Gothic 1 Remake (2026)

I had rated this 5 stars previous and was quite happy with it, until the dev team decided that it really hurt their feelings that players were having fun, so they quadrupled the health, armor and damage of nearly everything in the game and made it an absolute fucking slog to play.

A perfect example of a team that cannot abide players enjoying their game as, in the immortal words of shrieking dipshit gamers everywhere 'you're not supposed to play it that way REEEEEEE.'

What a genuinely abysmal, neckbearded collective of dev team.

Adding my final Steam review below:

Alkimia is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Impressive.

Gothic is one of my top-5 games of all-time. I've been playing it for ~25 years. I've never seen a studio take a wild success and fumble it so hard with a string of patches. It's like the devs have no idea how to handle a game post-launch, it's a complete mess.

Every patch is just the Turbo-Gamer, absolute loser mentality of "REEE stop playing the game that way! That's not how you're supposed to do it! Stop having fun REEEE!"

Making NPCs nearly invincible by up-to tripling their health, armor and damage; removing pick-pocketable gear; cutting the swim speed of NH and the Scavenger mount in half (and omitting it from patch notes); doubling the speed and damage of Shadowbeasts and doubling the health and armor of Swampsharks (among many other massive enemy buffs) because the devs can't handle people playing Gothic the way people have always played Gothic; refusing to address the convoluted and unrewarding lockpicking system (50xp or some trash loot is not worth what can at times take ~5 minutes of puzzling out a lockpick pattern); nerfing player damage; barely scaling magic so as to make it nonviable; crippling the economy system to further control the player; crippling the health regeneration system by the devs demanding you 'play enough' to 'earn' being able to regain your health and mana--i could go on, and on, and on.

These are not the foundations of Gothic, a game which prided itself on not holding the player's hand, dropping them in a strange world and allowing them the complete freedom to do and act and learn as they want. Alkimia seems to constantly grab the player's hand in order to drag them from their own playstyle and enjoyment to force them into the Alkimia-dictated way. Again: Capital-G Turbo-Gamer behavior.

Pre-patches, despite the lockpicking and sleep restoration being horrible, it felt like Gothic, and I was having a great time playing on Gothic difficulty. Then the devs decided that, instead of addressing dozens of known softlocks, the best thing to do was to make spiteful changes to further hinder the player and remove player agency.

It seems Alkimia has a very specific way they want to force you to play Gothic, a game they did not create. And despite the original being so beloved due to it allowing immense player agency, their response to players enjoying the game however they want is to release multiple patches trying to force players to play the game their way--patches which I could quite easily rewrite with a simple line of text: REEEEE.

Between all this and the string of self-inserts by the devs--not to mention the cringy turbo-dork streamer voice actor appearances--I have to wonder if Alkimia wasn't more than a little resentful when they received an overwhelming amount of negative feedback years ago when they showcased their original vision, and being forced to recreate the game rather than re-imagine it. The studio seems quite angry that Gothic players want to play Gothic, and not an Alkimia game, as each patch does its best to force the latter and shift further from the former.

As it stands, with the direction things are heading in, I don't recommend this game if you want the true Gothic experience of playing Gothic however you, the player, want to play it. Modders are already fixing things, while the devs continue down this road of self-appointed martyrdom.

EDIT:

Finished the game, and, wow. Only 18% of players made it past Chapter 3, with 14% of those players completing the game. It shows in the reviews. The last half of the game was the buggiest (and not classic Gothic-style buggy) mess of poor design decisions I have ever seen, with zero world reactivity, constant broken quests and NPC interactions, and absolutely no balance in even the slightest. Worst of all, though? An exceptionally dragged out and doubled Temple section topped off with a final boss that was buffed in patch 1.02, that has a nonstop hitscanning stunning magic attack (spawning grabbing hands from the ground for the entirety of my 4 minute fight with zero breaks in casting) that has a higher speed than your character and does 100dmg per second, while ignoring dmg resistance of the upgraded Ore Armor and a one-shotting laser attack that does 500+ dmg, again ignoring armor resistance. The entire fight was me spamming dodge roll nonstop, and every time my roll ended, being stun-locked until i could dodge roll out of the stunlock and spam the button to barely chug a potion in time to not die, OR get a single attack off. I drank 33 100hp potions and still ended the fight with 10hp. Again, I fought the post-1.02 patch version that was heavily buffed and I have genuinely never seen a worse developed boss in a game. Alkimia really has no idea what they are doing, but clearly they don't need to learn because hardly anyone is playing the second half of the game anyways.

Appallingly bad.