Gothic 1 Remake: Eurojank is not a feature

The Colony has been rebuilt in impressive detail. Far too much of the 2001 inconvenience came through the magical barrier with it.

Gothic was one of the few old RPG series I had deliberately left untouched while waiting for a remake. It had been announced years ago, so I was perfectly happy to wait rather than wrestle with the original game’s 2001 controls, interface and assorted ancient-PC nonsense. Avoiding those limitations is supposedly half the point of remaking an old game.

The remake eventually arrived in the condition everybody expected: buggy as fuck. I gave it about a month of patching before starting, then completed my Hard-mode playthrough on patch 1.0.4. Even after four major updates, it still felt like something that needed another year in development.

There is no Gothic nostalgia protecting it here. I have no childhood memories of being murdered by a molerat after school, no affection for the old controls and no urge to describe every obvious problem as charming Eurojank. I am familiar with older RPGs, but this is a full remake released in 2026. I expected the hostile world, unusual progression and faction politics to survive. The ancient interface design, wasted time and mechanical jank could have stayed in 2001.

Instead, the remake frequently updates the scenery while treating every inconvenience underneath it as sacred heritage.

Welcome to the world’s busiest prison colony:

The premise immediately grabbed me. The kingdom needs magical ore for its war, so convicts are thrown into a mining colony surrounded by a magical barrier. Something goes wrong during the barrier’s creation, trapping the mages inside alongside the prisoners. The inmates seize control, split into rival camps and create their own little societies while the king continues trading supplies for ore.

It is a great setup for an RPG. You arrive as an anonymous prisoner in a place where nearly everybody is stronger, richer or better connected than you. Nobody is impressed by your destiny because, as far as they know, you do not have one. You are fresh meat walking into a colony ruled by gang politics, religious fanatics, mercenaries, smugglers and a dictator sitting on the kingdom’s most important resource.

The three camps immediately give the world a convincing political structure. The Old Camp controls the ore trade and enjoys the closest thing the Colony has to stability. The New Camp follows its own plan for escaping the barrier. The Swamp Camp has built an entire religion around the Sleeper, complete with gurus, templars and enough swampweed to keep the faithful appropriately enlightened.

The Colony also contains nearly every standard RPG environment within walking distance. Forests, swamps, deserts, frozen regions, lava-filled ruins, ancient temples and underground cities have all been conveniently squeezed beneath the same magical dome. World-ending monsters, divine weapons, forgotten civilisations and godly artefacts also spent centuries concentrating themselves inside this one particular patch of land.

Strange how that always works.

The lore generally holds the whole arrangement together, particularly once the orcs become more than another collection of experience points waiting in caves. Their expanded culture, language and history are among the remake’s better changes, giving them an actual place in the setting beyond guarding the next dungeon.

The environmental storytelling can be excellent as well. Abandoned camps, ruined homes, mines and caves often communicate what happened through their layout and the objects left behind. Some locations feel properly inhabited, with resources placed around believable work areas and enemies positioned in ways that tell you something about the region.

Then you enter a sealed temple that has supposedly remained untouched for thousands of years and find fresh blood and corpses scattered around inside. Orcs keep their valuables in suspiciously familiar human lockpicking chests. Ancient spaces contain random supplies apparently delivered by the same invisible courier serving every RPG dungeon in existence.

The world can be thoughtful and detailed one minute, then completely forget its own history because somebody wanted another chest in the corner.

Hard mode begins with an economic crisis:

The opening hours on Hard are brutal. Molerats can kill you in two bites, while many larger creatures barely need one. You begin without decent equipment, proper combat training or enough ore to buy either. Killing things requires skills and weapons, while obtaining those skills and weapons requires the money earned from killing things and completing quests.

That initial helplessness suits the setting. You are a nobody, and the gradual transformation into somebody capable of walking through previously lethal territory is one of the game’s strongest qualities. Your first respectable weapon matters. New armour visibly changes what you can survive. Creatures that once forced a lengthy detour eventually become routine kills.

Progression also depends heavily on knowledge the game refuses to provide. You need to know which trainers matter, which skills repay their cost, where useful equipment is hidden, which quests can disappear and which choices quietly close off later content.

The Colony’s most valuable resource is prior game knowledge.

Experimentation is expensive because learning points are limited, training costs ore and many abilities demand both. Trying something because it sounds interesting can waste hours of progression when the skill turns out to be shallow, overly specialised or nearly useless. Respeccing barely exists as a practical option, so every investment risks becoming an invisible landmine.

