Wunderdoktor PC Review

The entirety of the time spent with, or rather as, Wunderdoktor was in a travelling wagon in perpetual motion. Ringing the bell on my desk would bring another patient in, the steady stream of people with strange ailments convincing me that, while they may be missing hands and growing things out of their foreheads, everyone there had some really strong legs.

There’s a Papers, Please vibe to Wunderdoktor. You sit behind your desk for the entirety of the game, ringing your bell to have patients come in. Afterwards, you start examining them to find the source of their trouble. Sometimes, they’ll give you a hint via what’s said in their speech bubbles. In other scenarios, the eel that’s dug inside their heads can be quite easily spotted. When neither applies, you take off their clothes and proceed to investigating deeper using your trusty magnifying glass. There are a decent number of different diseases you can run into from berry pimples, to flies buzzing around someone’s head. Some patients cough spiders, while others have strange tree-like formations growing on them.

To deal with these problems you’ll use a number of tools, all of which are controlled using the mouse. Spiders must be dealt with using an injection or squashed with your finger, open wounds must be closed using a bandage that, for some reason, rotates around as you try to place it, requiring proper timing lest if fall off. Certain things need to be cut very precisely. You’ll kill flies using your fingers and make ghosts go away using something that very much resembles a fly swatter. There’s a certain order in which these need to be done, as ghosts can only be shooed away once you’ve fixed all the other problems the patient has and the game automatically assigns required tools to you. All of this also needs to be done within a certain time limit, shown by the candle on top of your stone gargoyle assistant’s head. For the most part, the game wasn’t particularly difficult as the utensils’ control smoothly. There were, however, a handful of situations when things did get a bit hectic, resulting in the patient’s candle running out and me having to try the procedure again from the start. While getting used to the mechanics involved in removing each disease is done pretty quickly, each of the game’s five acts introduces new ones, that make sure to shake things up a little bit. As you burn leftovers, or help various individuals, you’ll receive some rather interesting (or sometimes odd) drawing to add to your almanach, which is a way to keep track of the diseases you’ve encountered.

All this is, however, set to a story that’s a tad too straightforward. The promise of unmasking a medical conspiracy as you hack, cut, sew and bandage doesn’t have that great of a reward. Relevant events are relayed through limited interactions with certain characters and the occasional newspaper you receive, simply coming off as shallow. There are no unexpected twists or meaningful revelations, either. Furthermore, Wunderdoktor does try to add side activities of sorts. One time, a detective asked me to place a worm on the next person of a certain profession that comes in. I proceeded to carefully checking the professions of every patient until I found the right one. Several patients later, I could recover the worm and hand it over to the detective. I was rewarded with thanks and a medal at the end of his miniature quest line, medal which was added to the almanach. This would have been a neat opportunity to find more information on the conspiracy at hand, or even to simply tell more about the case I helped solve. These things, alongside the main story, are a large missed opportunity. Instead of expanding the world and providing a sense of depth, they are nothing more than shallow distractions from the core gameplay loop.

This is a bigger pity when you take into consideration that, while limited to your wagon, the different patients and conditions are portrayed in a weird, almost morbid style that gives the game its own visual identity. From people with eyes hanging out of their sockets, to coal miners whose skin was replaced by the very thing they’re mining, there’s a good amount of variety in Wunderdoktor. The soundtrack too, while not particularly memorable, does provide suiting background music for this sickened world you’re fixing. Wunderdoktor also never shows your character or paints any other motivations unto them. You’re there to heal people and fix a conspiracy. Why? Because you’re Wunderdoktor and the stone gargoyle assistant said so. This, alongside the fact that the tools are automatically given to you, instead of having the player pick them up themselves, makes for a rather impersonal experience.

Even without looking at it through a Papers, Please frame, Wunderdoktor suffers from being too straightforward with its story and side-quests and not deep enough in its writing. It misses out on the opportunity of properly fleshing out a world that could have been interesting. Its visuals do give it a pretty distinct identity and, from a gameplay standpoint, it does a good job at introducing new mechanics and making sure curing patients doesn’t get repetitive, while maintaining a fairly casual approach. It may even steal a chuckle or two with a handful of lines and some situational humor. As long as your expectations boil down to having a casual, somewhat carefree, puzzle-style title to spend a bit under three hours with, Wunderdoktor is a valid choice. Expect more from it and it will fall short.

Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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