Released more than 25 years ago, Gothic was an attempt at an open-world RPG by the small Bochum-based studio Piranha Bytes. Undeniably rough around its edges and sometimes too ambitious for its own good, Gothic reached a cult following in Germany and around the world, for not being your typical hero save the world adventure, but a charming and confined world full of personality. With Piranha Bytes sadly shutting down in 2024, now in 2026, THQ Nordic and Alkimia Interactive are releasing a full Gothic 1 Remake, promising not only to keep what makes Gothic popular, but also expanding and improving on it. Will they succeed in reviving a classic?
A Nameless Hero
For those unfamiliar with Gothic’s story. It is quite simple. Orcs are invading the empire of King Rhobar II. His only hope is to forge a weapon out of magic or in the mines of Khorinis. To secure constant supplies, he commands the most powerful mages in the kingdom to summon a barrier around the mining valley to make sure the prisoners who work there do not escape.
And this is where everything goes wrong. The magic works too well and gets out of control. The barrier not only gets too big but also imprisons all the mages themselves. The prisoners seize the opportunity to get control of the valley.
While nothing living can leave the barrier, but only enter it, the king must make a deal with the prisoners. So, they start delivering him the magical ore he needs, and the king gives them all the goods they want.
And this is where your story starts. You stand on the edge of the barrier, getting ready for your final verdict, when a mage interrupts it and hands over an important letter to the fire mages. Ordering you to deliver it as fast as possible, because it is important for the future of the kingdom.
And then you get kicked down, only getting robbed while being unconscious and meeting a fellow named Diego, who introduces himself as someone from the old camp with some influence. He tells you the best way to survive is to join him there. Your name? Doesn’t matter. Your crimes? No one cares. You are new in the colony and people are going to treat you this way until you make a name for yourself.
The Mining Valley and its factions
The core of Gothic is to make yourself familiar with the Mining Valley and its multiple factions, and ultimately join one of them throughout the game or not. The world feels condensed, and even though Alkimia Interactive said that they increased the map by nearly 20%, the game feels familiar to all the veterans coming back to it and is never too overwhelming for new players. While in the original, some areas felt barren and empty and unfinished, they are now filled with detail and content to discover. A true highlight is the camps themselves.
In the game, you find yourself confronted with three major factions. The Old Camp, the New Camp and the Swamp Camp.
The Old Camp is where you end up first if you follow Diego. It’s the oldest and most established faction in the game, controlling an old half-destroyed castle in the centre of the Mining Valley with the most control over the old mine. Gomez is the leader there and has a huge army of Shadows and Guards. The other big group are the fire mages, who hold out in the castle.
The New Camp is led by the bandits under Lares and mercenaries under Lee, who work for the water mages, who plan to collect as much magic ore as possible to blow the barrier up and get free. And the final faction is the Swamp Camp, where Templar and the cult of the Sleeper smoke their swamp weeds to enlighten themselves and follow the Sleeper, a mysterious godlike creature that wants to free them all.
New to the Gothic 1 Remake is the improved Orc faction. They got treated with not only a proper culture and language, you can learn now, but also extended quest chains to follow.
Since you are a nobody, you must work your way up if you want to join any of the factions. People don’t know you, and they treat you that way. You will get robbed, and people will force you to pay protection money or chase bullies after you to get it for them. Your journey to make a name for yourself starts with little jobs like stealing something or finding out what happened to someone, and will ultimately let you travel between camps and get to know the major people in them and do more complicated work for them.
While doing so, you start to level up, increase your health and earn learning points and ore to use at multiple trainers throughout the camps. From fighting skills to magic to stealing and more, you will get more powerful over time.
The Charm of Old meets the Now
A central point of what made Gothic so charming was the way NPCs reacted and talked to you. Back when I was a teenager, I met up with a good friend of mine to play Gothic in his teenage room, and we had the biggest laughs. Back then, we played the game in German, and the way NPCs talked was heavily inspired by the local Ruhr area dialect. People in the colony were very direct, somewhat rude, but also ironic and funny. And I can happily say that they not only brought back a lot of the old voice actors in German but also did an excellent job on recasts and keeping the same atmosphere alive 25 years later. And as someone who replayed Gothic multiple times over the last few decades, I can also say that they heavily improved the English localisation and voice acting as well. While back in the day, some translations simply didn’t make much sense, it has vastly improved now.
An Expanded Yet Familiar World
The remake of the world is beautiful. The move to Unreal Engine 5 allows for stunning vistas. I sometimes just stopped for a moment and moved the camera around to take it all in. From the get-go, everything felt familiar, yet so much more beautiful. I could navigate through the mining valley without much worry; all the pathways felt familiar, and I could make it blindly from the old camp to the new camp or the swamp camp.
