Gothic 1 Remake review-in-progress: "A beautiful remake of a true original, but too much jank made the cut too"

Gothic is rated 18+, but that's nothing to do with the content in the game. It's because of the endless torrent of red-faced swearing it inspired from me when playing it. In fairness, Gothic enjoys swearing at me too. Almost as much as it enjoys killing me, confusing me, withholding crucial information from me, and wasting my time. Stick with it and you'll find an incredibly rewarding remake of a true original. But dear God, who wanted a game that was like Kingdom Come Deliverance except less user-friendly?

Unlike Kingdom Come, we're very much in fantasy land here. The King is at war with an army of orcs, and he's got all the prisoners in some grim mining colony endlessly collecting ore to make weapons. But, a magical explosion suddenly leaves all those prisoners trapped beneath a one-way magic dome. An uneasy truce is forged between the King's forces and three rival camps all living under this literal thunderdome.

You play a criminal who's lowered into the dome and you've barely landed before a thug greets you with a punch to the face. You're called the 'Nameless Hero', but you're not a hero. You're nothing, and Gothic never lets you forget it. Dare to leave the starting camp's walls and you'll be mauled to death by a monster in two hits, three if you're lucky. I'd strongly recommend glueing your finger to the quicksave key.

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Weapons barely help. You're about as clumsy with a sword as it's possible to be without operating it with your nostrils. You're slightly better with a bow, but even then you can't hold a shot for long without starting to shake like a freelance writer getting Gothic code on Monday and suddenly remembering the review is due Friday.

Tuition fees

Improving your skills isn't simply a matter of leveling up and picking from a skill tree (yawn). You have to find someone willing to teach you new abilities. And you better have enough learning points, and often a large chunk of money. I blew a ton of valuable ore and an even-more-valuable learning point just to learn how to loot teeth from the wild animals I was constantly fighting, as I was assured by the teacher that they'd fetch a high price from traders. Next time I see him, remind me to pluck out and sell his teeth…

I spent my opening hours desperately snatching up everything that wasn't nailed down and then selling it in the hopes of buying a half-decent weapon. Agonizing over whether to put my learning points towards combat skills or making the lockpick minigame less complex than brain surgery. When I discovered that the person I needed to speak to to get my strength skill up was one of the very first NPCs that talks to you in the game, I strongly considered quitting games journalism and becoming a war correspondent instead. Less stressful.

See, Gothic's true currency is information. The game encourages you to talk to every named character in its massive cast, mentally noting any facts you find. The map, when you finally obtain one, has no markers on it. Want to know where the other camps are? Better put on a pot of coffee and get gossiping. Or why not wander around in the forests and hope for the best? Ha! Yeah, good luck with that…

The benefits of being treated this horribly is that every victory in Gothic feels like winning the lottery on the same day all your childhood bullies file for bankruptcy. When a wolf attacked me and all-but bounced off my first set of decent armour, I practically wept with joy. By modern standards, the open world is tiny, but it's so ruthless that it feels massive.

I loved risking my way through its ferocious forests. Sometimes I'd stumble upon a hideout, and read the last words of a toymaker, then pretend to be moved by his plight while already planning to sell his life's work. Sometimes I'd find a hermit who'd teach me to climb if I brought him enough weed (yep). 99% of the time I'd find a quick, painful death, but that 1% was so good that I always wanted to continue playing.

It's got great dungeons, too. Enemy design is so-so but the environments are terrific and the sound design is truly evil. The horrible scratching sounds in the mines will be soundtracking my nightmares for months. Your arc from being a talentless dolt into a mighty warrior capable of conquering this land is about as good a power curve as I've enjoyed in a game.

None More Black

Given the title, premise, and brick-wall of a difficulty curve, you'd be forgiven for expecting a grimdark mopefest. Actually, Gothic is a lot funnier and more interesting than that. The prisoners have split into three camps. You start in the Old Camp, who still trade ore with the King each month. The Swamp Camp believe in a God called the 'Seeker' who they think will release them from this prison (and you'd believe that, too, if you smoked as much swampweed as this lot). And then there's the New Camp, searching for a way out and perhaps the most dangerous of the three.

