GOTHIC 1 Remake Review Brutal and Faithful

Gothic 1 Remake, originally released on Steam on June 5, 2026.

The version I am reviewing today is 1.0.4. It's possible to complete the game despite its numerous bugs. But it's highly recommended to create many manual savegames and not only quicksaves, so you can roll back if you get stuck.

Let's Talk About the Bugs First

Before diving into the game, we have to talk about... the bugs! 😅 One thing Alkimia Interactive stayed true to from the original game was the sheer amount of them! Cheers my friends, the legacy is safe 😄 You have to understand that in a game like Gothic, with so many interactions between NPCs that can impact the story as a whole, it's a miracle when it ships bug-free.

The game was patched a few times, but every time... new bugs cropped up.

1. Game-breaking bugs if you wandered too far off the beaten path.
2. Loss of focus in the game — the gamepad suddenly unusable to answer a dialogue or during the save screen, forcing you to grab the mouse, or worse, to ALT+TAB out of the game and back in.
3. The occasional crash to desktop, especially when doing those ALT+TAB switches... 😕
4. Important quest monsters or NPCs despawning permanently. This happened when the thing was close to you and you just wanted to save before the interaction... then on loading, it would respawn improperly, stuck in a wall, and so on.

Frankly, at some point I even became a little paranoid... I was like "Okay, I hope that whatever I just did didn't break anything?". And so I'd wander off to visit all 3 camps, just to check that the important NPCs were still standing in their right spot. I think I lost 10 hours of my life doing that in Gothic 1 Remake.

If you visit the Steam forums for Gothic 1 Remake — beyond the usual toxicity of players insulting each other from behind their screens — you'll also find a good deal of genuinely frustrated people who really did lose hours to these bugs.

And then there are the hardcore ones: the players who hit level 26 as early as Chapter 2 — whereas I finished the game on Hard at level 31 in Chapter 6 😏 — or the ones who insist on picking every single lock, even the most complex, only to vent their rage on the forums the moment the mechanics don't go their way. And my personal favourite: the guy wondering why he can't beat the game using nothing but a bow, when the lore clearly establishes that you need the Sword of Innos 🙃

Guys, I'll say it with love: it's a game. A brutal one, sure, designed 25 years ago by people who didn't care whether you had fun on your terms or theirs. If a locked chest is winning, walk away... Even in Real Life some mysteries can't be unlocked, so just treat it as one of them. That's not the game being broken — It's working exactly as intended. 😏

Hard Mode Hits Harder Than Any Souls Game

Gothic is a difficult game! You're a weakling at the start... The original had no difficulty slider at all, so you worked with what the devs had designed for you. In this remake, you get the choice between Easy, Gothic (true to the original difficulty) and Hard, a new mode designed for people who want the ultimate challenge.

And of course, Hard is what I picked 😏 There's also a Permanent Death mode, but that's something I'll never touch. I can't fathom investing hours in a game only to watch them turn to dust because at some point I lost focus during a fight.

Sorry, I'm not downing an energy drink every time I play just to stay sharp.

A video game should stay relaxing... That's why I play — to face challenges, but also to unwind 😎 And I think I died WAY more in Gothic 1 Remake than in any Dark Souls. Not because of the bosses, but because of the roaming mobs, even the small ones you meet outside the camps, which can literally kill you in 1 or 2 hits.

You Start With Nothing — So Train, Steal and Loot

When you arrive in the colony you have nothing.

Everything is expensive (especially on Hard), so you'll have to scrape together whatever you can find — a loaf of bread, old rusty weapons that barely qualify as tools. The smallest fight against the local jerk will be hard, which is exactly why it's so important to... STEAL! 😜 And most goods are locked tight in chests inside everyone's homes.

Because without training, you'll be a slow turtle trying to swing a piece of steel. It'll be very hard to prevail in battle, or even to avoid the slowest club from an unworthy opponent. (Well — at least unworthy of you, that's for sure 😄 Weakling!)

You can't loot an opponent's armor, because the game stays logical. You can take their main weapon — which is great, and early on your best gear will come from loot — but obviously you're not going to strip someone naked 🤣 So you'll be able to loot weapons, money (represented by ore nuggets), food, potions, tools and so on.

Armor in Gothic is a game changer, and that's exactly why you can't loot it from your enemies. You should also know that by default you don't kill people — otherwise you'd quickly turn into a murderer. Just because someone tries to beat the hell out of you doesn't mean you should end him. It's a lot like real life, really. And if you do choose to kill, you'll have to press a chain of keys to finish the guy — and then deal with the consequences.

