning strategy fairly quickly and never needed to adapt it, this being on the hard difficulty setting, so this could do with some work.

It’s ultimately the writing and worldbuilding where this game really shines. The story kept me hooked, the characters kept me invested, and the faithfully reconstructed Warsaw’s simmering political and socioeconomic tensions are palpable. Granted, the voice acting was so uniformly terrible that I preferred to mute the game and play the voices out in my head, but the actual quality of what those voices say and convey is excellent. Ligia, your doting, ambitious twin sister who strives to prove herself a man’s equal. Abaurycy, your screw-loose childhood best friend, embroiled in the criminal underbelly yet loyal to a fault. And Rasputin… I’ll leave him a mystery, for I could hardly do otherwise. Warsaw is perhaps the main character of the game, as a RockPaperShotgun writer put it; there is melancholy in knowing that this beautiful, cultured city would be best known in 40 years’ time for its near-total destruction, and there is warmth in randomly discovering an alcoholic’s grief in a glass shard, a revolutionary socialist’s fear in a bold scrap of paper, or an Okhrana agent’s boredom in a chair.

This game well executes what I think of as the isometric visual novel style of RPG of which Disco Elysium is the crown jewel, where traditional RPG mechanics are eschewed in favour of literariness. It isn’t at all on the level of DE and its weaknesses are clear, but The Thaumaturge is a worthy and unique experience that I’d recommend to anyone with an interest in the genre (or indeed just in the setting).