Gothic 1 Remake Review – Classics Still Byte

To explain the kind of chokehold Gothic had on the gaming landscape of a few select European countries would be a gargantuan task, so you’ll just have to believe me when I say it’s likely one of the top five or ten generation-defining games in my part of the world (Poland). Sharing cheat codes or YouTube masterpieces created using the game’s expansive toolset was a playground activity at least as common as exchanging Pokémon cards was in the US. You had your monsters to catch; we had a prison colony to get out of.

It’s probably why talking about games is often so alienating. While, sure, American and Japanese games were often buggy and confusing, those who weren’t molded by the likes of Gothic really don’t seem to experience this medium the same way I do. Whether it’s the resilience to keep going after getting unfairly smoked by an enemy, or the will to tango with a game’s annoyances as basic as its controls. Your camera is a bit wonky? A spell doesn’t work? That’s cute. I didn’t know how to do anything other than move in my games. If even that.

The creators of this classic, studio Piranha Bytes, shut down in June of 2025, leaving me incredibly distraught. I wasn’t a fan of their final efforts in the ELEX series, but the games, like all under their banner, had the qualities that brought me where I am today. I wouldn’t be writing about games if it wasn’t for the satisfaction of defeating an enemy I previously couldn’t even damage, or if I hadn’t found a weapon hidden in a cave past a dozen enemies I managed to avoid, or if I hadn’t swindled a guy from his deal by stealing the entire stock and trading it for a few potions.

As I’ve talked about in my In Progress Review, the early game of Gothic is quite infamous. You’d see people drop it due to a lack of a story hook or control woes, but to me, and thousands like me, the atmosphere was enough: three unique, joinable camps, the moments of safety and perhaps even belonging among the guards extorting you for protection or bandits forcing you to work or else they’ll knock you out and steal all your belongings. That and, of course, the eventual revenge you inflict once you’re strong enough.

Alkimia Interactive, the developers of the Gothic 1 Remake, began work on the project around a decade ago, releasing a controversial playable teaser in 2019. It featured a very talkative, quippy protagonist as opposed to the original’s mostly silent, but no less witty Nameless Hero, combat in the style of For Honor, and cinematic changes to the game’s intro. I was not into it. Your torch emitted a lens flare. Certain NPCs were invincible. You fought a bunch of dinosaurs in the intro. They kill you in one hit at the start in the original.

I am very happy to report that close to nothing has remained from that era. Meanwhile, everything from the original Gothic made it in, with some modern quality of life such as non-insane controls. You can now experience one of the most influential RPGs of all time, a huge part of what made The Witcher game series what it is today, without having to ask someone how to jump.

You’d think that a lot would be lost by simplifying the controls, but Gothic 1 Remake makes use of modern techniques to communicate the same kinds of struggles. Weapons are much heavier, and each swing is a dedication. A method popularized by Dark Souls, but mixed in with Gothic’s identity. Without leveling up and paying for training, the Nameless Hero will swing one-handed weapons using both hands, and his attacks will fail to knock enemies back. Following up will also be much harder, as the swings lack forward momentum. It’s one of the most satisfying parts of the original, and its effect feels even more pronounced in the remake.

Exploration runs just as deep, though it can’t quite match up to the work of the genre’s masters. If you could reach a place in Gothic, you could bet something worthwhile was placed there, and you could deduce what kind of story led to a dead body or a treasure chest you just found. While Gothic 1 Remake keeps a lot of these spots intact, it sometimes fails to properly reward an inquisitive player or add to the world’s stories. Many spots feel empty or lacking, even with some loot or herbs.

But there are other ways to make something of yourself in Gothic. Hubs are an absolute wealth of opportunities, from experience points to chests inside fellow inmates’ lodgings that they abandon during the day. If you manage to find a guide, anything they knock out on the way to your destination will provide you with experience points too! A few people will send you out on simple quests, like the Shadows in the Old Camp who are meant to test just how trustworthy you are. Help a few people out, and you’re in business.

By that, I mean you may just be able to fight two bloodflies on your way to find some flowers for a quest. That quest, however, will compound into an ability to do another. And another. Until eventually you truly are ready to take on something more. Progression in Gothic is another core part of its identity that translated so well into the remake.

I played the game on the Hard difficulty, if only to counteract the knowledge I came in with, and it changing up the sell prices for merchants, alongside the new mechanic of supply and demand lowering the value of items I gathered the more I sold them, really pushed me to keep grinding for currency even as far as the game’s fourth chapter.

All the new skills surprisingly added a lot to the experience and come recommended on any one playthrough, though many are easily missable. A climbing trainer in the Swamp Camp, a breath control teacher in the New Camp. I was taught to look everywhere and talk to everyone, but even then some of these were really out of the way. These, alongside (slightly) easier controls, are great tools for forging your own path. Gothic 1 Remake just feels less like a survival game and way more like an actual roleplay environment.

Take, for example, the lockpicking minigame. The mechanic became a hotly debated topic during the game’s release due to it requiring some complex math when untrained, and while I also initially could not stand just how much work it requires, after leveling it up twice (which, admittedly, was quite a resource sink), it was a nice, short puzzle, the ease of which truly reflected the points I spent on it.