In most role-playing games — including The Elder Scrolls, and even the old original Gothic — lockpicking eventually becomes so easy it's pure routine. The hardest I'd found so far was Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

But Gothic 1 Remake has clearly raised the bar 👍

Training matters, but even as a Master, some chests and doors stay VERY hard. To the point that some players — the over-achievers who want to open everything — resorted to a third-party tool that calculates the right moves for them 😕 I'd never use that. It's called cheating. Swallow your pride: some things in life are meant to stay a mystery.

Exploration and the Unreal Engine 5 Glow-Up

Exploration is a HUGE part of Gothic. As soon as you're able to, it's important to spread your own wings.

Back when Gothic was made by Piranha Bytes, it was already well known that players would explore the game just to take in the majesty of the scenery — sitting in front of a splendid landscape with the sun going down on the horizon.

And now more than ever with Unreal Engine 5.4! You should know that Alkimia started out working on Unreal Engine 4, then decided more than a year into production to migrate to UE5 in order to support the latest features — and the result is just astonishing. The Colony looks so damn real that sometimes it's hard to tell the video game from life itself.

There are a few "escort" quests... where in fact the one being escorted is YOU 😄 Let's be fair: you're so damn weak at the beginning that even a wolf bite will one-shot you, and since they're fast and you're slow, killing them yourself simply isn't an option. That's why a few NPCs can escort you from one camp to another when you need it.

These NPCs kill the mobs on your way very fast. It's always good to take part in the fight by landing a few blows, to make sure you get the experience. But be careful — let the NPC hold the aggro, because remember: at this stage of the game, those mobs can one-shot you. Participate, but do it smartly. Don't throw away your life for one hit.

And that map isn't an oversight: game director Reinhard Pollice confirmed the studio deliberately shipped without a minimap and without a quest compass. They even considered making it an optional toggle... and rejected that too. You find your way by asking NPCs, buying maps and actually reading the landscape — exactly like 25 years ago 🗺️

Like in the original Gothic, smoking a joint is no problem at all 😄 Swampweed, heavily inspired by cannabis, is widely used throughout the Colony. It's actually the cheapest way to regenerate mana and "open your mind" 🤣 Its use is actively promoted by the Swamp Camp — also known as the "Sect Camp", because that's exactly what it is!

Kai Rosenkranz Is Back — and That Changes Everything

Here's the detail that tells you Alkimia understood the assignment: they brought back Kai Rosenkranz.

If the name doesn't ring a bell, "KaiRo" was Piranha Bytes' in-house composer. He scored Gothic 1, Gothic 2 and Gothic 3 — the last one recorded with the Bochum Symphony Orchestra, the symphony orchestra of the very city where the studio was based. That soundtrack is, to this day, one of the finest things ever written for a role-playing game.

And he's back for the remake. Twenty-five years later, the same man is scoring the same world again. When I say this remake is "faithful", this is the kind of thing I mean — you can rebuild every polygon in Unreal Engine, but you can't fake the person who wrote the theme that's been living in your head since 2002.

By the way — if you want to hear what I'm talking about, I've got the Gothic 1 and Gothic 3 themes on my video game music page. Go listen to the Gothic 3 main theme and tell me it doesn't give you chills 😌

Learning Points, Teachers and Your Own Scavenger

We're in a role-playing game, so of course there's leveling, gear to buy and skills to learn.

You get 12 hit points and 10 skill points every time you level up. It's not much, considering that training a single skill generally costs 10 points, and can go far beyond that — up to 40 points to become a Master of two-handed weapons. But we'll keep that for later, since your avatar will first have to learn how to handle one-handed weapons.

Don't count on hoarding your points to learn two-handed before one-handed: it's not designed to work that way. And since Hard mode gives you less experience, you'll have to plan your build carefully and only spend on what's genuinely useful.

You'll meet several teachers in the colony — and nobody will hold your hand to find them — who can teach you skills like Acrobatics to dodge enemies, Diving to breathe twice as long underwater, Climbing to reach previously inaccessible heights, or skinning animals in various ways to resell their hides, teeth and claws.

You can even get your own mount! No, not a horse... a Scavenger! Much better than running everywhere 😏 Because fast travel doesn't exist in Gothic. Yes, you'll be able to teleport between camps later in the game, but until then you'll spend hours on foot. So grab that mount the moment it's available.

Once again, nobody will tell you about these teachers. You'll find them by exploring the Colony.

And like in most Piranha Bytes games, there are occasional nods to real people.

Nothing official, of course — but a few NPCs bear a striking resemblance to faces you'll recognise. Whether it's deliberate homage or pure coincidence, I'll let you be the judge 😏

Unbalanced Beasts and the Magic That Never Delivers

There are many creatures roaming the colony, and the biggest aren't necessarily the hardest. I'd even say a few are wildly unbalanced relative to the experience they give and the damage they deal.

