Gothic Remake "Nyras Prologue" - Feedback + Review

Alkimia Interactive and THQ Nordic, the companies behind the Gothic Remake, have finally released a new playable demo to the general public as part of Steam's Next Fest 2025. The "Nyras Prologue" as they're calling it, is a version of a similar demo that's been floating around for a while now, last seen at Gamescom in August 2024, and perhaps even before that for more limited press coverage. In this demo, you play as Nyras -- whom you may remember from the original game -- just after he's thrown into the colony for the first time, tasked with exploring a small area around the exchange zone and completing a few quests with basic character interactions and combat opportunities. As such, it does not represent what the actual start of the actual game will be like, since they claim that "the full game [will] follow the story, structure, and spirit of the original Gothic, with the Nameless Hero as the protagonist." This demo is basically a mod scenario simply meant to preview what certain mechanics or production designs might look like, in addition to the game's modding capabilities, and of course the creators are quick to point out that everything is a work-in-progress which is subject to change, and that there WILL be bugs and glitches involved. Knowing that, it's hard to judge this demo since it's unclear what exactly is intended JUST for the sake of this one limited scenario, versus what might be intended for the full game experience. 

For instance, there's a big rockslide blocking your path down the mountain from the exchange zone, with Kirgo there trying to clear it with a pickaxe; that is presumably just there to serve as a convenient way to close off the small demo area near the start of the game, as are the invisible walls preventing you from trying to climb or slide down the cliff face, but I wouldn't put it past them to do something similar in the full game as a way to turn the starting area into more of a mandatory early game tutorial. After all, it would make smart business sense for them to implement more overt tutorials to ease new players into the experience a little better compared to the original game which had a tendency to alienate people with its weird idiosyncrasies before they ever had a chance to learn how the game actually works. Having someone there like Kirgo to train you in sword combat, for example, would probably make the game more palatable to new players by making it clear that your crappy, untrained combat animations are not how the entire game will be, and that you will have opportunities to improve things. That way they can keep the same old untrained combat animations to satisfy the longtime fans while not completely alienating new players in the process. However, it probably wouldn't make sense to have Kirgo train you for free with zero learning point costs and no other real incentive for him to do so, like he does in this demo. And they probably wouldn't want to make him insanely easy to beat once you learn your first level of sword training, because then that would completely ruin the progression curve to be defeating armored guards with a rusty sword in the starting area of the game.

So that's why it's difficult for me to draw strong conclusions from this demo, knowing that everything could potentially be different in the final product, and not knowing what aspects are concessions being made just for this demo. Because I wouldn't put it past them to do something almost exactly like this in the actual game, even though this is allegedly not what the actual game introduction will be. 

Watch this review in video format.

For what it's worth, I actually wouldn't mind doing something like this so long as it's executed and balanced properly. Like if you had to actually spend learning points to level up your combat training, and Kirgo's stats were set so that he'd always crush you if you tried to fight him for real, and all subsequent encounters were designed to accommodate the player already having some degree of training so that you still feel like an utter weakling when going up against anything but the weakest creatures in the game, and you shouldn't HAVE to be forced to complete the tutorial before moving on to whatever else you might prefer to do. I also like having that extra opportunity for more world-building with Drax and Ratford, where they talk about the other camps from a different perspective, since that helps to tease the setting a little more in the early stages, and the quest with finding Jorik might be a nice way to establish some of the central plot elements with the Sleeper, if those drawings he made before he died were indeed supposed to be related to a vision he had of the Sleeper. I've always enjoyed the way the story progressively reveals itself in the original game with all the mystery surrounding the Sleeper being pulled back in layers with each chapter, so I think the game could benefit a little by teasing that stuff early on, so long as it isn't so explicit that it becomes predictable. I mean, the original game does already start you off with a warning that the Sect Camp god is not what they think it is, if you break the seal and read the letter to the fire mages yourself, so there is already precedent for establishing these kinds of plot details from the very beginning.

