Gothic 1 Remake Review – Brutal, Unforgiving, and Proud of It

Gothic 1 Remake Review

Sometimes games have an identity problem. The developers have a vision for game that’s way different than what players experience. For example, Pearl Abyss’ Crimson Desert was supposed to be a game where players figured stuff out on their own. Instead, players just complained about opaque systems, poor quality of life and missing features. The developer made some smart and ongoing changes and the final game is much better for the player feedback. On the other hand, the Gothic 1 Remake has no such identity crisis. It’s a new and technically improved version of the 2001 original, but it sticks amazingly close to the philosophy and design that made Gothic a cult RPG-fan favorite. It’s highly unlikely that, aside from bug fixes, Gothic 1 Remake is gonna change.

A Hero in Name Only

Action games tend to be power fantasies. Even in games where the player-character starts out weak, the ramp-up to mastery can be very fast. If you’re a skillful player and know what you’re doing, you can beat the first boss of Elden Ring within the first few minutes. Gothic 1 Remake is the polar opposite. Your un-named character starts the game knowing precisely nothing. Not how to wield a weapon, cast a spell, learn a skill or craft a potion. There’s no map unless you buy one, and no coin to buy it with unless you earn it. And when you do get a map, there’s nothing on it to suggest where to go. In Gothic Remake the road to even minimal competence is exceptionally slow by design. This was an important element of the original, too.

If you want to level up a skill, you need to find a trainer, and to do that means talking to dozens of NPCs and completing minor tasks to appease them and earning ore to pay them. There’s no sprawling skill tree. Impatient gamers accustomed to more benign, faster-paced  RPGs will bounce off Gothic’s glacially slow and sometimes frustrating, incremental progression.

Just as with the original, though, there will be players who relish the relative realism of Gothic 1 Remake’s struggling hero. There’s certainly an internal logic, and it can’t be denied that each hard-won upgrade or battlefield success feels all the more sweet. The power fantasy kicks in much, much later, but it comes. Getting there requires quite a few hours of struggle at the start. Again, this runs entirely contrary to most RPGs, which try to hook players into some minor success early on.

Swing and Miss

As befits a game that benefits from 25 years of game evolution, combat in Gothic 1 Remake is improved over the original in just about every way. You begin by inexpertly swinging whatever weapon you can find, because it will take some amount of ore to buy a good one. Until you find a trainer and upgrade your skills, whatever sad pickaxe you happen upon will do little more than keep the lowest-level enemies at bay. On the island of Khorinis, everything wants to kill you, and most things can. Now and then an NPC will accompany you on a trek outside the camp. They kill everything along the way, giving you free XP while you listen to them blather on.

While combat starts out frustratingly awkward by design, controller implementation and animations are much improved and by mid-game it feels very satisfying. Unfortunately, there are also quite a number of combat-related bugs, and not the kind killed by a broken axe. Overall, the game’s performance is hampered by a lack of polish and optimization. My Ryzen 9 and GeForce 4090 with DLSS and no frame gen averaged around 38FPS in 4K.

Under the Dome

As far as fantasy RPGs go, Gothic 1 Remake has an interesting narrative premise. An island valley is trapped inside a magical barrier that was only supposed to constrain convicts in a colony. But the spell went awry and now no one can escape. The prisoners have taken over the means of production. Ore goes out, more prisoners and luxury items come in to keep everyone happy. You play as a nameless prisoner with an ill-defined past, with a letter to pass along to a mage inside the barrier. It’s a step up from “character with amnesia.” I’ll take it.

There are three factions that you can align with: The Old Colony, the New Colony or the Swamp Colony. Each offer a differing set of trainers and skills. For instance, the Swamp Colony is a religious faction devoted to a diety called the Sleeper, with a religious practice — and lifestyle, to be honest — based on recreational hallucinogens. Players interested in a “magic” build would gravitate there. However, choices have serious consequences. Aligning with one colony — which you will have to do — locks you out of trainers, NPCs and quests from another. Most of this closely mirrors the 2001 original.

Gothic 1 Remake’s story, characters and dialogue are honestly a mixed bag, with some excellent performances alonside some really uncommitted ones. The dialogue — and there’s a huge amount of it — inconsistently mixes contemporary and fantasy language. It’s too often blandly expository and feels like it needs the help of an experienced fantasy writer. There are welcome touches of humor underneath the grime and sweat but overall the tone is bleak.

A Quarter Century Later

Overall, Gothic 1 Remake accomplishes the goal of looking like a contemporary AA-game punching above its class, with tons of detail to the environments, impressive lighting and weather effects and all the graphical bells and whistles you’d expect. As noted, it comes at a performance cost. On the audio side, Kai Rosenkranz’ orchestral score has some really effective moments and helps alert the player to danger, underscores the introspective moments but mostly gets out of the way. Rosenkranz was the composer for the original Gothic trilogy.

To its great credit, Gothic 1 Remake does not try to smooth out the challenge or design approach of the 2001 original, choosing instead to make significant graphical upgrades and add layers of improvement to combat and other mechanics. It turns on its head the front-loaded pacing gamers have come to expect, holding off the most rewarding gameplay for many hours in. It can be punishing, not because the player lacks skill, but because its world is just that way. Updates and patches will hopefully iron out performance and the bugs, but Gothic 1 Remake will always primarily appeal to RPG fans undaunted by its unforgiving approach to the genre.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***