“Return to the Valley of the Mines in this faithful remake of the genre-defining open world RPG. Explore a hand-crafted, organic open world that reacts dynamically to your actions. Whether you’re a seasoned Gothic veteran or this is your first time being thrown into the colony, you’re in for a true RPG experience with unrestricted exploration like no other.” – Steam Description

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Gothic 1 Remake is a tough game. It does not and will not hold your hand. If you want a map of the region or town, you have to buy it. Your glossary of terms and quest log is a physical item that you carry on your person. It’s refreshing to play a game like this in the current “Yellow Paint” landscape of gaming. However, this level of freedom can come at a price, you can easily lock quests or break entire lines with a wrong dialogue choice, so it seems “save scumming” is rewarded.

You’re going to die. A lot.

What’s fascinating about a game like this to me, is that no two playthroughs will be the same. You don’t have quest markers, you don’t have a GPS arrow that tells you where to go, or who to talk to. You have to talk to people, and listen to what they say. An NPC will say to you “Look for my friend, I last saw them sneaking out at a cave near the pond.” and if you don’t know what pond or didn’t buy a map you’re going to have to explore. I found random loot in secret caves and underwater paths that let me into secret rooms. You are rewarded for exploring things. You don’t need to. You can join the first camp you see, talk with the first people you see, and have a barebones (in my opinion) experience.

• Graphics– The graphics are a massive improvement over the original, and they don’t look bad by any stretch of the imagination. They kind of give that “Unreal 5” feel which is a little generic at a glance. I think they work well, and a lot of the scenes are shot for shot recreations from the original game.
• Gameplay– This game slaps you in the mouth and expects you to ask for another. Honestly, you have to go into a game like this with some level of desire for the game to give you a hard time. You start at level 0, weak enough for a mole rat to kill you in two hits or a wolf to kill you in one. It’s unforgiving and you will die a lot. NPCs can knock you down and rob you of your gear and valuables. You are constantly reminded that this is a society formed and run by criminals at every step, but as you gain levels, gear, and skills you will start to carve out your own force. There’s something incredibly satisfying about almost losing to NPCs or a certain creature type and a couple hours later coming back and being able to handle the fight without a sweat.
• Sound– The soundtrack for the game is very good, and the developers know it. You can buy the soundtrack separately on steam, that’s how much faith they have in their soundtrack. However, the sound mixing sometimes is atrocious, when you get into cutscene dialogue with NPCs ambient sound will sometimes spike up to the point where if you didn’t have subtitles you wouldn’t have heard a word they said.
• Controls– The controls for this game are a little janky. The way combat is done is you have 4 attack buttons, on the controller you have the 4 face buttons that give one of the corresponding attacks: left to right, up to down, right to left, and down to up motions. It’s a combat system similar to the directional combat of Conan Unchained which allows for combos once you have unlocked some training, but it is a little clunky and daunting.
• Story– The story for Gothic is pretty thin, there’s an orc war and a king that needs ore from within the bubble for fighting the war. That’s just something you’re told though, as far as your story inside the barrier, you decide that for yourself. You can pick one of 3 camps to side with, most quests can be handled in a myriad of ways, and you can play the sides all the way up to whatever definitive quest makes you side with that camp. Be warned, you are locked in once you make that decision.