In Warsaw in 1905, snow fell on the boundary monuments of three countries. My name is Victor Schultz, a strange magician who can see the “obsession spirit” — a kind of demon that parasitizes in people’s hearts and feeds on certain characteristics of his master: pride, inferiority, remorse, or nostalgia. My pipe always smells of sage, not only to exorcise evil, but also to cover other breaths of the city: vodka, soot, and the hope of fermentation in the cracks of the empire. _The Thaumaturge_ told me from the beginning that in this divided city, the most complicated mysteries are never in the file, but in the depths of people’s hearts.
The form of the obsession spirit depends on its “host”. The obsession of a Polish worker who is humiliated in a Russian factory may be like a rusty shackle; a banker who accumulates wealth in the Jewish quarter is like a gold-plated viper. My magic system is not combat, but “dialogue” — in the state of spiritual vision, I must deduce the essence of the obsession spirit and choose to tame it with intimidation, persuasion or sympathetic. But every choice will affect my relationship with the host, and even change their fate. The most exquisite design of the game is here: what you tame is not only the devil, but also the most real part of the self in people’s hearts.
The case is intertwined with supernatural and historical reality. The bizarre death in an alley eventually involved the experiment of the Russian secret police; an inheritance dispute revealed the discrete trauma of three generations of Jewish families. I need to play the role of detective, psychologist and historian at the same time, shuttle between the huts in the slums and the aristocratic salon, and interpret the debts of souls of different classes with the same skills. Sometimes, the most dangerous obsession spirit does not come from individuals, but spreads over the whole community — for example, the “tired spirit” that always wanders in the textile factory area, which is condensed from the chronic despair of hundreds of female workers and has begun to stain the loom with blood for no reason.
Warsaw itself is a character. The cobblestone streets reflected the light of the gas lamp on a rainy day, and the church spire on the other side of the Wisła River pierced through the low clouds. The game reproduces the details that have been simplified in history books: the Russian ban next to the Yiddish notice, the ink smell of the Polish underground newspaper, and the vague revolutionary ballads in the tram bells. Each of my choices is reshaping the subtle spiritual landscape of the city: if I choose to protect a young spirit with an “uprising obsession”, it may lead to a more severe search of the community by the police; if I purify the “spirit of conquest” of a Russian official, it may be possible to suspend the oppression, but make his Polish employees lose the opportunity to be promoted. .
As the investigation deepened, I found that my family’s secrets were also entangled in it. The notes left by the father record a rare “inheritance of the spirit of obsession” — it will parasite across generations and turn the sins or regrets of ancestors into the shackles of their descendants. When I finally saw the faint outline of the spirit body on my shoulder in the mirror, the detective became a patient, and the pursuer became the object that needed to be chased.
The ending of the game is not a simple purification or corruption. In the last magic ceremony, I faced the “collective obsession spirit” of the whole Warsaw — a huge existence composed of countless people’s pride, pain, resistance and compromise. I don’t have the power to destroy it. I can only choose what kind of contract to reach with it: become its new host and bear the whole weight of the city; or admit its existence and learn to coexist with these ineradicable shadows.
I chose the latter. When the contract was established, the obsession spirit did not disappear. It turned into a flock of crows and scattered to all corners of the city. And I can finally see that every pedestrian has spirit bodies of different sizes on his shoulders — some are docile like pigeons, and some are as restless as eagles. Warsaw hasn’t changed, it’s my eyes.
After exiting the game, I looked out of the window at the city where I lived. _The Thaumaturge_ did not give me a sense of victory to exorcise demons. It gave me a pair of spiritual eyes that could no longer be turned off. It made me understand that historical trauma never really passes. It is just transformed into various forms of obsession and lives in the corners of the hearts of generations. And the real supernatural may never be ghosts, but those psychological realities that we collectively choose to remember, what to forget, and why we hate and rely on certain scars, which are so complex to the point of magic. In the rift of every turbulent era, we are detectives and magicians who are obsessed with our own minds. While taming demons, we learn to reach an imperfect but sober contract with our own history.