A returning player already knows where the trainers are, which quests offer the best rewards and how to route the opening efficiently. A newcomer burns time and resources discovering that information through failure. The resulting restrictions are then presented as replay value, even though much of that second playthrough would simply involve avoiding the mistakes the game never properly explained the first time.

The same problem affects quests and missable content. The game often expects advance knowledge of where to go, who to speak to and which order to do things in. One badly timed decision can close off content, while experimenting with skills or factions carries enough cost to discourage experimentation in the first place.

Hard mode amplifies all of it. Ore is precious, training is expensive and wasting learning points can leave you struggling with enemies whose resistance or damage assumes a more focused build. The challenge frequently comes from knowing the correct route beforehand rather than adapting intelligently during the run.

Quality of life is another unlockable:

You begin without a useful map and must acquire maps inside the game. There is no proper NPC tracker, quest-item tracking is poor and the journal often records too little information to help when something goes wrong. Directions rely on landmarks and memory, while NPCs follow daily routines across several large camps.

That arrangement falls apart as soon as the game’s bugs enter the equation.

When somebody is missing, you have no way to know whether they are sleeping, working, wandering between locations, stuck behind scenery, teleported somewhere incorrect or currently falling through the bottom of the fucking world. Intentional behaviour and broken scripting look exactly the same from the player’s side.

You can spend ages searching several camps because one quest character has wandered somewhere unexpected, then discover that the NPC was glitched all along. The game has already given you limited information, a vague journal and a world full of moving characters. Its technical state turns every search into a debate over whether you misunderstood the quest or the quest has simply stopped functioning.

Constant backtracking makes it worse. Before collecting enough teleportation runes, much of the game involves travelling between the same camps, mines and quest locations repeatedly. The routes are interesting while they remain dangerous and unexplored. Once every creature is dead and every corner has been searched, they become long stretches of nothing between conversations.

Better directions, useful journal entries, proper map notes and a basic method of locating important NPCs would have saved hours without covering the Colony in glowing icons. Instead, even finding information feels like another mechanic you were expected to unlock through prior knowledge.

Exploration rewards curiosity, then charges admission:

Exploring the Colony is generally fun and rewarding. Dangerous routes often lead to hidden caves, weapons, permanent upgrades, quests or environmental details. Returning to an area that previously killed you and finally clearing it creates a satisfying sense of progression.

The remake also includes traversal abilities such as climbing, diving and acrobatics. Climbing opens shortcuts, hidden ledges and optional locations, giving the world more verticality.

Naturally, even basic traversal is locked behind a trainer, ore and learning points.

You can encounter marked climbing walls long before knowing where the trainer is or whether the ability deserves its cost. Never discovered that climbing is a learnable skill? Tough luck. Better remember every inaccessible wall you passed and return after another hour of travelling.

Several other skills feel similarly thin. They exist as individual permissions rather than substantial mechanics. Pay to collect a particular animal part. Pay to perform one specific interaction. Pay to remove an inconvenience that was deliberately placed there so the trainer could sell you the solution.

Transformation magic hints at something much better. Changing into different creatures could have supported exploration, infiltration, puzzle-solving and combat, but the game only uses the idea in a handful of situations. Many of its other skills receive the same treatment: plenty of things to unlock, very little depth once you have them.

The world itself is inconsistent. Some areas are carefully constructed, with strong enemy placement, interesting routes and environmental clues. Others are huge stretches of land with almost nothing in them. Empty space can establish scale or atmosphere, but the game is unfinished enough that its intentions become difficult to read.

Is the cave deliberately empty? Did an encounter fail to spawn? Is this path leading towards a secret, or towards scenery the developers never finished?

In a polished game, emptiness can feel deliberate. Here, it frequently looks like missing content.

A legendary weapon with a larger number:

Exploration regularly rewards you with weapons carrying impressive fantasy names. Ancient blades, magical swords and equipment linked to gods or legendary warriors are hidden throughout the Colony.

Most of them are stat upgrades with better names.

Innos’ Rage is a two-handed sword named after a literal god. Mechanically, it is a sword with very high damage. It has no memorable effect, unusual property or characteristic reflecting its history. You equip it because the number is bigger, then replace it when another number becomes bigger still.

Armour follows the same pattern. Protection improves and the visual design changes, but equipment rarely creates a meaningful playstyle. Few items have unusual properties, conditional bonuses or interactions that distinguish them beyond their statistics.

