We waited a long time for this, but maybe we need to wait a little more
There was an undeniable charm in the idiosyncrasies and jankiness of European-developed PC games during the early aughts. These games, colloquially referred to as “Eurojank,” prioritized complexity and depth over what the budget could actually accomplish: open-ended, nonlinear stories that came with obtuse user interfaces, clunky controls and game design choices that made one wonder what the developer was thinking. One game in particular defined the moniker more than any other, and that was Piranha Byte’s 2001 dark fantasy RPG Gothic. A few years back I played through a good portion of it, with some added mods to make it more modernized with quality of life choices, but wanted to hold off a full run once news of a true remake was announced.
So I had to ask myself: Does this remake add enough to make that wait worth it?
Set on the world of Morgrad, where humanity is nearing defeat in a war against Orcs, a desperate decision to send all convicts to a penal mining colony to gather resources, is made by the king; to ensure none can return a magical barrier is erected around the site, preventing any living thing from passing through once entered. This is all we are made aware of at the onset before taking control of a nameless hero, recently sentenced to be exiled into the colony. But before we are tossed in with the others we are given a letter to bring to a group of Fire Mages.
Accomplishing this one task is much harder than one would imagine due to the brutal nature of combat which is compounded by clunky animations and a grind that moves slower than molasses. The only way to initially progress is to spend a few hours running from any sort of combat situation, or at the very least only fighting one enemy at a time. The strategy to become stronger is done through quests and gathering items to sell for ore to upgrade weapons and skills. We are given the option of choosing one of three factions that determine how our character build will unfold but also how challenging the game will be during the initial chapter, of which the most interesting one was bugged out for me.
While there are plenty of the idiosyncratic elements I mentioned this time around in the remake (such as not ever being able to pick up a dropped torch or having the map buried in the inventory and not capable of being set to one of the quick inventory slots) these were not what ruins my experience to the point that I am unable to finish; it it’s the aforementioned technical issues. Gothic 1 Remake suffers from what I suspect is a nasty memory leak issue which leads to audio sources completely going haywire or disappearing altogether. Most of my playthrough was spent playing in a ten minute cycle of rebooting my game to not just be able to hear the environment and surrounding enemies once again, but to also stop the game from stuttering more and more.
In a game that took me three hours of in-game time to level up just once, of which an additional ten or so was from save scumming and resetting the game to fix glitches, I just did not have the heart to continue. While I would’ve been able to see it to the end without the technical mishaps, one other thing became apparent during this time that made me realize another big failing of this remake: I felt the modded version of the original played better than a professional remake made 25 years later. So no, it was definitely not worth the wait.
This review was based on a PlayStation 5 code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher.
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