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The Thaumaturge is an adventure-RPG set in a slightly alternate 1905 Poland. The alteration is thaumaturges: people with a familiar spirit (a "Salutor") and an interesting mix of psychic powers.

(Disclosure: while The Thaumaturge is high-end for an indie production, it showed up in the IGF lists and I got a free review copy to play.)

The game starts in a remote farming village. "Oho," you might think, "this is a Witcher riff -- a lone monster-slayer stomping around the Polish countryside." Nope! Your talents are far better suited to sniffing around a crime scene (which the village obligingly provides). You can track someone's psychic imprint on physical objects, glean their motivations, and -- in extremis -- give their thoughts a nudge. Okay, extremis happens pretty often.

Farm life isn't your milieu anyhow. The prologue ends with a telegram at the train station. Your father is dead back home, and home you gotta go. (All great fantasy has trains!) Welcome to fin-de-siecle Warsaw, a stew of Polish aristocrats, Tsarist soldiers, gang leaders, rabbis, revolutionaries, journalists, whores, pączki vendors, and on and on. And other thaumaturges, to be sure. (Your father was one.) Not to mention your travel companion, Grigori Rasputin his own fire-eyed self.

In fact the game is much more a Disco Elysium riff -- though not a simple one. A thaumaturge is connected to their familiar through a Flaw: a hole in their mind that allows the unseen world to leak in. Your Flaw is Pride, and Pride is a key stat in navigating the game. Certain dialogue choices feed your Flaw; act haughty and your pride increases. Other choices are gated on having too much (or too little!) pride.

It's not the same as Disco Harry's splintered head-daemons, but it provides a similar tension. You can decide how to treat people, with arrogance or empathy, and this naturally affects the course of the story. But you're also choosing whether to feed your familiar -- and thus level up your supernatural powers. It gives the familiar "are we an asshole today?" dialogue branches a lot more oomph.

Sadly, the game doesn't carry this premise as far as I'd like. Your Pride winds up being rather disconnected from your RPG stats, which are a bag of four generically-named concepts. Pride comes from and affects dialogue choices. The other stats come from XP, which you gain from the usual mix of plot threads and side quests. And the other stats are primarily used in fights.

Yeah, there's a lot of fights. You're an arrogant overdressed rich boy nosing into people's business all around Warsaw. Guess how people react to that. The fights are moderately challenging but not all that varied -- unless you get tired of the mechanics, as I did, and set the game to easy mode. Then the fights are same-y and trivial too.

Occasionally you get into a supernatural boss fight, which represents trying to absorb someone's Flaw and thereby bind the spirit which haunts them. Thus you spend the game acquiring more and more Flaws. In theory this should keep adding more dimensions to the choice/personality model. Pride, then Vehemence, then Recklessness... But in fact this doesn't happen. It's single-axis, Pride the whole way through. Once you've acquired a spirit, it's just a bundle of combat powers.

I can see why the designers thought they needed a combat system. The XP loop and your menagerie of spirits have to be good for something. But, as I said, it all feels disconnected from the storyline. Yes, some investigation challenges depend on your stats, and the fates of certain spirits are crucial to the plot. But if there's one Disco Elysium innovation which should be copied by absolutely everybody, it's the complete disregard of combat mechanics. All these spirits and your multiplying Flaws should be integral to the story model!

Because the plot is juicy. Oh yes. If there's a comparison to the Witcher series, it's the absolute whirlwind of plot threads, side characters, and social scenes which you can dig into. You explore Warsaw from its dockside to its fine townhouses, with all the markets and parks in between. Not to mention the streetcars, the jail cells, the synagogues, and the brothels. It would be overwhelming if it weren't firmly grounded in your own family and friends: your sister, your boyhood friend, your father's associates and enemies. Plus, of course, the designers' tangible love of Warsaw and its history.

(Side note: I visited Warsaw for real a couple of years ago. I walked those same streets of Powiśle and Śródmieście. Of course the game's rendition of 1905 doesn't look anything like what an American tourist sees in the 2020s. But I felt a connection anyhow. Plus, the game has people pronouncing "Powiśle" and "Śródmieście" correctly, something I never managed in real life.)

The bulk of the game action is investigation -- big mysteries and small ones -- via your psychometric powers or old-fashioned shaking-down of witnesses. (Fights are frequent, as I said, but they just space out the quest threads.) Now, the investigation gameplay doesn't have much to it, gameplay-wise. You follow the magic sparkles to a clue, or a character; if the character won't talk then you find more clues. Repeat until solved. But the point is the stories you discover, and the choices you are thrust into as you progress through them. The choices are sharp and the writing is really good. Every single clue is thaumaturgically freighted with thoughts and memories and personality. The game must have hundreds of these crisp little paragraphs -- a constant stream of character notes for the people around you. It's the best of environmental storytelling without awkwardly requiring a city full of diary-writers.

I loved all the characters. Including the assholes. (It's not just you. Your pal Abaurycy is magnificent.) The designers are very serious about portraying the diversity of their city. A Romany king, multiple rabbis, a Tatar doctor... it's easy to write lists. But when I walked in on one Jewish character who was singing, not in Hebrew, but in Yiddish... a delightful moment.

The stakes are both high and low: this is a pivotal moment in Poland's history, and a pivotal moment in your fictional family's history as well. (Your twin sister, the cranky chain-smoking goth businesslady: also magnificent.) I really struggled with some of the choices, which is the sign of a game that's hooked me. Small spoiler: trying to collect every Salutor in the game is a Prideful approach! Consider your options well.

I put in about 28 hours. That was obsessively scraping all the side quests. Honestly, it would have been even better as 20-hour game with all the fights removed. And the mechanics could have used another pass. Or, more likely, a more ambitious design got trimmed down in development? I would absolutely believe that the Flaw system started multidimensional and the designers cut everything but Pride in order to ship.

I'm glad they shipped. Highly recommended. The Thaumaturge isn't a category-buster like Disco was, but it's a successful modest-sized RPG-adventure and a thoroughly enjoyable romp through historic Warsaw.