The game offers melee, ranged weapons and magic, yet there are surprisingly few meaningful builds within those categories. You raise the appropriate attribute, learn the relevant combat tier and equip the strongest item currently available. The route changes, but the result usually remains the same.

The equipment names promise legendary fantasy artefacts. The systems deliver spreadsheet replacements.

Three methods of combat, none worth celebrating:

Combat ranges from badly clunky to serviceable at best, and the whole system feels like several different ideas forced together without anyone deciding which one should lead.

Ranged combat is straightforward and barely worth discussing. You aim, shoot and maintain enough distance to avoid most of the enemy behaviour. It functions, but there is very little mechanical texture beyond raising damage and finding somewhere the enemy cannot easily reach you.

Magic is far more entertaining. Some spells are visually satisfying and genuinely useful, while transformation magic hints at a much more ambitious system. Unfortunately, half the spell list feels pointless outside a few situations specifically designed around it. Certain spells dominate because they solve encounters reliably, while many others are expensive novelties used once before returning to whatever actually works.

Melee is where everything falls apart.

The remake added dodging and parrying alongside the older combat structure, apparently deciding that what Gothic needed was a layer of Soulslike mechanics stapled onto enemies and encounters never designed around them.

Inputs are sluggish, attacks carry strange delays and the Nameless Hero often responds several moments after you press the button. Animations trap you for too long, movement feels sticky and the targeting system begins shitting itself whenever more than one enemy enters the fight. The camera loses useful information, targets switch at the worst possible moment and your attacks miss from distances where enemies can somehow hit you perfectly well.

Enemies clearly did not receive the same combat rulebook. They rotate, slide and track through committed attacks while you remain locked inside slow animations. Their reach frequently has little relationship with what their bodies or weapons are showing, and they recover fast enough to interrupt whatever miserable counterattack the game finally allowed you to begin.

Group fights are complete garbage. The lock-on system drags your attention towards the wrong enemy, attacks arrive from outside the camera and one stagger can trap you inside a sequence of hits with no meaningful opportunity to respond.

The usual “tough but fair” description is doing an incredible amount of unpaid labour here. Readable attacks, consistent hitboxes and responsive controls would make that description credible. Gothic 1 Remake has other plans.

On Hard, melee eventually becomes a long exercise in forcing one-on-one fights and parrying absolutely everything.

A biter is about to lunge? Parry!

An armed guard swings a sword? Parry!

A massive troll with arms larger than your entire body is about to smash both fists down hard enough to turn you into prison-colony paste? You guessed it: PARRY!

Apparently the Nameless Hero’s little weapon block is powerful enough to disregard mass, momentum, anatomy and common fucking sense.

The other dependable strategy is even more thrilling: hit once or twice, run, repeat until one of you dies from boredom. Dodging and positioning occasionally matter, but the combat keeps pushing you towards the same few safe responses because anything more ambitious exposes how unreliable the system is.

Different creatures may have different models and animations, but melee reduces most of them to learning when to press the universal parry button. The enormous troll and the angry bloke holding a rusty sword demand roughly the same answer.

The Mad Demon is where everything collapses:

The Mad Demon at the end is hands down the worst encounter in the game.

It combines nearly every weakness of the combat system into one miserable finale: lunging melee attacks, area explosions, a ranged beam and tracking attacks erupting from the ground. Those ground attacks can stagger or trap you long enough for another ability to connect, while moving away invites the beam and staying close places you inside the explosion.

The boss chains disruptive attacks together while your character remains burdened with the same sluggish movement, delayed inputs and unreliable positioning. Most of the fight is spent wrestling with the controls, staring through visual effects and hoping the next tracking attack does not appear beneath you while another animation has locked you in place.

On Hard, a badly communicated hit can erase the attempt immediately. The practical options are ability spam of your own, summons, consumables or exploiting whichever part of the AI happens to malfunction in your favour.

Someone clearly decided the final boss needed more tracking, more stagger, more explosions and more visual noise. The existing combat problems simply became louder.

Beating it brought no satisfaction. I was relieved that I would never need to fight the fucking thing again.

The first act promises a better RPG:

The opening act is easily the strongest part of the game. You are unknown, vulnerable and trying to understand three competing camps without knowing who can be trusted. The Old Camp controls the ore trade and represents the closest thing the Colony has to political power. The New Camp follows its own escape plan. The Swamp Camp has built a religious movement around the Sleeper.