The Swamp Camp is a great mix of sincere religious followers and people who clearly just prefer getting high to mining ore all day. They're ridiculously trusting, even when I was 'undercover' but still wearing the uniform of a rival camp, which is what happens when you don't enjoy your herbs in moderation, kids. Tensions between the camps start poor and only get worse. It's much more compelling than the usual humans-rule orcs-drool nonsense. There's some great stuff off the critical path, too. I can't remember the last fantasy RPG that asked me to become a drug dealer.

So the dialogue is fun, the gameplay is tough but fair, and it tells an original tale. What's the problem? Well, this is a remake of a 25-year-old game that was considered janky even in 2001. Unfortunately, I think this redo has been a little too faithful to some design choices that were crap 25 years ago, and prison-worthy now.

One quest involved a Swamp Camp guru wanting me to recruit more of the Old Camp populace to their religious cause. OK, so logically I should head back to the Old Camp, try talking to some of the NPCs, and see if they'd prefer smoking grass all day to back-breaking manual labor. Right?

Wrong. The actual solution is to stay in the Swamp Camp, talk to an NPC called Melvin who had previously escaped from the Old Camp, and ask him if he knows one specific person who might be interested in escaping. Huh? You'd have to be clairvoyant or the quest writer to follow that train of anti-logic.

Think I'm just an idiot? Agreed, so let's have a worse example. A woman in the Old Camp feels threatened by a guy called 'Bullit' (can't imagine why). I offer to take care of him and she tells me that Bullit likes to drunkenly wander around outside the camp every night, crucially out of sight of the guards. Perfect!

Everyone's on a unique daily routine, you see. That means you can rush eagerly into the forge, only for the selfish blacksmith to be too busy sleeping to buy all your stolen weapons. You can wait around for time to pass, which is as exciting as it sounds, or you can go to sleep to pass the time. Where's the only bed in each camp you're allowed to use then? Oh, dear, sweet, naïve reader. After everything you've learned about Gothic from this review, do you really think it's going to be forthcoming with that information?

The hero is so horribly incurious, too, that he only bothers to ask one NPC in the Old Camp where that bed is. Gah! This isn't an uncommon problem, either. Countless times I'd be speaking to someone who clearly had information I wanted, like the whereabouts of a location or crucial story character, but be offered no dialogue option to check.

Get Stuffed

Anyway, I slept until nightfall, sought out Bullit, then waited patiently for him to begin his nightly drunken jaunt. A wait made excruciating by the fact he wouldn't stop barking "ahhh, that's the stuff." Every. Few. Seconds. Gothic hates silence. The soundtrack never stops blaring and everyone keeps yelling gibberish constantly. Nonsensical barks that are too often incoherent with what's currently happening in the game.

One NPC who you briefly team up constantly tells you to "STOP!" even though he doesn't actually want you to stop, or even speak to you. Quest givers will thank you for helping them and then tell you to piss off in the same breath. It's really hard to ignore this when the game is demanding you wait around to learn someone's schedule and have a stupid repeated soundbite drilled into your skull.

Sometimes the jankiness of the affair is more endearing. Like when I plotted with a woman to abandon the Old camp and betray its leader, without the leader realizing, even though he was sitting right next to us. I celebrated by breaking into the chest on the other side of his chair and stealing all his stuff, all while he somehow still remained none the wiser.

But, other times the jankiness makes you long for a less faithful remake. When Bullit finally tired of informing me that was the stuff, he got up to leave and then wandered drunkenly around the camp for several laps before leaving, at a pace that would embarrass snails. He never seemed in any danger of noticing me or even caring I was following him, so there was no skill being tested here except saint-like patience. Tailing missions in games are almost always terrible, so it's borderline impressive to deliver the worst one I've ever endured.

Shame, because when the immersive sim magic does cohere, Gothic is glorious. I thought I'd locked myself out of a quest because I'd lost a fight I needed to win. My rival was now refusing to even speak to me, let alone challenge them to another bout. Turns out I was being too polite, and the solution was just to punch them in the face and get another fight going (God how I wish that was the solution to Bullit's quest…) There's a terrific RPG remake in here, but it would've benefited from more polish and being less afraid to rework the bad bits. Fingers crossed for another attempt in 2051, eh?