Gothic 1 Remake review

I've come to the edge of the swamp to collect hallucinogenic swampweed from a harvester on behalf of a cult who smoke it to commune with a sleeping god. I find the harvester up a rickety tower after fighting through the monster-infested bog, but he won't hand over the wacky baccy until I clear out the nearby bloodflies.

I can see some of those giant wasp jerks clustered on a beach near the magical barrier that prevents us from leaving this hellhole. I trudge over and laboriously kill them. If I lure them into attacking one at a time it's easy enough, but if a second comes along, parrying their stingers is much harder. Three at once? I'm probably fucked.

Eventually, I kill them all and climb the two ladders back up the harvester's fort to tell him it's done. But no. He says I need my eyes checked, because I haven't killed all the bloodflies within 20 paces. Looking out from the tower I can't see any, but there's a lot of thick swamp nearby. I head back into it, being eaten by a surprise swampshark and then reloading before I find another swarm. I kill them and return to the tower, climbing both ladders again. You must need your eyes checked, the swampweed harvester tells me. You haven't killed all the bloodflies within 20 paces.

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Knee-deep in swampwater, hunting for what I hope are the last bloodflies, I find myself thinking a blasphemous thought: "I sure do wish this quest had a compass arrow pointing me in the right direction like in Skyrim."

Over the wall

The original Gothic came out in 2001 and found an audience among people who, when Morrowind arrived a year later, thought it made too many concessions to modern players—what with the silt strider fast-travel and free map. Gothic did not have either of these things, and neither does the remake. It's a fantasy RPG committed to grim-and-gritty realism.

The aforementioned magical barrier was supposed to enclose a prison colony where convicts mine magical ore. Something went wrong and the barrier isolated an entire valley, including the wizards who cast it. The prisoners turned on their guards, cut a deal with the wizards, and now have a workable little carceral state of their own.

Ore goes out and criminals go in, alongside a tithe of outside-world luxuries to keep the miners happy, like cheese and beer. On the shipment in the opening cutscene, among the sacks and barrels, there's also a bound woman in a corset. Gothic wants you to know it's a grim and awful setting from the off, and it begins as it means to go on.

A nameless criminal with an undefined past, you also go through the barrier in that opening cutscene. The colony you find isn't as united as the system they've got going makes it seem. While the Old Camp continues mining and dealing with the outside world, there's also a New Camp stockpiling ore to blow a hole in the barrier and escape, and a Swamp Camp where cultists live, believing a god called the Sleeper will free them when awakened.

What follows is an open-world RPG where you choose between three factions, and which is deeply indebted to the era the original was made. To get a map you have to buy it, and while it shows where you are and lets you drop markers for locations of interest, there's no compass or quest markers. When a questgiver says you need to go to the cave near the pond, you just have to figure out which body of water they mean. Occasionally an NPC will walk you to a destination, which is great because when they kill all the animals along the way you get XP for it.

There are a lot of wild animals in the colony, and they all want you dead. At the lower end, molerats and the younger scavengers—a kind of chickeny dinosaur—can be defeated when all you've got is a pickaxe and some rags, but otherwise you'll do a lot of running away and reloading saves when wolves or the bigger varieties of lizard monsters catch you.

Getting in fights with people is often better, not because you're any more likely to win in those opening hours, but because there's a chance when you lose you won't be dead. Those humans who don't have a reason to add murder to their list of crimes will knock you down, take some of your stuff, and then walk away, leaving you to recover and nurse a grudge so you can come back later for revenge.

Losing money and weapons can be so dispiriting you'll be tempted to just reload a save, though. The grind to get anywhere in Gothic is wilfully exhausting. Every faction wants you to prove yourself by performing multiple quests and several of those quests demand skills you don't have—combat or otherwise. Training costs money and "learning points" that you get at level-up, and you'll probably run out of quests you can safely complete and just end up jogging through the wilderness trying to find molerats and juvenile scavengers to kill for XP.

