The Thaumaturge

Graphical glitches aside this is an interesting little story of a game so far. The concept is good but the execution makes the gameplay very linear feeling. Maybe that will go away the further I get. The graphic glitches are mainly just annoying. There has be nothing persistent just seems like when cutting between scenes the character models don't retain their post and just for a split second have to reset to the proper view. The audio issues when it comes to conversations are a little more jarring. Usually happens if you go out of order on your choices that the audio and video desync momentarily. The video seems to be the primary cuplret would be my guess.

Unfortunately, I dropped the game half-way through. I got hooked by Vampyr vibes, good voice cast and an interesting premise, but I just can't for the life of me find the strength to deal with even one more fight with 3 drunks who think it's a good idea to fight a dude who can control literal demons. Granted, I hate JRPGs explicitly because of repetitive drawn out fights, so I'm biased here. But Jesus Christ, there's SO. MANY. BORING. FIGHTS. It's just padding, wherever your quest leads you - be sure you WILL get interrupted with "hey! what are you doing here!!! this is our place, we don't take kindly to yer kind 'round 'ere!!!!!" followed by a fight with 3 drunk dudes. I guess I'll never know how the story ends.

QoL could be better, an the story while fine, does not really me. but 1 had only one small bug, the VO is good, and the combat fun.

Usually the setting in which this game takes place is not my cup of tea. Everything slightly historical bores me to death. But the demons really make up for it. This game has the exact amounts of horror and tension for me to be totally captivating. I love the characters and the world, the story is well written and exciting. If I had the time, I would have been "binge-playing" the game, like it was my favorite netflix series. I love reading in games, like the Pillars titles, like Disco Elysium, Torment, BG series, so this game is what I was looking for. The turn based fight were good and most of the time doable. Only one fight for a salutor or the other hat to be taken several times until I succeeded. I had 2 or 3 hours of boring grinding, since I could not interact with locked items, but I did not notice at that point, that I first had to get a salutor in the main campaign, before I could actually access these hints. Could have spared me sometime with a littel tutorial heads up, but I don't mind in the end. Great Game, fully recommend it.

Just finished the campaign. Took me around 47h with almost all side quests I was able to find. I liked the game, especially the combat system with salutors. Story starts off slow (sometimes it's reeeeallly slow in Act 1 and beginning of Act 2), but picks up in pace at the end of Act 2 and in Act 3 is really interesting with high stakes. What I really liked here is these seemingly random fights that come up from nowhere, like bunch of randos start asking questions and you know it's going to be a fight there. This works wonders to break the slow pace in the beginning of the game, so good job there. Voice acting is decent, but don't expect AAA performance here. In few dialogs it almost feels like AI generated bland and soulless (but this is exception and not the norm. Just know that it's there sometimes). That's it yeah, in summary a decent 4/5 game with interesting combat system that has the potential to be even better in the next game.