It’s only recently that soon-to-be-released RPG The Thaumaturge popped up on my radar, but looking at the way it’s been described by various outlets as some kind of ultimate mega-combo ofPersona,Disco Elysium,Divinity: Original Sin, andPokemon—and the fact that it’s set largely in and around an alt-history Warsaw at the turn of the 20th century, I don’t know how I’ve slept on this one pretty much until the moment a review code arrived in my hands.
Now, I can’t talk about anything in the game beyond the part of the Prologue that’s already done the rounds around the internet, nor am I going to give anything resembling a qualitative judgment, but I do want to speak to all these comparisons that have been thrown around, because while I get why games press uses the ‘[little-known game] is like [super-famous game x] meets [super-famous game y]’ descriptor (Lord knows I’ve done it myself), sometimes that can be a little overused, concealing more about the game than it reveals.
So in buildup to the game’s launch March 5, let’s pull up those ‘Big Four’ it’s been compared to and really break down how similar itactuallyis to each of them.
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Divinity: Original Sin
Fun factoid: The Thaumaturge studio Fool’s Theory actually provided some support work for Larian on bothDivinity: Original Sin 2andBaldur’s Gate 3. But neither that, nor the isometric 3D perspective, automatically qualifies it as a Divinity-like game. Yes, combat is turn-based, but it’s a completely different kind of turn-based, with no movement, or action points, or arenas to run around and strategically position yourself around. From the fixed diagonal camera perspective to the comparative simplicity of the combat, the combat is more Persona (which we’ll roll around to shortly) than Divinity.
Divinity and Baldur’s Gate 3 are also pretty much immersive sims in the massive freedom they offer in exploring environments, finding multiple routes, and their general spirit of D&D improvisation. The Thaumaturge is much more straightforward and linear in its approach. I guess you can draw some parallels in terms of the fact that you have dialogue options which can sometimes get you out of combat situations, but even these are gated by your proficiency in certain thaumaturgies rather than based on dice rolls. This isn’t a game about Larian’s much-vaunted ‘D&D-style’ freedom, but an adventure with a few RPG systems thrown in.
And on that note, The Thaumaturge ismuchlighter on RPG systems than Larian’s heavyweights. Stats don’t factor in nearly as much, leveling is simplified to skills and abilities, and you can’t go breaking into every home and nobleman’s pocket that you find.
Similarity: 4/10
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium is one of the most verbose games out there, and it earns the right to that by also being one of the best-written games out there (much like its spiritual predecessor Planescape: Torment). The Thaumaturge doesn’t really go in for heavy internal monologuing and dense writing in the same way, and it’s far less reliant on RNG and far more combat-based (what with combat basically being non-existent in Elysium). Also, even though both games have a fixed protagonist, Elysium’sveryold-school RPG in its sheer number of builds and the significant ways they affect your playthrough of the game. In The Thaumaturge, a bit like in The Witcher, there is no initial stat distribution or character creation.
There are definitely some parallels between the troubled, politically tense cities of Elysium’s Revachol and The Thaumaturge’s ‘Eastern Europe but with some magic.’
There’s a whole detectivey-investigative element to The Thaumaturge however, where you use your magical ‘Perception’ ability to detect objects in the environment and the memories they hold therein. Your ability to do so will depend on your distribution of Thaumaturgy abilities, and what you detect from these objects—whether it’s the scent of a person or the raw emotions with which a dead goose was strangled by someone—can be used to learn about an investigation you’re looking into, which then opens up new dialogue options and means of concluding the investigation.
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Then there’s the matter of the setting itself. There are definitely some parallels between the troubled, politically tense cities of Elysium’s Revachol and The Thaumaturge’s ‘Eastern Europe but with some magic’ at the turn of the 20th century. Revolutions, workers’ revolts, and conflicting narratives are in the air, so there’s a similar general atmosphere of disgruntlement and unrest in the air. They’re both rich, unique and historically inspired settings, and I can see those who enjoyed learning about Revachol also getting into the world that Fool’s Theory has crafted here.
Similarity: 6/10
What’s the core conceit of Pokemon? Capturing cutesy critters then using them in battle. And in its own twisted, warped way, The Thaumaturge does tick that box. As the titular magician, you’re able to liaise with and tame demonic entities known as Salutors. There are four different categories of Salutor—Heart, Mind, Word, and Deed—which feed on human flaws, and by taming them you can then use them to aid you in battle, dishing out damage, leeching health, and generally effing enemies up.
And yes, there’s turn-based combat too, but as we established with the Divinity comparison, that’s like saying a game with ‘real-time’ combat is like another game with real-time combat. It’s just too broad to be relevant, even if The Thaumaturge’s relatively static combat feels more ‘JRPG’ than ‘Western RPG’. Beyond that, The Thaumaturge is so massively different tonally, mechanically, thematically to Pokemon, that all it’s really got in common is the fact that ‘you catch creatures. That gives it a few points on the ol’ similarity spectrum, but hardly makes it a Pokemon-like to me.
Similarity: 3/10
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Now this one’s kind of interesting, because The Thaumaturge’s Salutors can, thematically, be better compared to the Personas from Persona than to the critters from Pokemon. Much like how Personas are a manifestation of a person’s psyche, Salutors come into being through individual peoples’ ‘Flaws,’ and so are a manifestation of the psyche as well. Their function in the battle system—which again more closely resembles Persona’s than that of any other game mentioned here—is similar too, fighting alongside you to topple your enemies. The nuances of the combat system are different,
But what about the rest of the game? You’d think that with one being a hyper-vibrant anime-styled tale of high-schoolers battling demons, while the other is a grim alt-history RPG set in early 20th-century Poland, that they couldn’t be more different, but there’s actually a bit of a throughline there. Persona is a JRPG par excellence—colourful companions, linear storytelling, thematic anime influences—while The Thaumaturgeseeminglyowes more to a more western RPG tradition, with a bigger focus on dialogue choices and investigation.
As mentioned earlier under the Divinity comparison however, The Thaumaturge is pretty streamlined as western RPG elements go, and a case could be made that its fixed protagonist, relative linearity, and narrative focus over ‘be who you want to be’ tilt it back towards that JRPG tradition.
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Conclusion
So upon deeper investigation, what can we conclude? Well, if youhaveto pick two games from there, then ‘Disco Elysium meets Persona’ is probably the most accurate smushing together of two games to describe The Thaumaturge, but even then we’re still looking at 12/20 on my totally scientific overall similarity metric. The Thaumaturge is clearly its own beast, with the comparisons to other games in this case being headline hooks that don’t really paint an accurate or helpful picture of the reality here.
You’ll need to wait a few weeks for my review, but what this shows is that some games lend themselves better to ‘this is ‘x’ meets ‘y’’ descriptions than others. Yes, everything will be influenced to an extent by something that came before it, and those punchy headlines are a good way to get eyes on an article, and ultimately on the game, which is good publicity-wise for an interesting lower-budget title like this, but also doesn’t quite do justice to its individuality.
So let’s try again: The Thaumaturge is a promising mid-budget RPG that boldly integrates elements of slavic folklore and magic into the unique historical setting of Poland at the turn of the 20th century… with demons you can tame and some investigation stuff. I wish more RPGs would be so brave as to blend history with fantasy like this, and I’m excited to dig deeper into it over the next few weeks.
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