While earning those points can be a grind, going from a doofus who holds his sword wrong to a master of the blade feels great, as does tanking attacks that would previously have floored you once you finally get decent armor. Earning that armor is gated behind joining a faction, a choice that makes the opening chapter compelling. It's not that you're tempted by what the camps offer, but that they're nasty in such different ways. Rather than feeling like the belle of the ball being wooed by every organization in town, you're choosing the one that seems least awful.

Hack and dash

While the setting and story remain familiar from the original, combat's one of the remake's key changes. Enemies have a greater variety of attacks, molerats burrowing down to leap out of the ground at you and wolves pouncing from a distance. As in the original, your attack animations improve as you buy skills, and those initial clumsy swings get faster and easier to chain into combos. The remake's controls are better all round, with a lot of things that used to take two key presses now only needing one. You can even use the mouse to aim ranged attacks instead of relying on a clunky auto-aim.

The other obvious change is how it looks. The last 25 years of progress in haggard man-face technology are on full display in Gothic 1 Remake, with an endless parade of men who look like they once brought home a puppy they bought in the pub for their kid, and then had a hell of a time explaining it to the missus. They look like Black Sabbath roadies teleported in from the '70s. They look like the one uncle you only see at Christmas.

All the gnarled trees, muddy paths, and falldown huts look super detailed too and you get to see them in a variety of weather, from torrential rain to sunny days that actually seem quite nice. (They don't last.) The cost of all that detail is less clarity than the rudimentary-looking original had, and it takes a while to learn which herbs and other items are actual interactable objects rather than clutter.

Unreal Engine reflections and whatnot don't come cheap in terms of performance either, and you might have to turn things down from Very High to High to get a decent framerate. Those of a sensitive disposition might have a fainting attack at this, but you may even consider turning on frame-generation.

Meatbug Ragout

The reason I didn't stick with the original back in the day is how buggy it was, and while the remake's less buggy that's a bar so low it's subterranean. The NPCs are the worst, sometimes appearing and disappearing at random—two orcs sprang into existence right in front of me while I was carefully using arrows to lure their friend over, and that was that, time for another reload. An NPC I needed to talk to occupied the same space as a different guy, and I couldn't interact with either until they finally split up and moved away. One companion who was supposed to help me fight an earth elemental decided to attack me instead before I'd even drawn my mace.

Other NPCs sit in midair, have conversations with their necks tilted at a broken angle, wave a fan at an empty throne, repeat barks on a constant loop, and react to being saved by telling me to get lost. I haven't had any crashes, but two of my coworkers have. So yeah, it's less of a mess than the 2001 game, but you'll still encounter plenty of jank. I even got stuck in a rock and had to reload a save, which made me feel downright nostalgic.

I did not feel nostalgic about the lockpicking minigame, a new addition, but one that harks back to the era when minigames tried to make you feel like you really were doing the thing. You shift sliders left and right until the pins in them all come up red, but some of those sliders are connected and will shift other sliders when moved. If you push one when it's at the end of its pins your pick might break, though my patience usually ran out before my lockpicks did.

It may be new to the remake, but it fits perfectly with the original's German dedication to misery simulation. This is the kind of game where it gets so dark at night you can barely see even with a torch, and you have to put the torch down when you want to do basically anything. I mod newer RPGs to get rid of minimaps and add survival mechanics, but even I draw the line at having to drop a torch to draw a one-handed sword in the name of realism.

Hardcore to the mega

I thought I was getting an open world RPG that had a bit more grit than usual and instead Gothic is all sand. I crossed through the magical barrier and now I'm stuck in here with people who think the first Witcher was where the series peaked.

If that's you, if you have made hating Skyrim a cornerstone of your personality, you will love Gothic 1 Remake. Turn the 6 in the score upside-down and pretend it's a 9, because this is a whole-throated recommendation for you, my friend. For anyone else, Gothic remains what it always was—an admirable edifice, a reminder it takes all types, and a thing you would probably be better off enjoying in the form of a bugs-and-jank compilation video than actually wading through yourself.