All difficulty options in The Thaumaturge

Fool's Theory's latest title is surprisingly challenging, so players must acquaint themselves with the difficulty options in The Thaumaturge before diving in. These range from surprisingly easy, letting players kick back and enjoy the story and worldbuilding, to extremely tough, which makes each encounter a puzzle in itself. In a nutshell, all kinds of gamers have been accounted for.

Let's see which difficulty options are available to pursue. We will also see what changes these bring to the table in terms of affecting gameplay.

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All difficulty options in The Thaumaturge explained

The Thaumaturge boasts three distinct difficulty modes to pick from when starting a New Game. They are: Story, Balanced and Challenge. Here's how each differs from one another:

• Story: Combat is easier. This mode is for those wishing to focus on the story
• Balanced: Combat is challenging while allowing for a lot of freedom.
• Challenge: The combat is challenging. To win, you must plan your actions carefully

By default, the game uses a Balanced setting; however, players are free to choose whichever difficulty options in The Thaumaturge they like at this junction. As it is obvious from the description, these choices only affect combat difficulty. Outside its turn-based combat scenarios, the Thaumaturge is a fairly straightforward supernatural detective RPG game.

These skirmishes against other humans or worse, supernatural entities of Slavic folklore and myths, are highlights of The Thaumaturge. The battles are deeply strategic, with protagonist Wiktor and his Salutors possessing Skills (each having different speeds) that serve offense, support, and debuff purposes against enemies.

Combat requires some degree of thought regardless of the picked difficulty options in The Thaumaturge (Image via 11 bit studios)

Reducing an enemy's health to zero defeats them. Alternately, depleting all of their Focus gauge puts them in a Breakdown state, which allows Wiktor and his Salutors to perform a powerful special attack. Skills can also be augmented with Upgrades, further allowing inflicting ailments that can turn the tide in the player's favor.

Utilizing them while keeping in mind the order of the timeline on top of the screen that tracks when a Skill is played forms the basics of combat gameplay. At the Challenge difficulty, The Thaumaturge will not shy away from presenting foes that deal a lot of damage. On the Story difficulty, foes don't deal much damage to Wiktor so it is easy to take them out.

The difficulty options in The Thaumaturge can be changed at any time during normal gameplay (Image via 11 bit studios)

Some degree of planning is still required on both the Balanced and the easier modes. Enemies can stack debuffs like Bleeding and Suffering to make things worse. Those who are not good at turn-based combat but still wish to experience the wonders of The Thaumaturge and its alt-history setting should go with Story mode.

Players who do have a lot of experience with RPGs, and card games such as Slay The Spire, and love planning ahead will be delighted to meet the brisk difficulty on the hardest mode. Since difficulty can be changed anytime from Options > Gameplay and then under Combat, players are free to experiment all they want.

This is all players need to know about difficulty options in The Thaumaturge. Check out our full review of the game to know more about it.