Wunderdoktor

Wunderdoktor

A macabre and gothic doctor simulator with a strange and grotesque cast of sickly patients. Play the role of a traveling doctor through a dark yet cartoonish world to cure the downtrodden and otherworldly patrons who visit you, while at the same time uncovering clues to the bigger story.

Wunderdoktor uses a cute paper cut-out picture-book style to communicate a much darker vision of the medical world, and the mysterious greedy souls on the top who plague it.

Gameplay

Wunderdoktor starts off feeling like a casual clicker, and it mostly is. The creative and almost cinematic little storybook visits from oddball patients are a collection of seemingly simple mini-games, where you square down the fun and core mechanics of popping boils, squashing buzzing pests around a patient's head, or even popping their dangling eyeball back into its socket. As time goes on new plagues arise, stronger and craftier than the last. New ailments become not only harder to cure, but even harder to diagnose.

Some patients may appear to be physically fine, in fact, with no ailments to visually speak of. Their problems are much worse, and much harder to pinpoint or cure usually dealing with ghosts or other inner demons that plague the mind of certain special patrons. A smiling and physically fit old watchmaker may seem sound on the outside, but further investigations let you see ghosts that haunt the poor old man's surroundings. Every new patient gave me a giddy exciting new feeling curious to see what freakish new illness I'd have to cure next, and what next bit of the story with the evil Quack Co. would unfold.

Eventually you'll need to concoct some wonder potions of your own, and the ingredients to do so are more or less a mystery. To research the bizarre recipe to these healthy and helpful potions you'll need to harvest some of the stranger anomalies from your patients and their ailments, most notably the Berry Pimple juice popped from the boils on the residents of a more green and natural town. It all sounds pretty gross, and it only gets grosser, but somehow the hand-drawn art and playful animations make the whole thing more charming than offensive.

In a sort of cool metaphorical real world message the Quack Co. pharmacists will periodically try and sell you their popular pain killing elixirs. These quick acting and highly addictive substances are filled with nasty side effects many of which you'll encounter as a doctor, yet remain the most popular choice of relief for the low-income working class citizens. In a period in our own reality where human beings fall victim to the opioid crisis and other industries that seek to make us unhealthy while corporations profit more and more from sickness and death, this was a sobering message in an otherwise cute, casual, and visually family friendly game.

Final Thought

Wunderdoktor is a special kind of engaging and casual game. It's in the same tier of addictive clicking trial and error discoveries that was found in Little Inferno or Papers, Please, and with a little bit of arcade medical sim mini-game action like Trauma Center. The story of corporate greed and their preference for profits over people keeps you engaged and emotionally invested from beginning to end.

This review made possible through the consideration and contribution of IndiePromo and the developer/publisher.

Email contact@dnbmedia.co for requests & game promotions

Unique little puzzle game.

Hard to compare it to anything else but to drop a few names:

• Papers please
• Cook, serve delicious
• Trauma Center

Very nice atmosphere and weird patients that will make you smile. The game will be finished in a few hours that will fly by like nothing because the game is quite entertaining and though you kinda do the same all the time, it is always mixed up with something new that keeps it interesting and fresh.
Also the story is quite nice, even though it does not go all the way down the rabbit hole.

All in all it kept me entertained for the 3-4 hours it took me to finish (with most of the achievements, except perfect run that will take about 2-3 hours to complete, I guess).
The game can be quite challenging at times but it is also very forgiving, as you are not really punished, if you fail (you can just repeat each treatment until you manage to succeed), so it is suitable for casual players as well as hardcore gamers (if you go for the perfect run achievement).

Also the soundtrack is nice, like the art style (but you can decide about that yourself by watching the trailer).

tl;dr:
Atmospheric little indie game that will keep you entertained for a few hours. If you are intrigued by the trailer, go grab it!

Stay still or you’re going to get stabbed, and it’s not going to be my fault.

Wunderdoktor is one of the games I have that I picked up both because the gameplay looked like it would play as another that I liked and with how unique and weird it looked. With the premise sealing the deal for me more or less. However, on my original plan of playing it after picking it up, that didn’t happen and I’m just now getting to it. With how popular Papers, Please became and how surprisingly fun it was, we have gotten games that were like it or at least parallel to it. I’d say Wunderdoktor is parallel to it, and I’m mostly sure that this was the reason I was interested. Well, looks like it’s time for me to finally play it and see how it is after all these years.

Wunderdoktor has you play a traveling doctor on a train. You’re referred to as Wunderdoktor and your patients have some weird ailments affecting them. After treating your first few patients, and reading a newspaper on what’s happening lately outside of your train cart, you’re approached by a potion selling Quack that wants you to give potions to your patients and send them on their way. Before you have the time of filling it out, a strange stone creature named Stein pops up. Telling you to not order potions, as they only relieve the pain temporarily and are addictive, so you do. After all, you want to cure what ails your patients and hopefully not have them coming back. Stein actually worked for the Quacks before he escaped and he even managed to grab a recipe that they didn’t want to make. Curious on why, you set out to find out. The ingredients should be easy to get, as you’ll eventually get them through treating patients.

As you’re traveling through the couple of locations your train will be going through, you have patients to take care of. Ringing the bell once you’re ready, your patient will come in and say a line or two which may include how they got into their current position. For the most part, you will clearly see what’s wrong with them and it’s just up to you to figure out hot to deal with it (though Stein does help with the aspects that will hurt you or the patient). Sometimes, it requires a bit more to find out what’s wrong. Some patients will require their shirt to be removed to reveal what’s hiding and some will have you use a magnifying glass to reveal what’s hiding. You’ll come across a variety of conditions and they get harder as you go along the game. You start with simple pimples that you just have to pop or annoying flies to kill, but you soon get patients with spikey branches that you have to cut off, a bundle of painful pimples that you have to time right to remove painlessly, thorns that can’t be removed until everything else is, and consitions that need you to do a specific melody. There are even ghosts that can haunt your patients and can cause their own havoc, like shaking the screen or throwing leeches at you, that you can’t smack away (which the smack is so satisfying, I wish there were more patients that needed a smack). The simple ailments that you see at the beginning will even return, but be harder to deal with as they, say, swing around.

Oh and did I mention that there is a timer? Stein grows a candle when a new patient comes in and it melts as time goes on. The candle will also take a good hit if you hurt the patient or hurt yourself. This makes certain patients a hectic appointment as you’re trying to click the stupid mosquito-like bugs and annoying telling your patient through he screen to stay still. There are these little creatures that can increase the candle, but the blue mist that summons them doesn’t pop up that often so just do your best.

Wunderdoktor does have collectibles in the form of the Almanach, which will hold all these different scraps of paper that you’ll be given or making. You’ll be getting the most Almanach entries through the incinerator once the meter fills up every time you successfully treat a patient or incinerating parts of what fell off of them. There are also some that are story scraps, which are tied to certain patients that you’ll need to help to get it, which usually means getting an item from a patient and giving it to another. You won’t know when the first one comes, but generally when you can take something off and have the option to put it back on, keep it until a future patient mentions that they need or want it.

Verdict

Wunderdoktor is a pretty good game all things considered. While there are some annoying conditions that you’ll have to deal with, and some will bring you to the wire, this does enough to grab your attention and wanting you to continue playing. I also like how this went with the weird route as I did quite like how the characters were designed (and looking forward to what the next one will look like) and the different conditions they come in with.

I’m actually a bit glad that I waited so long so I could write this review, and after wondering if the developers made another game, I found out they did (and it was released on my birthday), and it’s a photography game so I’m definitely picking that up.