Gothic 1 Remake Review — Shanked in the Chow Line (and Eaten by Lizards)

The Gothic 1 Remake is a hard game to score.

If you’re unfamiliar with the original and somehow haven’t pieced it together from the title, the Gothic 1 Remake is a total remake of the original, genre-defining, and downright brutal Gothic, which was released back in 2001, an era that many consider the golden age of fantasy RPGs. The remake was created with the goal of creating a modern, visually upgraded take on the original,while remaining incredibly faithful to what came before.

If we judge the criteria of a successful remake as one that delivers a more polished, graphically improved, but mechanically faithful version of the original, then the Gothic 1 Remake is a total success. I don’t believe there is a fan of the original, released over twenty years ago now, who would play this title without adoring it. The graphics are beautiful, and the gameplay is so reminiscent of the first that it feels dated in a way that I can definitely admit is very nostalgic.

That being said, the game is riddled with issues and design elements that both undermine the quality of the remake for the original audience and make the game hard for newer players to enjoy. Some of these issues are deliberate decisions that are true to the game’s core identity, while others are mistakes, oversights, or outright bugs.

On the subject of polarizing features, ones that returning players will love but that may put off new fans, the Gothic 1 Remake is hard, clunky, and at times downright awkward. Some of this, of course, is intentional. The original Gothic was designed to be an absolutely brutal and demoralizing adventure set deep within the confines of a literal rogue prison. The world hates you and wants you dead, and it will get its wish more often than not.

The game is deliberately difficult and deliberately confusing. The first six hours of my playthrough, pictured predominantly in this review, were spent just trying to figure out the starting area. There are no quest markers, and almost everything can kill you in one hit or less. You are too weak to use what good gear you can find, which is already in desperately low supply, and quests are few and far between. It wasn’t long before the only quest I was left with sent me deep into the map, past hordes of deadly enemies that I was not fit to survive because I just did not have the experience points to level up to level two. Again, this was the first six hours of the game for me, and while I know not everyone will have this same experience, I know plenty will.

That being said, the crushing difficulty of the Gothic 1 Remake did not inspire me to quit. Quite the contrary, the game’s brutal nature, deeply compelling setting, and straightforward goal kept me engaged through every pitfall and savage beating. To say that I was compelled to make it through to the other side of my prison sentence is an understatement. The Gothic 1 Remake had me save scumming to do simple tasks like lockpicking a chest or completing a quest with a determination I haven’t felt since I picked up my first RPG at ten years old.

There are design flaws and outright bugs that were not quite as endearing as the game’s difficulty, especially when you consider that these are new bugs created with this remake and not pre-existing ones just coming from the original.

Quests, on occasion, would simply break, leaving me in this strange limbo where I just could not proceed because the NPCs I needed to talk to simply did not have the dialogue options to do so. Sometimes I was able to complete them anyway by looking up the location of something I wouldn’t be able to find without them telling me; other times, I gave up and reloaded my saves until I found the spot before the bug happened. Thankfully, this was a game in which I was creating quite a few saves.

I found the task of blacksmithing to be outright grueling, because an NPC would occasionally be animated using the crafting benches I needed, walking back and forth between them and disabling interaction until they were done, making the multi-step crafting process incredibly long as I was forced to wait my turn.

In the effort to make the game feel more alive, NPCs now have roaming behavior and will leave their spots at different times of the day, which makes the game feel slightly more alive but also makes completing a quest exceptionally harder when the characters are slowly meandering somewhere else, leaving you to find them. Adding this to the deliberately vague nature of the game, where there are no quest markers, will definitely make it harder for some newer players to enjoy the experience. That might be a plus for some, but the 20 years of quality-of-life improvements that followed the release of the original game are called “improvements” for a reason.

On a far less subjective note, the beautiful graphics of the Gothic 1 Remake come at the cost of performance, with many players, myself included, experiencing frequent frame drops and visual glitches. The game struggles to break 60 FPS even on higher-end machines, and patches definitely need to be made to address this.

It at times feels as though the developers used the fact that the game was old and therefore clunky to leave in a lot of awkwardness, far beyond just the issues I mentioned, which, for returning players makes the remake a faithful if imperfect one, and further makes it harder for new players, who are accustomed to some base level of quality-of-life improvements, to get into the game.

For these reasons, I struggle to definitively score the Gothic 1 Remake. If you’re a fan of the original, you will definitely enjoy this remake, though performance issues will plague you, and certain new bugs and design choices leave it less than perfect, albeit still easier to play than its 2001 counterpart. If you are a new player, I think there is a lot to enjoy, but there are elements both new and old in this remake that will make it much harder to appreciate the game without a nostalgic lens to look at it through.

The short version of the argument I’m trying to make, is that you can easily make the case that the best parts of the Gothic 1 Remake are the elements of the game that already existed in the first one: the story, the setting, the characters, and the unique way in which the game feels challenging. The new graphics are pretty, and many can say that all you need in a remake is the original game with new visuals. Those new graphics, however, are packaged alongside serious performance issues, and I would argue that not enough of the original was changed, improved, or even tweaked to appeal more to a modern player. The game at least could have done a better job of avoiding the new problems and new bugs that it made.

If nothing else, I was left with the impression that the Gothic 1 Remake probably shouldn’t have released when it did. It still feels like it needs time to cook, and I think you need only play the game yourself or watch someone else play it to see what I’m talking about. I would still recommend the game, and I will probably still play more of it despite my criticisms, but I would say it is a little hard to justify the game’s asking price given its current state. Give it a try, but maybe wait until it goes on sale before you do.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Gothic 1 Remake. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! The Gothic 1 Remake is available on Steam, GoG, PlayStation, and Xbox.