Anyone who knows me knows I’m a sucker for dark, supernatural games that play in historical settings, with bonus points for snarky dialogue and snazzy outfits.

Which might be why I liked The Thaumaturge so much.

The game has excellent worldbuilding, a plot weighty with meaningful choices, and a complex main character who pisses people off while wearing an over the top fur coat and one hell of a moustache.

Oh and you do this all alongside your best friend Rasputin – need I say more?

While it’s not a perfect game – the combat mechanics are somewhat imbalanced – I was willing to forgive a lot in order to follow the story of Wiktor Szulski to its meaningful end. And in the Thaumaturge, when I say choices matter, choices really matter. They will come back to bite you.

What’s a Thaumaturge again?

The setup is this: In 1905, Wiktor is a thaumaturge who returns to Warsaw after the death of his father. What’s a thaumaturge, you ask? I wasn’t entirely sure for the first few hours of gameplay, but the closest comparison would be a medium who channels otherworldly spirits called salutors and uses their powers to manipulate the real world. Wiktor’s skills come from sensing emotions embedded in objects; I love the notion that possessions are imbued with meaning well after they’ve left the hands of their owners.

Wiktor’s a complicated guy; you can play him as a complete asshat, and it makes sense in the troubled political environment and his estranged relationship with his father. In fact, this is exactly how I played him; loyal to those loyal to him, but often letting his ambition overtake these loyalties.

Or you can play him as a sympathetic guy, but be warned, this might lock you out of skills later in the game. There’s a clear payoff for being good. I liken it to the high and low chaos playthroughs of Dishonoured; you might be a nice guy, but nice guys are not always good negotiators. It pays to play it tough at times, although this might cost you relationships instead.

NPC – the C stands for Complicated

Alongside Wiktor rare a cast of wonderful NPCs, all as complex as the hero himself. Who can’t but like the chaos gremlin best friend Abaurycy Niedzic, who wins Wiktor’s affections by kidnapping him, then going on a complete bender, and writing some sociopathic poetry along the way.

And I’d be remiss without mentioning the nuanced depiction of Rasputin, the Svengali who mesmerises Wiktor with his knowledge of the supernatural world. Too often in fiction he’s caricatured as a manipulative cult leader, but here there’s a compassionate side to his megalomania. Which makes it even harder to figure out whether he’s using Wiktor or genuinely his friend.

What struck me as I played was how richly drawn the female characters were in this game; no simpering archetypes here. Strong women abound, from the local bar workers to his sister, Ligia, who plays a major role in the story. She has inherited her father’s business, and this chain-smoking, pants-wearing businesswoman will tell you exactly what she thinks. In fact, most of the women in this game will tell you exactly what they think.

One of the funniest moments comes when two women are checking Wiktor out on a park bench; this reversal of the male gaze is both hilarious, and as a female player, incredibly refreshing.

It’s for this complexity and nuance that the writing was the biggest highlight of the game. Added to this, some incredibly beautiful lines on the objects themselves made you want to read each and every item’s story.

The powder keg of politics

Much of the plot is balanced between Wiktor’s pursuit of the salutors and navigating the escalating political tensions in Warsaw, between the Russian empire and the fight for Polish independence. Tsarists and communists come into conflict, under the shadow of the rise of fascism. And of course, in this literal powder keg, Wiktor’s personal goals are going to come into conflict with the world state.

You can choose to align yourself with one political side or the other, or your own thaumaturgical ambitions. Political malcontent Wanda is the unexpected face of the revolutionaries, and engaging with her as a feminist and political activist takes the story in unexpected directions.

Finding the salutors requires deft negotiation of these plotlines. For example, the salutor Krampus is uncovered through exploration, and opens up into a quest around dockside union politics.

Less appealing to me was the quest to track down the golem salutor; I felt like I had seen versions of this story in both Berlin: The Wicked City sourcebook and strangely enough, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. Perhaps it’s because the salutors are mostly based on Slavic mythology, and the golem is a more well-known story outside of Poland.

The Thaumaturge Gameplay

These salutors are also intricately tied up with the game’s combat system. And here’s where the game’s flaws come to the table, much like Wiktor’s collection of human flaws…

The turn based combat alternates between Wiktor’s physical attacks and curses, alongside the salutors. Different salutors have different skills and payoffs; the golem’s strong physical attacks can knock an opponent out in a single turn, but that’s going to be slow.

You have to think about how to synergise between salutor and Wiktor’s attacks; he may defeat an enemy in a single turn, then your salutor’s turn is lost. But some of the most powerful attacks come from inflicting status affects on opponents, then doubling down on the related salutor skills.

Most combat encounters on Balanced mode are easily dispatched, and you’ll find yourself using the same strategies over again. I wanted more of a challenge in these battles; perhaps I should have put the difficulty up to the more challenging mode. I also wonder whether this game would this have been better as a deck builder to provide more randomness in the encounters?

But there’s a major difficulty step between your everyday fist-fights around Warsaw (and look, Wiktor is always getting himself into trouble) and the boss battles you’ll encounter to capture the salutors. On balanced mode, these were particularly challenging, and my success relied a lot on the luck of Veles’ healing capacity.

Outside of combat, most puzzles and sidequests are solved using Wiktor’s thaumaturgical knack, demonstrated by lines of glittering blood in the environment. While these are beautiful to look at, the wonder wears off by the end of the game. Instead of figuring things out for yourself, you’re more reliant on the in-game direction to find clues and draw conclusions. Granted, some of these clues are very hidden, some require certain dialogue choices, and sometimes you can lock yourself out of story lines from feeding Wiktor’s flaw of pride.

But mostly, quests follow the same structure: two conflicting parties are fighting, Wiktor must find clues to support either argument, then take a side depending on how you feel about the moral quandary. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good moral quandary, but the game is at its best when it doesn’t over explain, as with the murder mystery in Powiśle.

It’s also sometimes hard to know where and when quests are, and when they finish. Towards the end of the game, I thought I’d done all the key sidequests, then realised I’d missed some after the game ended. During my first playthrough, I believe the game was patched to provide more graphical indications of quest locations, which was a much needed improvement.

Graphics and world

It would be remiss of me not to mention the other highlight of this game: worldbuilding. The location and character design serve the story to create a unique supernatural world. I haven’t quite seen anything quite like this Slavic-inspired, gritty historical setting, where Warsaw feels like a bastion before the forests and villages full of folklore. The design is a key part of creating this atmosphere, where even the attempts at modernity can’t hide from the supernatural histories that attach themselves to places.

In terms of NPC animations, there are some areas which require more finesse. When characters aren’t wearing clothes around their neckline – mostly women – some of the connecting lines between head and body can be seen. I appreciate this is an indie game, and hope that some of these graphical issues can be fixed with future patches. However, the wholistic design style of the maps, menus, and colour themes deserve commendation, and go a long way to creating a consistent tone for the player.

The top-down environments feel rich and beautifully constructed, featuring many of the historical buildings of the time. I recently visited Warsaw, hoping to see some of the places I’d experienced in the game, without realising that all of them had been destroyed in the 1944 Nazi bombing after the Warsaw uprising. The only ‘old’ buildings that exist in the city have been rebuilt from scratch in the style of what once existed there. It was a haunting end to my experience of this game. In this way The Thaumaturge is as much historical document as game, and in that, it is an important piece of work.

The strengths of The Thaumaturge’s narrative forgive the polarizing combat difficulty and somewhat repetitive gameplay. With its weighty choices and complex characters, I was left haunted, much like Wiktor and his demons. The Thaumaturge 2, anyone?