Boggy Strongly Recommends: The Thaumaturge
Release Year: 2024
Reading Year: WI2026
Developer/Publisher: Fool’s Theory/11 bit studios
Time to Beat: 25 Hours
Thoughts: I began The Thaumaturge on October 21st, 2025. After hearing about this game on the No Clip Podcast, I finally picked it on Humble Bundle and immediately became enraptured. I got 15 hours into the game in two weeks! And then, I dropped off hard. Months later I picked it up, and it was a bit of a slog to finish the fight, but I am so happy to have reached the ending. Even with pacing issues, The Thaumaturge will go down as one of the most memorable video games I have ever played.
The Thaumaturge is a “character-driven RPG.” None of that matters. You play as a thaumaturge, which is an Eastern European wizard. Capable of communicating on different levels of consciousness, which includes salutors - the demons of folklore spanning the globe. Krampus, Golem, Djinn, and more. You are set in 19th century occupied Poland with real-world characters like Rasputin and Tsar Nicolas the II. As you progress, your thaumaturgy powers and mastery of your salutors grow. It’s your choice how the fate of occupied Poland will end, and how your people will fair with it.
The Setting and Story What places The Thaumaturge above most games is the world-building. Fool’s Theory created a reality. You can feel the history, intent, and consequences in every bend of the streets. The layout of the world and it’s attentive design tells its own story. All of which only benefits from the writing and dialogue - both of which are S-tier compared to any other video games I have played. Simply by walking through the different regions and interacting with leaflets, magazines, newspapers, and random notes strewn around you will immediately understand the living and working conditions of locals. You will tap into their worries, their needs, and their happiness.
From this, comes the truly excellent voice-acting and dialogue. It is truly a gift how much of this game is voice-acted, and there were so few moments where I found a mismatch in voice-acting and character selection that there may as well have been none. Even in FFVII Remake I find myself stunned at the voice actor choices. Characters are complex, multi-faceted and are built from telling circumstances. It is a delight to speak with any and all characters, even in the small interactions before a fight, or when someone brushes you off. You can feel their hate or ignorance or how enamored they are with you.
The writing comes from a deeply rooted place, it has a history and its informed by what it means to have lived in Poland during this moment. I couldn’t stop thinking throughout my 20+ hours playing that this was one of the most effecting history teaching tools I have experienced. How the story teaches you stakes and intrigue. However, I think the writing truly shines in the masses of text you experience by using your Thaumaturgical skills to discern emotional imprints on objects and items throughout your playthrough. These paragraphs are almost always as poetic as they are utilitarian. The writing doesn’t overstay its welcome. I imagine this is how people feel about Disco Elysium, but from a different angle. Instead of the witty, philosophical, this instead is deeply empathetic and historically thoughtful. Both excellent in different ways.
Characters What is most compelling - in that it gets you into the text and willing to read more and more - are the characters. A world isn’t full unless every character plays their role, thus filling out every dimension of a place. You must have your complex and powerful leading characters, but just as important are the consistent, smaller roles that show you who you are by reflecting back your reputation through their perspective. In this way characters don’t have to be multi-dimensional, instead they need a reason for their actions and words, and every character has this quality. Emblematic of this effect is how many characters I felt deep resentment or annoyance from, most notably Ariel Rofe. They all serve a purpose. I was always excited not to see how a peasant hated me, but which reason or slur they would use to express it.
Game Mechanics On the surface, the interactions and mechanics of this game are quite simple. However, the genius in this decision is that game mechanics feel more like an extension of the story and world, rather than for the sake of making this feel game-y. You spend most of your time walking around the world and interacting with objects, which tells two stories - the description in our reality and the emotional imprint left only noticeable to thaumaturges. It’s interesting to see environmental storytelling expressed through a game mechanic. As you develop your skills, you gain high levels of insight into spaces scattered across the region. This power is also how you get into side quests and other exploration.
Now, we have to talk about combat. I LOVE combat in this game. It’s a “you can do no wrong” RPG, in that your use of points on your skill tree doesn’t matter all that much. The developers ensure that you will have enough points to experience almost everything at the time it is available. This also means in combat you will be able to use any build you prefer without having to respec or compromise other options. This does have the trade-off of making the combat portion of this game easier. I don’t think I died in my whole playthrough, but I did have an immense amount of fun. Instead of worrying about dying, I got to spend all of my time configuring my skills and buffs to new ways to exploit a new salutor that joined my team and I appreciate that. It must also be said that the combat is aesthetically so beautiful. All of the animations, characters, and salutors are brilliant and a feast for your eyes. I may have gotten sluggish on the story pacing, but the visuals never disappointed me.
Aesthetics It must be said that the design and animation of the salutors is some of the best character(?) design I have ever seen. I had heard of about half of the salutors and seen different depictions of them before, but these artists leaned into their macabre and ancient fairytale histories. They feel like demons, but they also contain this charisma - and I’m not just saying that because of the busty mermaid. They feel like taboo and that makes them all the more worthy of intrigue. I adore them and I grew attached to them. How they embody a flaw and that relationship to their mythos and use in folklore and storytelling is powerful. They’re all brutal in their own way, yet whimsical in their melodrama. The unique intimacy you are able to have is priceless.
As your progress, you will have numerous moments to experience the features of the world. Sometimes, you will gain a new perspective on the 3D renders - my favorite being the building that looks like a hand soap dispenser. Or, you will experience the animated drawings of an intimate, mundane moment, such as getting hot cocoa at a walk-up window. With the music - which is also excellent - I would be stopped in my tracks just taking in the moment. Playing through this historic, high-stakes, and painful period of history contrasted with these warm, small moments made me quite emotional at times. A testament to the developers mastery of the art and mechanics.
Questing and Pacing - The Only Downside There are only two issues I take with this game. First, is the pacing. To me, it felt like everything, whether side-quest or main storyline, took the same amount of time. Whether you were in Act I or II, it went at the same pace. It was hard to feel the escalation of the narrative when the pacing doesn’t put some pressure on and hit you in the face with the escalation. It may also be from the number of quests offered, which is my second issue. There are three types of quests: main, side, and urban adventures. I think the number and depth of the main story is good. The side-quests have a lot of variability in length and plot relevance, and are basically all worth doing - with some exceptions that are better than the main story. What I think could have easily been left out of the game are the urban adventures. These populate your quest log from random items you find in the streets, which is fine. However, they are all time-gated and it is never clear with how your progress. There are two ways to think about this. One, it’s inaccessible and not fun to put that much work into the lowest tier quest in the game, which likely has the smallest payoff. Two, urban adventures are for the people who love this game the most, and they will get the most pleasure in memorizing street names and addresses, so it serves them. Both make sense, but I fall into the former. What should be unanimously disliked is that sometimes, not all the time, these urban adventures will turn into full side-quests. WITH SALUTOR MISSIONS ON THE LINE.
I want to be clear, neither of these issues caused any significant issues with my play experience. It only elongated the time it took me to roll credits. I presume that these are nitpicks and many people won’t have noticed them in their playthroughs.
The Final Word This is full. I know I will return to this review weeks and months later to add a sentence or two because I forgot an interaction or side-quest plot that I have to fill in. It is almost overwhelming at times just how much you can explore in the density of this story and place. This is a special game. It provides the narrative depth of Pentiment with the game bonafides or an RPG - an impressive accomplishment! I think that even if you don’t stick with the story and play for 5-10 hours, it will have been with it. While you won’t get the full payoff, you will experience every part of this game that I have gushed about.
Please play this game.