I think this kind of approach permeates every part of this version of Gothic. The original had a lot more interactables; it was quicker, despite all the clunkiness. Once you got going and if you knew where all the good stuff was, you could stop caring about all its systems five hours in. Gothic 1 Remake kept me immersed and invested all the way to the end, even if it shares the same major issues.

Once the story starts getting intense, it stays intense. You’ll be fighting multiple enemies at once and even entire camps if you so choose. While the remake changes quite a few parts of the story and gives more importance to the series’ iconic, recurring characters, it still ends up becoming a combat-heavy MacGuffin chase for several chapters. It’s where the faults of the game really started showing.

Gothic 1 Remake suffers from the same annoyance many modern action games do: inconsistent staggers. Canceling animations is something you can do after training up a weapon type, so, in theory, it makes sense that certain enemies can do it too, except they don’t do it while attacking; they do it while recovering from being stunned. Every few hits you’ll trigger a stagger animation on the enemy, but they can exit out of it if they are attacked again and they haven’t themselves attacked in a while. Because some of your own attack animations are quite slow, this often means getting hit despite being explicitly shown you should be on the offensive. On hard, this meant getting two-shot in the final dungeon, even with the strongest armor.

There’s also the fact that projectiles are incredibly difficult to dodge up close, and deadly accurate at predicting your movements from far away. As I said, Gothic 1 Remake is not alone in these problems—even some of the biggest action games like God of War suffer from the same stagger-cancelling issue—but I think it hurts more because Gothic never really was a combat-focused game. So much so that fighting more than three enemies, even in the remake, looks quite comical, with many not knowing what to do as you whack them to death.

The new system does a great job at translating the original’s early game struggles, but the choice to make the final bit of the game more intense takes away from letting the player feel powerful after putting in so much work to obtain the best gear available. The final boss even has his own ways to stunlock and multihit you, just in case you felt too comfortable after obtaining the actual best gear. I ended up stunlocking him instead with precise timing on hits. He who lives by the stunlock dies by the stunlock.

Finishing my near 60-hour playthrough, I was frustrated. I was ready to say that Gothic 1 Remake is actually better than the original, despite it being shorter and more replayable, which is an absolute rarity for me with remakes and remasters, but those final moments left me just plain annoyed. And then I remembered my first time finishing Gothic, Gothic II, and ELEX. Oh, how wonderfully all those games fall apart once you’re done circling the hubs and get to fighting against the world’s enemies. Alkimia Interactive, for just how amazing a job they did at preserving the game’s unique qualities, seems to have stuck too closely to them.

I truly don’t know if Alkimia Interactive can fix what Piranha Bytes never could, but it is clear to me that they are able to improve on their finest qualities, which, honestly, I never would have expected. After Piranha Bytes’ closure, I truly believed their RPG style was going to fade for the next who knows how many years, but there is a true understanding here that doesn’t feel out of place at all, while still finding spaces to make its new elements seen.

I mean, check out how the game looks! I can’t believe I got to see a Gothic game where they manage to keep the slight goofiness of the characters, like everyone in the Swamp Camp being bald, all the gruff of Old Camp’s workers and guards, and the smugness of New Campers, while still looking so great! Look at how the lighting changes in each new biome, or the little critters realistically crawling on surfaces. Witness the new weather effects and the newfound intensity with which night takes over the Valley of the Mines. No more runs around the Colony at night without a light source. None of that was there, or was as pronounced in the original, but it is here. It’s the vision of these new developers, the details they clearly loved.

The music, re-edited and incorporated wonderfully, with new combat tracks adding excitement to late-game encounters (probably the only thing that kept me from going insane), logical story changes and all those frankly fantastic monster redesigns—there is a vision here that could carry over to a sequel, and maybe even two. Gothic 3 needs a remake so badly, it’s not even funny. But I also wouldn’t want to hold the studio down to just this IP; I think they have so much potential to create worlds of their own.

So I think I just might say that Gothic 1 Remake is better than the original. With a few caveats. The Chapter 5 quest for the game’s best armor feels totally bugged, with you being able to just walk among characters that should be hostile to you. That’s one of the game’s most memorable moments, and it’s just plain silly. The rideable scavenger certainly helps speed up its already long traversal times, but it feels completely out of place. Other characters don’t ride scavengers. This, alongside the exploration mishaps, large-scale battles still looking bad, and a few moments of what I can only call fanservice, make the world feel more plastic when you start to look deeper. It’s not like the series lacks silliness, there’s an entire camp all about smoking plants to gain mana and get closer to God and it is a legitimate choice, but an effort has to be made to properly implement these things into the world. And, you really could have removed the part where you can peep at one of the five female characters in the game. I think we could have survived without that one.

I really don’t want to discourage anyone from playing the original, so I also might not say that Gothic 1 Remake is better than the original. Both have a leg to stand on though, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone from siding with either. I’m just blown away by the fact that it exists. That in 2026 we can have a game that follows the style of a studio that just shut down and can still be rewarded for it. I heard a lot that people who enjoy these games are blinded by one reason or another, or that the games themselves are unplayable and everyone who thinks otherwise is just some weirdo. When Piranha Bytes shut down, I thought these voices might be right. Perhaps it was all driven by a nostalgic chase after a feeling nobody could replicate, even the original creators. Gotta love when art itself proves such pessimism wrong. Long live Gothic, long live Piranha Bytes, and, hopefully, long live Alkimia Interactive.

Mateusz reviewed Gothic 1 Remake on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.