Okay so I have a problem.
I sat down with Gothic 1 Remake last Friday afternoon thinking I’d give it an hour. I did not give it an hour.
I knew nothing about the original. Well, not nothing. I knew it existed and that a very specific kind of European gamer would get a slightly haunted look in their eyes if you mentioned it, same look people get about Morrowind or the first two Fallouts. The kind of game people don’t just like but feel personally about. The remake felt like the right entry point so I jumped in.
They throw you over a wall. Literally, a bloke grabs you and lobs you over a wall into a prison colony and then just goes quiet. No waypoints. No map unless you find one. No hand holding of any kind. I got killed by a rat almost immediately and had to sit with that for a second.
And something clicked.
I was fourteen when I first played Skyrim. Escaped Helgen, walked out into the world, stood at the top of a hill looking down at Riverwood in the snow with absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do next. Just this enormous world sitting there waiting. I remember thinking oh. OH. So that’s what this is. And then not moving for about thirty seconds just taking it in.
Gothic did that to me again last Friday and I was not prepared for it at all.
The Colony is this dense hand-built valley, three camps full of horrible men who all want things from you, paths going off everywhere with zero indication of which ones will get you immediately murdered. I wandered the wrong way at one point, scrambled up a cliffside by accident, and came out on a ledge with a view of the whole map. Nothing happened. No achievement popped. The game didn’t care. I just stood there for a bit looking at it like an absolute muppet.
That’s the thing that’s been missing. At some point open world games decided to solve mystery as if it was a problem, and now everything is sitting on your map named and categorised before you’ve gone anywhere near it. You’re not discovering anything, you’re travelling to coordinates. Gothic doesn’t do any of that and the difference is genuinely a bit startling.
Yes it’s janky. There’s a tailing mission involving a man called Bullit that I cannot talk about without my eye twitching. Some quest solutions follow a logic that I can only describe as specifically and aggressively medieval. An NPC walked in circles near a campfire for an amount of time that I found personally upsetting. None of it put me off because the feeling underneath all of it, of actually being somewhere rather than playing through somewhere, is rare enough now that I’ll take the jank gratefully.
Five hundred thousand copies in the first week. For a remake of a twenty five year old niche PC game that barely anyone outside Germany had heard of. Brilliant. Every single one deserved.