A couple of years ago, CD Projekt RED announced a remake of its 2007 classic, The Witcher, which is to be developed by Fool’s Theory which has veteran Witcher series staff involved – so an ideal choice. Or so I thought, before playing Fool’s Theory’s new isometric turn-based RPG, The Thaumaturge.
Set in an alternative 1905’s Warsaw under the rule by imperial Russian tsardom, we play as Wiktor Szulski, a Thaumaturge – someone who possesses Perception which allows them to read other people’s thoughts, emotions, actions and words by examining items linked to them. Through this ability, Thaumaturges are also able to identify when a person has a Flaw, and, in turn, is possessed by a Salutor which feeds off that Flaw. Similarly, all Thaumaturges have a Flaw which binds them to their tamed Salutor of which they can use its abilities to their advantage in combat, investigation and dialogue.
The Thaumaturge is the perfect example of a game full of creative ideas, built on an interesting foundation, which is ultimately ruined by very poor execution. The general concept it’s built on is a fascinating one, and this period of time in Poland is also not often covered in media. This gives the game a unique setting that stands out from others within the same genre.
We start off the prologue as Wiktor is seeking a healer after attempting to tame a second Salutor in order to grow his Thaumaturge abilities. This attempt went wrong and his ties with his first Salutor, Upyr, have now been cut and his worsening condition is becoming critical. After finally finding Grigori Rasputin, a pilgrim whom Wiktor has heard wields extraordinary healing powers, Wiktor is cured of his condition and… immediately gets back to trying to tame more Salutors, but this time with Rasputin by his side to aid him during the taming process.
The prologue of The Thaumaturge did not hook me at all, and despite the development of a further plot in Act 1, I was still frustrated by certain elements of the storytelling. For one, Rasputin’s involvement felt forced and he was quite out-of-place in the game – it reminded me a lot of Assassin’s Creed throwing in historic figures for the sake of including these big historic names in its plot, no matter how forcefully they have to be crammed into the storyline. Despite having just met this man, Wiktor keeps returning to him, letting him poke around inside his head using hypnotism, and keeps telling everyone that he has full trust in Rasputin despite barely knowing him.
There are also a lot of unanswered questions around Thaumaturges in general, or scenarios that would realistically come up however don’t for the purpose of the storyline. For one, no one seems bothered that Wiktor has been snooping around their belongings to find out more information about them. In fact, I often felt like Wiktor would result to breaking people’s privacy very prematurely, and this subject isn’t really explored in the game.
What kept me interested in the story behind The Thaumaturge were the Scooby-Doo-style quests where Wiktor encounters a Salutor in the area and must investigate to determine who possesses a Flaw that the Salutor would be feeding off. These reminded me very much of the quests I enjoyed the most in CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and I hoped that it would stay this way rather than turning into a world-ending quest of heroism. For the most part, The Thaumaturge’s main quest did stay this way, as shortly after being healed by his new best friend, Rasputin, Wiktor hears of the sudden death of his father (whom Wiktor is estranged from), and must return to Warsaw for the funeral and will reading.
In Warsaw, Wiktor reunites with his twin sister, Ligia, and learns that the only belonging his father has left him in the will is his Grimoire, the book used by Thaumaturges to harness their abilities. Wiktor also learns that the Grimoire is actually missing – and is presumed to have been stolen from his father’s corpse. The Thaumaturge now turns into a murder mystery, and a hunt for the stolen Grimoire. This is exactly the kind of storyline I was hoping to find in The Thaumaturge, and it didn’t disappoint. Despite a slow start, I was hooked by the end. In fact, even Rasputin’s involvement grew on me towards Act 3, and he no longer felt so jammed into the storyline.
Unfortunately, we get to the point as to why The Thaumaturge is so poorly executed despite its strong storyline: the voice acting. The Thaumaturge has a mostly Polish cast, yet no Polish dubbing. And you can tell, especially with Wiktor’s voice actor, whose accent flitters between upper clash British to Eastern European consistently. Many characters phrase sentences strangely, making them difficult to follow and there’s no flow in what the characters are saying; everything feels incredibly disjointed. There’s also plenty of overacting and underacting, which makes it a struggle for the player to know how to feel. It’s so bad that cutscenes are really awkward to watch, especially with a lack of music in most of them, and it’s especially difficult to feel immersed into the story and feel involved with these characters. At least with the availability of Polish dubbing I wouldn’t feel so distracted by the poor voice acting. In fact, no voice acting at all would have been a preference to this.
