Published 15/04/2022

Gothic

Now, I’m not going to be one of those people saying that the action RPG genre has grown stagnant; we still get fantastic games like the modern God of War entries, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, or the most recent trilogy of Assassin’s Creed. But I think few people will disagree that this style of game has grown stagnant, featuring gigantic open-worlds with a checklist of somewhat repetitive tasks for you to fill your time with. Again, I like these kind of games; but when I booted up Gothic, I was transported back to an era of games I was too young to experience at the time, a game that despite it’s janks, it’s foibles and it’s little eccentricities is a very pure, very focussed experience that captivated me utterly through it’s well-paced runtime.

Whilst I haven’t had much experience with this style slash subgenre, that of the fantastically described EuroJank, I’m well, well aware of how much of a cult hit Gothic is. That said, I actually knew next to nothing about the actual game itself. I knew it was vaguely a fantasy-based action RPG, and that people put a lot of emphasis on the Jank in EuroJank when it comes to this entire series. And almost from the jump, this jank is apparent. Out of this world (in a sense!) voice acting, a bizarre control scheme, and just a general… vibe that wasn’t present in a lot of action RPGs of the day. I quickly spent the next hour stumbling from place to place, getting killed by wolves, and frequently screwing up all manner of actions because of the controls - and so, I decided to cut my losses caused by my idiocy, and just reset my game. Now, armed with a (relative) understanding of the basics of how this game worked, I dived into Gothic properly and, well… Goddamn is this a special -albeit weird as hell- game.

Gothic takes place in a kingdom under siege by a massive army of Orcs; the King of said Kingdom, needing a steady supply of weapons and armour, sets up a prison penal colony in the Valley of Mines. This prison is created through the use of a giant dome-like barrier that can be entered, but not exited, trapping hundreds of prisoners, and the mages who formed the barrier itself, within. With the king’s guards killed almost instantly by the prisoners, a rough trinity of societies have formed within the barrier’s limits; The Old Camp, comprised of prisoners roughly loyal to the king, sending off ore in returns for supplies from the outside world; The New Camp, manned by defectors of the Old Camp, who are mining the ore in an attempt to find a way out of the Barrier; and The Swamp Camp, a religious society full of cultists who believe a god, known as The Sleeper, slumbers beneath the camp. The protagonist, who remains unnamed, finds himself thrown into the Barrier, and after being saved by a kindly Old Camp member named Diego, and is free to join any of the three camps after passing their unique trials. The setting is simple, and to the point - all the protagonist wants is to escape the Barrier, just like everyone else, and whilst you can choose any of the three camps, you’ll be bouncing around each one as a part of the relatively linear main quests. Instead, your choice of Camp will have much more to do with developing your general character build, rather than major storyline consequences.

Gothic boils down the action-RPG genre into its most pure form - no matter if you choose the blade, the bow, or the art of magic, the protagonist is *terrible* at them all - at least at first. Swinging a sword not only looks clumsy, but *feels* clumsy. Sword strikes come out slow and pitiful, and to have any success with your chosen combat style, you’ll have to find someone to train you to not be pathetic at everything you do. Once you’ve actually got the skills to take on your foes, combat remains very simple. I spent most of my time with Gothic wielding swords, and it’s a pretty simple maneuver of drawing your blade with spacebar or TAB, and hitting the arrow keys to perform certain moves. Whilst on paper it seems rather boring - and I wouldn’t describe it as overtly complex - there’s a sort of ‘rhythm’ element to swings. Left and right, sweeping motions, all in an almost rhythmic sense, as hitting the next key too quickly, or too slowly, and your attacks will stutter and take that much longer to come out.In practice, it’s not the biggest evolution of your skills, but the fact that the player character is genuinely terrible at combat-related skills is really sticks out to me - it’s not a matter of levels, it’s just a matter of actually getting the skills. This extends even to the dialogue - you don’t just walk up to a trainer and get a generic line of dialogue informing you you’ve got new skills; the NPC will literally break down your new abilities - albeit the fact it’s just fluff text - and explain how the player character should be holding and wielding their weapons. They didn’t need to do that, but it’s immersive in a way I see few other, much larger games actually go into. No matter what you’re really fighting, enemies don’t really provide you with a huge diversity of experiences. Sure, humans and orcs will sometimes use magic or ranged abilities, and flyers will hover just out of your range, but really this is a game of timing your blows, waiting for openings, and pushing forward with aggression once the moment comes. It’s a really fun basic-yet-complex combat system that I really appreciated, but like a lot of things in Gothic, it feels like a blueprint for something more - something I hope it iterates and improves on in its follow-ups.