The glow-ups, especially for the New Camp and the Swamp Camp, are amazing. They are much longer and look incredible. Especially at night with the new lighting system, the colonised portions of the world look simply stunning.
I watched some Gothic 1 videos to compare the graphics, and where there were non-complex stretched out textures in the original game, there are now complex and beautifully detailed roads, cliffs and forests and much more. It’s incredible what Alkimia did with the Unreal 5 Engine there.
Another thing to point out is the variety in NPCs, a lot of unique faces and body types, detailed armour pieces and clothing. And the enemies are as scary as always. Blood flies, and mine crawlers move weirdly and attack deadly, but look amazing now.
As in the original game, NPCs follow daily routines and react dynamically to the world. So, you can abuse NPCs to fight for you to gain experience early on, because enemies are still hard and deadly at first.
Eurojank no more? Combat and Controls
Gothic 1 was one of the founders of the term “Eurojank” and not without reason. The game was ambitious for its time and for the studio’s size, and so a lot of bugs and weird interactions made it into the game. While the remake is in a much better state, I have to say I had some weird encounters when the nameless protagonist locked on some NPCs or some NPCs clipped through items to talk to me, up to the point I glitched through the world and had to reload the game.
Another big point was the control scheme. It was not only clunky but a struggle. The remake refreshes controls and adds modern things like a proper lock-on system, better hit feedback, dodging and a better parry system. You can even select a follow-up system to make combat feel more modern, but that is up to you. When you use a weapon, you have the 4 face buttons to weave combos with and the more you train combat skills, the easier and more natural it gets.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking Gothic got any easier. You suck at the start, and you have to learn from trainers in the world to get better in combat skills, earn attributes to increase damage and find proper armour to protect yourself. When I started the game on the default Gothic difficulty, one of three modes you can select, plus a mode where you can set up everything yourself, I didn’t see the first weapon and thought it is a good idea to try to kill a mole rat with my fists. Turns out, it was not as the mole rat killed me immediately. Even with my first sword in hand, the mole rat was a threatening enemy. And don’t even get me started on the first couple of Scavengers on the way to the Old Camp.
Exploration is also still old school. There is no minimap; if you want one, you can buy maps from certain NPCs, and then you can add a limited number of notes on it. There are also no quest markers; you must check your journal, and I often found myself using the glossary to refresh my memory on where the NPCs I needed to find were. But ultimately, this is a very satisfying experience even in 2026, because you get familiar with the camps, the roads, and the mines and other places in the Gothic remake, just like you did back in 2001.
Technical issues and old school decisions
While the game looks beautiful, especially at night, and the vistas look gorgeous, the game only runs at 30fps on Xbox Series X and PS5 Pro. While mostly stable at 30fps, it feels like the game sometimes suffers some slowdowns. Especially on PS5 Pro, we encountered regular freezes while running through the Old Camp and some crashes throughout the world, which sometimes were especially rough since it deleted hours of progress. Gothic Remake makes use of auto-saves sometimes, but still not often. So make heavy use of manual saving, otherwise you will get frustrated from losing progress, crashes, freezes or when you get ambushed by groups of enemies.
Another issue we had was that the sound suddenly disappeared after going to the menu or pausing the game, sometimes just the background music, sometimes it was replaced with noise or the sound in general was lost.
We also encountered moments when the menu stopped working and was not controllable anymore, but that was also fixed with a simple restart. With a Day 1 patch just around the corner, we expect THQ Nordic and Alkimia to have fixes ready soon, to make the adventure a better experience.
We would like to thank THQ Nordic for providing us with a copy of the game for review purposes.
Gothic 1 Remake (PlayStation 5 Pro)
After hours of playing Gothic 1 Remake is a triumphant return of the series. After being sceptical when THQ Nordic announced the remake and a bit hopefully after the teaser demo, Alkimia Interactive understood exactly what made Gothic 1 Gothic 1. Instead of watering it down and modernizing it to be some light action game with RPG elements, they took the core of what Gothic, expanded and modernized it where it was needed and kept it true to the original game. If you stand deep in the night in the mining valley, with a torch in your hand, the soundtrack setting in and you hear the slow breathing of an Orc in the distance, you get this tingling sensation you had 25 years ago. With combat modernized, without losing its impact and challenge and the new quests and content feeling like it belongs in the game, Gothic 1 Remake is a testament of how you should approach remakes of classics. For newcomers to the series and veterans alike it is a worthy comeback.