However, I wouldn’t entirely blame the cast for this as the dialogue in The Thaumaturge can also be very poor. While the storylines are well-written, the dialogue holding them together is not. NPCs will greet you with unnaturally forward comments about your physical appearance, or blurt out blunt, personal questions as though they are children with no filter over what they have to say. This increases the awkwardness of the cutscenes, and makes for a very strange scene all together. I also found that a lot of conversations would escalate unnecessarily, with the NPC we’re talking to suddenly getting aggressive for little or no reason – and it’s hard to tell whether this is due to poor writing or if the terrible voice acting has meant I’ve failed to pick up previous cues that things were getting heated.
In fact, NPCs want to pick a fight for little to no reason, you can guarantee in every quest that the moment you walk into a new building, the group of NPCs in there will find something (anything) to pick a fight with you, from your nice shoes to just walking into a room looking for someone; there’s not a single quest that can be completed without wading through a group of hotheads first. Unfortunately, this then has a negative impact on the combat, as it becomes VERY tiresome towards the end after you fight down civilian after civilian who turn up to a fight with a Thaumaturge with their fists.
Despite how well-written the main story and side quests are in The Thaumaturge, this doesn’t mean they’re set up well. As an RPG with multiple endings, you have a lot of decisions and dialogue choices to make in The Thaumaturge. Some of these can have a genuine, significant impact on the ending of the game, others… not so much. In fact, The Thaumaturge suffers heavily from a false sense of choice in its dialogue. Often if you’re given the option of two answers to a question, Wiktor will always use both regardless of what you picked. I also came across one conversation where I had some optional questions, but while cycling through them I noticed that the game hadn’t recognized my other dialogue options, so it was acting as though I hadn’t already told Ligia this. This felt as though the conversation was going around in circles and, quite honestly, I would have preferred it if these dialogue options just weren’t there until critical decisions as they made conversations even trickier to follow.
That being said, your decisions do have significant consequences. My favorite part about this is that you may not realize this as the time because, Wiktor, as the one who has technically made this decision, will always find a way to justify what he’s done in a convincing way, which really makes your decision feel solidified into the plot and also connects you more with Wiktor as a character. It’s the reactions of those around you which will tell you whether you made the right decision or not. However, I did find the ending to be somewhat of a mess. To put it simply, you are given two choices but other characters will allude to the option of alternative choices. If you look into these alternative choices and go for them, you will end up with a very rushed ending with no elaboration or epilogue. This is another example of false choices that The Thaumaturge gives you, which really tarnishes what is otherwise quite a well-written adventure system.
The Thaumaturge also annoyingly has timed side quests, which really takes away from the urgency of the main storyline, especially when these timed quests are so mundane. In one instance, Wiktor had just found out that someone had created a Golem to endlessly hunt him and his bloodline until no one is left. He goes to tell Ligia about this, assuring her that he would find the Golem before any harm could come to her. Straight after this conversation, she tells Wiktor she’s putting on a talk at the local university and wants him to pick up some doughnuts on the way there. Obviously, being more interested in the life or death situation with the Golem, I carried on with that quest and ignored Ligia’s sweet tooth request, only for her to scold me when this quest quickly ran out of time and I missed the talk and also failed to bring the doughnuts. She didn’t care that the Golem was now dead.
Although I won’t fault the game for this, I also ran into a problem where I had so little interest in the storylines and these characters in the first half the game that I was barely engaging in side quests at all. This led to drastic consequences which affected the main plotline, which is something to keep in mind when playing. That being said, despite these kinds of side quests being in some of my favorite games, I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of them as side quests are there to be explored at your leisure if you’re looking for further content around the world and its characters, and the game shouldn’t punish the player for not immediately dropping the main quest to pick them up.
The point-and-click elements of The Thaumaturge simply involve using Perception to highlight what areas that Wiktor can pick up an object of interest, usually marked by red particles, and then searching that area for any objects relevant to the investigation. When you pick them up, there will be a description as to what Wiktor is sensing on each item. A trace of a person comes in three forms which also signifies how clued up Wiktor is in his investigation: ‘Unknown’ means this is the first time Wiktor has found a trace of this person, ‘familiar’ means he’s seen it before but he’s not certain who it belongs to, and ‘certain’ means he’s completed his investigation and has worked out exactly who left it and the story behind it. Unfortunately, there’s no journal of sorts that tracks the ongoing investigations you have, only the quests, so you never know how much more you need to find.
