Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to play Gothic Remake, but I’ve managed to put 6 hours into it and I died (or save scummed) 47 times.
I’m a huge Gothic aficionado. I remember I first played Gothic 2 when I was around 10 and I fell in love with the game immediately. It made me love RPGs the way I love them today. As a result, it’s obvious that when I heard about the remake, I got interested right away. I was following the development, I played the teaser, the demo (Nyras Prologue), and I ended up preordering the game.
It finally arrived and here are my first impressions of the game.
Welcome to the Colony
When I started playing the game, I felt like a child again. There’s a lot of nostalgia in the game. The Polish voiceover cast is fire 🔥🔥🔥 The only complaint is that the main character sounded a bit weird a few times, like the recording quality wasn’t that good or they did something wrong in post.
Aside from that, the world looks nice, the views are gorgeous and I like how they revamped some of the well-known locations. The world has the same vibe as before, but you can see that it’s more modern and higher budget.
It looks like they also added some characters, quests, and changed magic a bit. The fighting system is also a bit updated, but feels like home either way. So far I think I like it. There was also the infamous lock picking mini-game, but I haven’t tried opening anything yet to see how it works.
Something interesting that seems to be happening is that some of the enemies seem to respawn even without progressing to the new chapter. This is a cool addition, but I wonder if it won’t make the game a bit too easy considering that it increases the HP you can have.
The biggest problem that I have is healing. Back in the original game, you could sleep any time you wanted to fully heal. It looks like they changed it and now for each hour awake you can go to sleep to regenerate your HP. That makes replenishing your HP much harder. Especially since food is regenerating a flat value and it’s not scaling. But let’s see.
Some things never change
As we all know, the first Gothic was full of bugs. How about this one? Well, some things never change…
The game is still crashing, same as back in the day. Access Violation errors are still there. I encountered them twice so far. Fortunately, I save the game often enough that they haven’t been a big deal so far.
You can also encounter some weird AI glitches here and there. Sometimes enemies spot you from afar. Sometimes they don’t when you’re next to them. The biggest issue I had so far was that when you pull one hostile mob and kill it, the rest automatically follow. That shouldn’t be the case. The mechanic of pulling mobs one-by-one was a core aspect of early game in the original. Even in the Remake, it’s introduced by an NPC. Hopefully they fix it quickly.
Aside from that the game runs well. I encountered some weird behaviour with how healing on sleep works – even though I was up the whole day. The way I understand the system, it shouldn’t work like that.
And there was also this bug:
Is it worth it?
If you’re thinking about getting the game, so far it’s hard for me to say. I like the changes, I like the vibe, but let’s see how it looks in the long run. The original Gothic had a lot of content in the beginning and then it was a bit empty – let’s hope that’s not the case this time.
If you’ve played Gothic before, you should try it out. If you love Gothic, it’s a must have. If you’ve never played it before, it’s quite hard to tell so far how the game holds up.