Working towards membership creates a convincing sense of social progression. You learn who matters, perform favours, make enemies and gradually gain access to people and places that previously dismissed you. The factions appear distinct enough that a second playthrough immediately sounds tempting.

Then the first act ends and most of that promise disappears.

The main story largely converges regardless of which camp you choose. The same central events happen, the same major locations are visited and faction identity becomes increasingly interchangeable. Training, equipment and some quests differ, but the political tension fades as the ancient-evil plot takes control.

A story about navigating a hostile prison society gradually becomes another fantasy adventure involving magical artefacts and a world-ending monster conveniently concentrated inside the Colony. The later orc material remains interesting, but the faction choice mostly changes the entrance ramp onto the same road.

British voices, bastardised English:

Most of the voice acting has a distinctly British quality that suits the Colony surprisingly well. The blunt delivery, insults and mixture of accents give the camps more personality than the usual polished fantasy voices.

Then the subtitles and written text use bastardised English spelling.

It is minor compared with broken quests and terrible combat, but still irritating. The spoken performances sound British, the dialogue carries that tone and the localisation clearly leans into it. Seeing Americanised spelling throughout the interface and subtitles feels needlessly inconsistent.

Apparently even the English language needed its own remake.

Still balancing the game after release:

Patch 1.0.4 was already the fourth major update, yet the game still felt unfinished. Bugs remain across quests, NPC behaviour, audio, combat and navigation. Characters fail to follow their routines, scripts break, items behave incorrectly and environmental interactions remain unreliable.

The developers have also repeatedly changed enemy strength, resistances, spells, weapons and equipment placement after release. These changes affect builds, exploration rewards and items players may already have spent hours working towards. Powerful equipment has been altered, moved or chapter-gated because experienced players found it early or used it too effectively.

That approach works directly against one of the game’s better qualities. Sneaking through a dangerous area to obtain powerful equipment gives exploration a purpose. Reaching an item earlier than intended rewards preparation, world knowledge or simply surviving somewhere dangerous.

Moving everything behind stricter chapter gates because veteran players optimise too effectively turns the Colony into a controlled loot treadmill.

The patch notes increasingly resemble live-service balancing applied to a single-player RPG. There are no competitive ladders to protect and no multiplayer economy being destroyed. Nobody asked for the monthly exciting rebalance of Innos’ Slightly Angrier Sword.

Finish deciding how the weapons, enemies and progression work before selling the game.

Gomez discovers Christian modesty:

Giving the women around Gomez additional dialogue and quests is a welcome addition. More content is more content.

The absurdity begins with the changed outfits and artwork, followed by THQ Nordic insisting there had been “no form of censorship” and asking players to wait for the full context.

What context could possibly explain this?

Gomez is a murderous prison dictator who rules the Old Camp through extortion, executions and an army of armed criminals. Women are delivered through the barrier as part of the king’s regular supply shipments, then kept inside Gomez’s private quarters. Clearly, this famously pious gentleman only requested them so he could host a nightly Bible study and ensure they received proper Christian fellowship.

The implication is about as subtle as one of the trolls: they are Gomez’s sex slaves. You would need to have suffered severe head trauma during the opening cutscene to miss it.

That fits the setting perfectly well. The Colony is run by violent criminals who seized control after the barrier trapped everybody inside, and Gomez sits at the top because he controls the ore, the guards and the king’s supply deal. Naturally, the murderous dictator receiving women as part of that arrangement has developed the morals of a medieval warlord rather than a modern human-resources department.

Yet somebody apparently decided that their revealing outfits were where the situation became distasteful. The sexual slavery remains. The coercion remains. Gomez still keeps women supplied by the king inside his private castle. But now they are dressed more modestly, because even a murderous prison tyrant understands that the Lord disapproves of excessive cleavage.

Perhaps the missing context is a deleted quest where Gomez finds Christ between extorting miners and ordering executions.

The altered artwork makes the denial even sillier. Gomez can run a dictatorship, murder rivals and keep sex slaves, but displaying anything too sexual in his throne room would apparently be completely out of character. The man may be an extorting, slave-owning despot, but he still operates a respectable Christian household.

THQ Nordic denied censoring anything despite players being able to place the old and new designs beside each other and use their functioning eyeballs. Apparently it only counts as censorship when somebody places a giant black rectangle over the screen and rings a church bell.

Adding dialogue and quests gives the remake more content. Dressing Gomez’s sex slaves for Sunday service and altering the sexual artwork, then declaring that nothing was censored, is corporate nonsense so transparent that even the magical barrier could not contain it.