2.5/5 ★ – hwljulie's review of The Thaumaturge.

The main gameplay elements of this game are: find and read clues, the turn-based combat, and making moral ambiguous choices. Reading and finding clues is essentially just snap, follow pink sparkles, read thing. I am a reader and I love reading things, so I didn't mind it as much as the average player probably would, but I do believe that they should have added more ways to gain information about the situation. Sometimes you could talk to other NPCs to gain more information and make proper choices, but those were quite sparse. Also, this gameplay element takes up like 75% of the game. It should be more balanced than that. The other gameplay element is turn-based combat. I think most if not all battles are optional, depending on what your dialogue choices are. I initiated in every single battle possible and still thought the battles were incredibly sparse throughout the entire game. I couldn't understand why there was even this part of the game when it was barely used. It had such a cool battle system too! I loved how there were so many different salutors to choose from and you can choose any of them that fits your playstyle. You can also attach certain abilities to each attack of each salutor, like if a salutor uses one attack, that one attack can have the attached ability of the afflicted taking 30% more damage. You can create insane and broken synergies like this and it was pretty fun to look through everything, create your build, and absolutely break the game. It's just too bad that there were barely any fights throughout the entire game!!! Another thing that I thought was bizarre: in the final battle of the game, the turn-based combat throws you a completely different mechanic where you are now given the choice of severing your bond with a salutor permanently in exchange for getting rid of a burden placed upon you which is synced to a specific salutor. I really liked this mechanic a lot because it changed up my strategy and approach to the game. But WHY was this the only battle where it was the only mechanic? I know that the game can't just pressure you to part with your salutors throughout the game, but I feel that they should've changed it in some way so that you are not permanently losing your salutors but maybe they are unusable for the rest of the battle while also still faced with this pressure to change your strategy and approach in battle. This was a fun mechanic and it sucks that it was only in the last battle of the entire game. The final gameplay element is being able to manipulate people's minds and make them do whatever you'd like them to do. This is where the "morally ambiguous choices" come in, which I beg to differ. I am not exaggerating when I say that I think I approached an opportunity to manipulate people's minds less than 5 times. This includes the main story and some of the side quests that I did. We are literally The Thaumaturge. The entire game is based on that, our character is entirely based on that, every single person we talk to in this game brings up how we're a thaumaturge. So why would we not be able to do the main thing a thaumaturge can do which is to manipulate emotions often? I would forget this was even a part of the game the entire time until it came up again and I'd be like "oh yeah, this." How you manipulate someone's minds is based on your stats. If you had a level 6 heart, you can make them do this. If you had a level 5 mind, you can make them do this, etc. These stats are pretty integral to the game, so I felt that they should've been used more often in these situations. Also, even when you could make these "morally ambiguous choices", it felt like there was absolutely no difference in what you did. The people still treat you the same and there is no long-lasting consequence. I just didn't care for the choices because you just picked one and then you were done. You're not really eager to see what consequences there are because there are none. The premise and setting is unique, I was incredibly attracted to it. Early 20th century Warsaw was a delight to go through and I was intrigued by how being a Thaumaturge would exactly allow the story to unfold and how it would affect the characters. It essentially boiled down to "something shady is going on, figure it out and run around and read clues." These clues often led to finding out forbidden secrets and taboo topics others do not wish to talk about, and that leads me to my next point. The game often builds up these plotlines just for nothing to happen at the end. "oh, who killed my father? who?? wait, his death did not seem like an accident. let's run around the whole city reading clues and talking to people to figure this out." so you do this for several hours and then once you find out, it's like okay, that's it. nothing happened. your character doesn't even really acknowledge any of the shady shocking circumstances surrounding his father's death. and then the father's death was never talked about again the rest of the game. it's so weird! why! the game takes a completely different turn after that that involves revolutions and espionage. it's not necessarily a bad turn, it's just that the turn was so abrupt that it made me less interested. the writing was just poor here. Speaking of the writing, I grew tired of the fluffy writing that was involved in dialogues. I never bothered to read the extra dialogue options (which I always do for every single game that has dialogue options) and I would skim the main dialogue a lot, which I also never do. The sentences feel overly flowery and unnecessarily lengthened. I do like that there is voice acting for every single conversation though. That was enjoyable. I like when I can feel like I'm watching a movie. But the pacing of the voice acting was so slow that I just often rushed through it anyway. Characters often took way too long to respond to anything. It wasn't like a natural pause either, it just felt awkward. The way to gain exp in the game is strange. You gain exp by reading any side documents around the world. This could either be lore for the city, the newspaper, advertisements, recipes, and other random little things. Most of your exp comes from reading these things when you compare it to the amount of exp you get from sidequests. It is concerning that you don't feel rewarded for exp when you do a sidequest and that you actually end up getting more from reading these little documents which 90% of the time have nothing to do with the story or world. I think they should give a lot more incentive to the sidequest for exp, but maybe they tried to make up for it by allowing you to find more salutors through these sidequests? I still don't agree with this approach. Overall, the game was enjoyable enough for me to get through without dreading it or anything, but I'd say it was a slightly below average game. The game has a habit of building things up and giving it a lot of potential and shine just for it to not have impact, such as the story and some of the gameplay elements. The game just seems like a blueprint for a great game. It seems to be a presentation of "hey, here are some great ideas we've come up with!" they introduce these great ideas, but then where is the rest? how does it all connect in a meaningful and impactful way? If someone wanted to play a game of this genre, I wouldn't recommend this game sadly. There was a lot of potential there evidenced by the game's very strong start but it could not maintain its momentum and further revealed more flaws as time went.