Certain objects will also be unreadable until Wiktor has leveled up a Dimension (skill), there are four in total: Heart, Deed, Word, and Mind. Each Dimension is tied to a Salutor, and you will need to catch two Salutors associated with that Dimension in order to fully level it up. However, this also means that not leveling up a Dimension enough can block certain items from investigation, thus preventing you from using certain dialogue options or even finishing that quest until you’ve leveled up enough – this really defeats the purpose of the RPG elements, as you’re often pushed to become a Jack of All Trades in order to complete certain quests.
The marketing for The Thaumaturge describes the combat system as being unique, which it is as it’s turn-based combat, using stacked turns rather than each combatant taking one turn after the other. This means you can see exactly what moves your opponent plans to take and how long it will take them to prepare for it, allowing you and your Salutor to opt for either as many quick moves as you can before its your opponent’s turn, or taking the risk with a heavier attack that will take longer to prep for.
My biggest problem with the combat system is the difficulty. When I booted up The Thaumaturge for the first time, I noticed that ‘Challenge’, the hardest difficulty, was the default. Thinking this was a mistake, I switched it to ‘Balanced’ which is the normal difficulty. I quickly realised why Challenge had been the default shortly after when even with a mode that’s supposedly a balance of a challenge and enjoying the story, The Thaumaturge is ridiculously easy unless you play it on the hardest difficulty – even during fights where I had blatantly messed up or had not been paying attention, I was rarely in any danger until I hit Act 3. I am also not a veteran when it comes to turn-based combat.
My second biggest problem with the combat system is that it feels as though it never grows with the game. We’ll get new Salutors which we can switch in and out for a turn, and we’ll start to face up against groups of four or five – but it never progresses further than that. Even when fighting Salutors, we’re fighting manifestations of the NPCs we’ve encountered during that quest. So we’re never up against any new or unique enemies. Did I also mention the combat has the same music track again and again? It’s torture towards the end of the game where we have consistent fights one after the other. Wiktor himself also never grows to be stronger during combat. As we level up, he can unlock new moves that will become available after performing certain actions in combat, but his base set of quick, heavy, and distraction attacks never change. He can’t even heal himself without using up a valuable Salutor turn.
There’s also no accurate measurement of exactly how long you have until your opponent makes their move. The top bar which shows the upcoming attacks outlines where each round ends, which means if you have any ongoing effects, these will take effect at the end of the round, but there’s no measurement as to how long this is exactly. This means you could perform a quick attack, and think you have room for another when actually you don’t – which on the Challenging difficulty, can mean life or death.
I was mostly impressed with The Thaumaturge’s gorgeous, Slavic-style soundtrack by Agnieszka Wlazły and Sebastian Syczyński, which would always keep me tapping my feet no matter how little I was enjoying the game. This, unfortunately, wore off towards the end of Act 2, as there are not enough tracks in the game to prevent the soundtrack from becoming very repetitive. In fact, right up until the final boss. This is a big shame as this was looking to be one of my favorite soundtracks in 2024 as it reminded me a lot of the soundtrack in The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt with its use of chanting and whispering. I also found that the soundtrack is not utilized to its full potential. It’s rarely used to heighten emotional moments or serve as a backdrop during conversations.
During general exploration, The Thaumaturge has an isometric viewpoint with crisp graphics produced on the Unreal Engine 5. Environments are detailed and there’s plenty going on within them. Then you get to a cutscene and suddenly have to stare into the dead, soulless eyes of The Thaumaturge’s NPCs. I have no idea where Fool’s Theory has gone wrong with this, but every character has a strange, uncanny valley look to them and it mostly has to do with their eyes. Which is such a shame as the rest of the game looks stunning. I also found that the game was seriously struggling to load its cutscenes, which would often lag, load textures late, or crash the game entirely. And this is on a high-end PC.
The Thaumaturge has some really solid foundations in terms of storyline and setting. However, despite the storyline being so good that it miraculously saved itself towards the end, the poor execution of dialogue and cutscenes were so bad that I massively struggled to engage with them and, by extension, the storyline until it was too late. It’s safe to say that this has killed my excitement for The Witcher remake.
Jess played The Thaumaturge on PC with a review code.
