Old-timey German RPG Gothic had a few spiritual successors, but most were offshoots from the same studio. Thanks to pre-digital distribution limits of 2001, it was obscure in North America, which of course means it never existed. It didn’t even have Mario in.
But Gothic was also special. Gothic 1 Remake (whose refreshingly honest, direct name honours us) chose a path made of tightropes: to be neither a perfect recreation or a wholly new entity wearing its skin, but to modernise and improve while still bringing that distinct and contrary design into an era preoccupied with the safe, infinite, frictionless paste of Content.
The result is a huge vindication for everyone who took on that challenge (minus the bloodsuckers who canned them), and a game that reuses a map I’ve played through several times, but still got repeatedly lost in. And I want to get lost in it again.
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As before, the premise and game world work in perfect synch: You, Some Guy, are booted into a penal colony sealed behind a one-way magical dome. Its inmates rebelled long ago, but continue working the local mines, using their magical ore to trade for imports, and as internal currency. Not everyone agreed, so three camps emerged: anarchists, theocratic collectivists, and class traitors.
You’ll visit the latter first, die horribly trying to reach the others, or reach them and need to come back for something anyway. Especially if you favour the Swamp Camp, who share free rations of their holy herb, but whose culty hierarchy is so strict that the guys who test prospective members refuse to even talk to you until you figure out a workaround.
You must join a camp, see. Eventually the plot converges regardless, but Gothic Remake frontloads seemingly half its run time in its first chapter as you get to know three micro-societies, and repeatedly die while figuring out how things work, because you’re utterly helpless for quite some time. But this is the important bit: it’s difficult not for some tiresome posturing idea of (ugh) “hardcore”, nor the revisionist fantasy that old games were all harder. It’s difficult because you’re not special. You can become special. But you need other people to get there.
Joining any camp means doing favours for the right people, because everything is built on social bonds and mutual gain. Even reaching the other camps is near impossible unless someone leads you there. Remake adds a map marker to show your position (boo! Booooo!) but only if you find a map in game first, and most journeys still mean several minutes of running. Joining a camp doesn’t bar you from the others. They’re interdependent, not existentially opposed. Most people have at least one friend somewhere else, because that’s how people are.
Levelling up raises only your health, and grants learning points that are useless until spent on someone who can train you. You don’t suddenly gain knowledge or skill through innate ubermensch player-ness. You don’t “unlock” shit. Other people share it with you, often with spoken tips and explanations that visibly change how you move, like holding the sword properly or rolling after falls. It makes the beginning confusing and frustrating, as no camp offers every trainer, and you won’t even know some options exist until you happen to find them. But these demands and limitations get you talking to everyone, and thinking about how to contribute, not just force yourself on its world. However important you become, you got there because other people helped you.
If you’ve played Gothic, you recognise all of this. Remake gets it. It’s faithful not out of reverence or nostalgia, but recognition of why that design is still compelling. It’s a restoration, brightening and embellishing only in ways that augment its strengths. I wrote in 2016 that Gothic wasn’t particularly pretty, and boy did they pick up that gauntlet. Remake wisely retains the all-timer landscape, with all its verticality and hidden bits, and that naturalistic feeling that things exist for an in-world reason. But it now looks fantastic, and lush with detail that accentuates rather than distracting. Even at heat-defying, bottom of the barrel graphics settings (which happen to add a charming faux retro trim).
I first reached the Swamp Camp at night, its torches and blue bug-lamps throwing colours into the pitch black, densely wooded and confusing warren of paths. It’s a more believable home and stronghold: Nobody is raiding this place without getting lost, and jumped from treehouses and suspended walkways. Most importantly, it shows restraint. The New Camp’s central quarry, when you first walk into it, feels like it must have in 2001. It’s a gorgeous upgrade, immediately familiar to old hands, and identifiable to newcomers even though it’s just roughly hewn huts. It’s artistic judgement and skill served by superior technology, not swept out by it to chase fleeting spectacle.
The wilds are filled with decorative life, midway between ease of navigation and capacity to get enjoyably lost. It’s a joy to explore, all the more so when you feel out of your depth, but still manage to sneak and flee and dive into a river to survive its many threats. Even more so when stumbling across an area you know you shouldn’t mess with yet just by looking at it. More so again when you chance it and are not attacked, and the only “loot” is two beers and some nearby plants whose value you have no idea of. Useable things are less glaringly conspicuous, but more exciting because they’re scarce. You have to pay attention and move with purpose, not hoover up endless piles of stuff in every direction. You don’t explore those corners because they look like the kind of place a video game would put A Reward. There’s probably nothing there. But there miiight be.
Its other improvements don’t dramatically change the design. It’s less necessary to go all in on melee/archery/magic, and although magic takes a lot of breaking into, dabbling is possible thanks to disposable spell scrolls. “Transform into creature” scrolls especially bring back that feeling of a game being kinda breakable if you really want to, not sterilised for “balance”. The script hits all the same beats, but carefully rewritten and performed to feel more natural, and secure with itself. The “piss off”s are more distracted than posturing, its goofier characters softened. Minor players hint at who they are, like the master pickpocket who does the “pssst! Over here!” bit… to warn you about the guy who beats up newcomers. He gains nothing, and doesn’t explain why he warned you. But you can infer: he just doesn’t like people doing that. It suggests.
Characters are sadly far less bothered now by killing, which still takes a deliberate, almost never necessary coup de grace of a downed opponent. Locking on to enemies in combat is frustratingly inconsistent, and some keyboard control options are annoyingly limited. Aside from enemy health bars that are fashionably unreadable beyond short range, the UI is vastly improved. Remake does not, thank god, ruin it with fast travel. But it’s possible now to ride a scavenger (big screechy raptor thing), if you find the right guy, and that’s fine!
There are, thank the other god, no map markers, or current bloody objectives either, and disabling all Notifications causes no issues (beyond the absence of a sound effect when levelling up. Automatic RPG excommunication). You’re not here to tick stuff off a list, but there is an unintrusive journal screen, with “quests”, and character lists that need a little more detail, as most move around throughout the day. Some NPCs can lead you to someone, but this is wasted on near useless options. There are tutorial pages too, and, thank the third, morally ambiguous god, none of this pops up or otherwise badgers you. Some, though not quite enough, come naturally through dialogue anyway.
You’re expected, and sometimes outright told, to figure a lot out for yourself. To wander, talk to everyone, and try things. Gothic Remake introduces some sensible modernisations and aids, but isn’t afraid the player will look away. It trusts you to have some patience, some curiosity, and above all, initiative. This can, I concede, be a problem, and lead to frustrating situations early on, where you’re stuck needing something with no clear way to access it, and too weak to do much.
Which makes it all the more disappointing and bizarre that some story parts suddenly have your character bellowing “THAT’S THE OBJECT I NEED TO INTERACT WITH” at the massive, glowing centrepiece of the otherwise empty room you just spent several minutes following a guy to. “I SHOULD TAKE THE THING I JUST ASKED HIM FOR OFF HIM” he adds, the nanosecond I knocked someone out in order to retrieve that thing. Later he suddenly moronologued a story question we’d already answered while I was trying to rob a forge, which – silver lining – gives a glimpse of what a godawful disappointment it would have been if this was its norm.
It’s difficult, in a word, to review Gothic Remake without falling into all the same gushing about the original, but vastly prettier and with countless small, but cumulatively powerful improvements. It even has a speck of jankiness that’s funny often enough to outweigh the times it’s irritating. Gothic was a standard setter for its genre even decades on, and now it’s the same too for the very concept of a remake. Sometimes, just sometimes, looking backwards really is the way forward.