Summary
I can say for certain that during the dozens of hours I’ve spent playingBaldur’s Gate 3, I’ve never once thought about Rasputin. The Russian mystic (and famed lover) would make an excellent RPG character – a poison-immune seducer of queens and wandering religious healer sounds like the perfectD&Dcleric. Wait a second, I need to rewrite my character for my next campaign…
Right, now that’s all sorted and we’re all agreed that Rasputin is a perfect fantasy RPG protagonist, we can talk aboutThe Thaumaturge, a game that actually has Rasputin as the protagonist of its fantasy RPG. Well, nearly.
You actually play as Wiktor ‘with a W’ Szulski, the titular thaumaturge. However, the game’s prologue sees you arrive in rural, early 20th century Poland, then a part of Russia. You’re unwell, and your connection with the mystical demon figure you know as Upyr has been severed. This is where Rasputin comes in.
His healing process is as non-traditional as your detective work, both of which involve supernatural agents. Once the mystic healer has restored your connection to the undead creature who stalks in your shadow, you’re able to start working out what exactly is wrong with this town you’ve stumbled upon. Apart from, you know, the effects of a crumbling empire, the oppressive remnants of the Russian army, and the threat of civil war tearing the country apart.
Outside of all that political turmoil, you will also find men fighting over a dead goose, the village elder dead in his burning house under mysterious circumstances, and soldiers and drunkards alike challenging you to fistfights because they dislike your snooping. You can employ various attacks in turn-based battles, which make you hit harder and slower, weaker and faster, or remove your opponents’ focus rather than dealing damage directly, which sets you up for a devastating blow the following round.
Most fights I’ve seen in the prologue have been 2v2, and they ease you into the deep combat mechanics. It always helps that you can bring a vengeful spirit to a knife fight, and a skeletal ghost plunging a spectral scimitar through a soldier’s chest will never get old.
The mechanical depth extends to exploration and quests, too. The Thaumaturge is a detective CRPG at heart, but you have to use your mystical powers to uncover clues. Putting skill points into four separate trees – Heart, Deed, Mind, and Word – grants you supernatural powers to use in both combat and exploration. Skill trees based on your mental state, you say? Pinch me twice and call me Harry Du Bois.
While the power of Fortune can open up preemptive attacks in a fight, it can also be used to trace the ‘scents’ of people from their possessions. Wiktor is some kind of extreme empath, and his powers allow him to see the emotional state of someone who wrote a heartfelt letter, since discarded, while his logical brain can use environmental clues to work out why the carriage driver won’t go to the cemetery. It feels like a unique take on classic RPG systems, spinning old hat skill trees into a completely original fur collared greatcoat.
I’ve only played the prologue so far, but I can already see the depth that these systems are hiding beneath their surfaces. I can see myself taking out a pen and paper to assess different builds for Wiktor’s brain, and things will only get more complex when I start defeating more demonic Salutors and adding their skills to mine.
The Thaumaturge is a deceptively complex CRPG, and it deserves recognition for that. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare it toDisco Elysiumor Baldur’s Gate 3, two of the best RPGs of the past decade, if not all time. An isometric CRPG with upgrades based on your mental state is not the next Disco Elysium. A CRPG with supernatural elements from a small team of indie devs should not be held to the same standards as a mammoth game of the same genre from a kind-of-independent-but-definitely-enormous, global studio with the power of Tencent behind it. But both Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium captured my heart out of the blue, and I think The Thaumaturge is doing the same. It’s got detective puzzles, demonic possession, and Rasputin. What more could you want?