Overall, the game has a sort of ‘reverse difficulty’ that I kind of love. Following in the theme of the protagonist being terrible at most things, Gothic is brutal from the jump. Unless you’re fighting lizards or mole rats, you are going to be laid out on your ass until you’ve got some skills, some decent weapons, or any armour at all - preferably all three.As is such, you’ll be playing with a lot of hit-and-run tactics, performing odd jobs to earn ore for equipment, or even leaving the fighting to companions to get some early levels. It’s a very rag to riches kind of progression, as each time you’ll level up, get a new sword, or a new tier of armour, you’ll find a bunch new enemies that aren’t remotely as much of a struggle to deal with, opening up more of the world in a very natural way. It’s a true open world experience, very rarely gated by progression or whatnot; it just depends on if you can kill - or avoid - whatever is in your way. That and getting some cold hard cash - or in this game’s case, cold hard ore, the currency within The Barrier. Early on you’ll be scraping by whatever you can find, with even a basic set of armour feeling utterly out of reach, but as you complete quests hunt the lowest of the low beasts, and hoard each and every piece of ore, you’ll slowly begin to snowball as you gain access to better and better quests, and stronger and stronger monster with more valuable drops.

Like pretty much every other RPG on the market, Gothic is a mostly quest-focussed affair. You’ll find yourself at once of the three aforementioned camps, tasked with completing jobs to be welcomed in, but there’s always a steady stream of side quests to tackle, which will provide you with exp, ore, or sometimes even as a part of the quest you’ll stumble upon a weapon or item that’ll make your life far, far more interesting. The quests themselves range from pretty engaging to just fine, but the game never drops into ‘collect five bear asses’ territory, even if some of the goals can be a little mundane; they almost universally are about the people of the Camps themselves, internal politics between rivals, or about upsetting the power balance within the Barrier as a whole. It also helps that pretty much everyone within the barrier is just that little bit weird; I’m not sure if it’s the writing or the hilarious janky - but certainly not bad - voice acting, but it’s probably the element of the game that gives it the most innately weird atmosphere.

Being a game made on a budget more than two decades ago, Gothic isn’t referred to as one of the premier EuroJank titles without having its own share of jank. To start with, this game’s control system is utterly unique. Whilst most PC based RPGs adopt a traditional keyboard and mouse layout, Gothic is played exclusively with the keyboard, moving with WASD and swinging your weapon with the arrow keys. Even interacting with people, objects, and whatnot is weird, usually requiring a press of CTRL to interact, and then pressing the up arrow key to actually set it off. Inventory, trading, they all have little intricacies that can lead to you very quickly accidentally buying or selling something you did not need, or really really needed, respectively. But overall, I eventually got my hands around the uncommon It also has a habit of having little habits that can screw up your progression - enemies with items you *need* for quests will just despawn on occasion, forcing you to reload or - the nuclear option - using the game console to spawn them back in. Beyond that, its combat, whilst satisfying to master, has inherent problems that can just feel unfun to deal with. When facing a group of enemies, only the one being ‘targeted’ will actually take damage from your weapons, even if you’re slamming your sword into a skeleton’s head over and over again. Sometimes, even if you are targeting them, right up in their face, they just wouldn’t take damage, leading to many, many deaths.

Additionally, it’s seemingly single-minded intent to provide a decent amount of immersion in this fantastical realm, it all feels a bit… pointless. I think the chief example of pointless interactivity this game provides is in the mining. Now, at this point we all know that ore is the main currency within the prison of the Barrier, so when I entered one of the many mines spread throughout the valley, imagine my surprise at being able to *just mine* the ore right there and there. Conjuring a pickaxe from seemingly nowhere, the player character began to harvest the ore, and for a solid minute I harvested that ore, amazed at how easy it’d be to earn ore. Suffice to say, you don’t get anything for mining. You could sit there and mine for an hour, and it’ll provide you squat besides an incredible sense of patience.

Ultimately, it’s mostly the visuals that have aged for the worse for Gothic, and even twenty years on, it doesn’t look that bad. There’s a genuine sense of low-poly aesthetic going on, especially between camps, in sprawling, dark forests and forgotten tombs. It’s mostly in the character models that things look especially rough, especially when you accidentally trigger a conversation nose-to-nose with an NPC and you behold them in all their blurry glory. I’ve also heard people deride the voice acting - which, in all honesty, I kinda get. Almost universally the delivered lines from pretty much everyone ranges from okay at best, to downright laughable. But I honestly wouldn’t call it bad. It’s silly and clumsy and the orcs are all pretty much screaming curses at you - but it’s not bad. It’s embelic of the game as a whole - unpolished, a little bit all over the place, but ultimately entertaining and consistently putting a smile on my face.

Whilst Gothic has enough foibles for a dozen games, and it’s showing its age in control scheme and general graphics, this game is something special. It’s an action RPG in the purest sense, giving you enough freedom to tackle the game’s challenges in the style you want, whilst railroading the player just the right amount to keep the game from feeling too reliant on busywork. Your experience with the game evolves alongside the protagonist - you start at the bottom, unsure what promise lies in this death trap of a title… but give it some time, some practice, and some tools to keep you going, and Gothic will sink it’s claws into you for it’s twenty-or-so hour runtime. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t need to be; it’s clear to me whilst the Gothic series is held in such high regard. It’s rare you get a game that’s such a pure distillation of its genre - jank at all - and I couldn’t be more excited to tackle its sequel, which I’ve heard just improves on this already fantastic title.