Gothic 1 was known in its prime for letting you cheese your way past a few obstacles, and that hasn't changed in the remake. People will use magic or a bow from an elevated spot to kill nasty mobs blocking the way. I know I did it myself against the end-game Minecrawlers. Come on — they could kill me in 2 hits where even Demon Lords couldn't 🤔

There are a few difficulty spikes, especially — again — on Hard. Here's an example:

You have to get through a place full of "Biters", which look like small T-Rexes, to reach an Orc cemetery. Well, I find it surprising that an Orc NPC can kill 3 or 4 Biters before going down himself, while I can kill that same Orc easily... and get crushed by a single Biter in 2 hits. Where's the logic in that?

Many people complained about magic on the forum, and I have to say I agree with them. In every role-playing game out there, it's a given that a magic user starts weak, easily outmatched by a pure melee build. But with skills and progression, the wizard eventually wreaks havoc. By the time a warrior gets into melee range of a high-level spellcaster, he's already ashes.

That's exactly why we accept a long and painful progression — because we know the payoff is coming. The problem in Gothic 1 Remake is that magic is simply not worth the skill points.

Most spells take too long to charge, so they only work in specific situations, and you'll still have to rely on your sword. If you're going for a Battle Mage — melee most of the time, a few spells and scrolls for special occasions — you're good to go. But if you dream of a pure wizard obliterating legions of Orcs from afar like in Gothic 3, let me tell you: you're screwed. By the time you finish casting that fireball, your enemies are already on you and barely scratched.

Yeah — in the original game, I remember groups of Orcs could be handled just by swinging your two-handed sword in front of you, and they would (out of fear of taking a hit?) stand in line, politely waiting to be killed one after the other. That's over in Gothic 1 Remake. Three big Orcs on you? You'd better make good use of Dodge.

All in all, Gothic 1 Remake favours hybrid builds — melee/ranged or melee/magic. Dumping every point into a single tree will leave you weak somewhere, sooner or later. Better to be a jack of all trades.

The Parry Mode Is an Absolute Horror

One bad thing I really need to talk about: the parry in Gothic 1 Remake is an absolute horror. I've seen a few people say it's like Lies of P, and I beg to differ. I completed Lies of P, and it's the only Souls game where I genuinely spent time learning the parry — and by the end I was quite good at it, parrying most of the time and only dodging occasionally.

But in Gothic 1 Remake, the parry is nowhere near the precision of Lies of P. Honestly, comparing the two tells me those people never played Lies of P 🤔 There, the parry was a joy to learn and to practise. I knew when it would work, and I knew when the mistake was mine.

In Gothic 1 Remake, the parry feels based on luck and on a button press I still haven't figured out 😕 Even the parry in Lords of the Fallen (2023) — which had a slight delay that plenty of people complained about — was easier to handle. In the end I dodged my way through 100 hours, never relying on this insulting parry, even trained as a Master.

I don't know who designed the timing on that parry. But clearly not a Lies of P player.

Spells aren't totally useless, but again, only in specific scenarios. Like using a scroll to summon a Stone Golem right before facing a powerful foe — then charging your Ball of Lightning to stun the enemy while your golem does its best to bring down an opponent you'd otherwise have no chance against.

There are a few puzzles in the game, some requiring you to manipulate levers or wheels — you'll even recognise the "wheel of pain" from a certain 1982 box-office classic 🏋🏼💪🏼 Others will have you shooting with your bow or crossbow, and a few require you to use spells in a specific way.

Just be careful whenever a quest involves one of these guys: make sure they don't get stuck in a wall, or freeze entirely after talking to certain people (players will remember the Milten bug for years to come 😅). The problem isn't you — it's a bit like driving: you also have to watch what everyone else is doing 😏

It was a great experience to play Gothic once more after 25 years. Well done, Alkimia. You've successfully captured the essence of an old-school game — one whose marketing was so bad in its prime that people like me only discovered it through peer-to-peer software 😆 Now it's up to you to build the Gothic brand back up!

Now please, get rid of all these bugs before Gothic 2 Remake, Gothic 3 Remake and the Gothic 4 we're all waiting for.

+ Gothic is back, and in good hands for the whole series!
+ Let's be honest... one of the best RPGs of 2026 👍
+ Brutal on Hard — even Souls games aren't this punishing.
+ The old-school magic from 25 years ago is back...

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- ...though the in-game magic has been nerfed 😕
- The parry mechanic is an absolute horror.
- A few enemies are completely unbalanced.
- So many bugs I became a little paranoid...