In terms of the tone and atmosphere, it feels reasonably close to the original to me, and it helps that you can adjust a few key graphical settings to personalize things to your liking a little better. The saturation dial, for instance, can make a huge difference in tone, so I think it's good to allow everyone to customize it to a level they like best. So if you're judging the game based on my footage, just know that I recorded with different settings configurations and the game can look very different depending on how you have these set up, and also how good of a computer you have to run everything. I don't have a great PC -- my graphics card is actually supposedly worse than the minimum requirement -- so I can't run the game on high settings to get the best look and performance, but I think it looks alright on lower settings. I appreciate having the option to use a "classic" behind-the-back camera instead of the off-centered one, and also being able to change the FOV, although I still wish I could zoom the camera out a little. It would also be nice to separate things like the vignette and fog effects as their own toggles instead of lumping them in with "post-processing" and "shadows." I'm not really fond of the super bright sunlight that appears in places, however, since I prefer the more gloomy overcast look from the original game with more diffused lighting everywhere, but it's probably good to have some dynamic contrast in the atmospheric conditions so everything doesn't look the exact same at all times in all parts of the map. Something like this would probably be fixed in the future with more variable weather conditions, which we don't see here. It seems to me that the Unreal Engine 5 (which this remake is using) tends to have super contrasty lighting and shadows in general, which I'm not overly fond of either just with the way it tends to make the brights too bright and the darks too dark, but I was able to find a somewhat tolerable compromise in my own configurations. So it's by no means a deal-breaker for me.

And of course, with the extreme graphic fidelity of modern graphics it's a lot harder to parse meaningful information from the environment at a passing glance, like what items can be looted or interacted with, since there's so much more clutter to sift through between all different kinds of grass, plants, rocks, twigs, debris, decorations, and so on. This is probably why modern game designers feel the need to mark interactive items with icons all the time, but that always feels like a lazy solution to me, and it can be particularly distracting from the immersion so I definitely don't want that. The better solution really seems to be just better level design and item placement, in finding a way to make the interactive items stand out from their surroundings a little more noticeably, with less clutter around them so you're not having to face-hug the ground looking for an interact prompt to pop up, which is effectively the same as just marking things in advance with an icon, just with extra steps involved. It should take at least some effort to find obscure, hidden items so I wouldn't want everything to be blatantly obvious, but I think there's room for improvement in making things easier to notice with the naked eye, and easier to target once you see it than what we have now. The original game was much easier to tell what things were interactive or not, in part because of the lower-quality graphics with less stuff everywhere, but it also gave items a sort of pulsating highlight effect so it was explicitly clear what was interactive or not, and then locked the highlight to full brightness when you were targeting it. That highlight effect might break the immersion a little too much in a modern game, but for the remake it might be beneficial to put some type of very subtle glint effect on the items. So long as it's not a giant sparkle that immediately tells you where to find every piece of loot in the area.

Otherwise, the graphical style is obviously a huge improvement from what we saw five years ago, and everything looks pretty good while staying faithful to the look of most things, even down to specific level design features -- but of course rendered with much higher detail, in a way that satisfies the old nostalgia while still allowing it to feel brand new. The armor for the Old Camp Shadows and Guards, for example, is instantly recognizable while still offering a fresh interpretation of those armors. Molerats and Scavengers are likewise similar enough that I can tell what they're supposed to represent, even with the more artistic liberties given to them. I'm not a huge fan of that green goblin, personally, since it tends to look like a more generic fantasy goblin instead of the unique Gothic goblin, but it's a minor thing that doesn't really bother me. The music, of course, is largely based on the original soundtrack but sounding like it's been remastered with more realistic sounding instruments, a deeper sound mix, and possibly even some new harmonies on existing melodies. Or at least, if they're not new, they seem easier to pick out with the new mastering since I didn't immediately recognize them. That's of course in addition to several new tracks that draw heavy inspiration from the original music, quoting familiar parts and then blending them into something new. The new tracks haven't had time to grow on me yet, but they fit in extremely well and are certainly pleasant to listen to. With the original composer, Kai Rosenkranz, being brought back to work on the remake, I of course have little reason for concern when it comes to the music.

The NPCs that we see in the demo area (which includes Diego, Whistler, Orry, Kirgo, Drax, Ratford) seem to be close in attitude for the roles they served in the original game, if not being exact copies of their actual personalities. Drax and Ratford feel a little backwards to me, since Ratford was the one who was more talkative and helpful in the original game, with Drax being the more standoffish of the two, and now those roles have been reversed, but they come as a pair in both games so you get the same net effect either way. The characters as a whole offer a decent blend of some being rude a-holes to you, and others being more quid-pro-quo in their interactions, with just a few being somewhat nice. Kirgo is the worst offender of overwhelming niceness that would seem to be uncharacteristic of this setting, but he was a decent enough guy in the original game so it's maybe not out of character for him to be so polite under the right circumstances. Still, there's no one there like Bullit to punch you in the face and victimize you, unless you count Diego straight up murdering you if you try to push your weight around him; THAT feels out of character to me, since he was one of very few people from the Old Camp who were actually somewhat nice to you and had good reason to be, since it's supposed to be his job to be welcoming towards newcomers so he could recruit them to the Old Camp. At most I would've expected him to simply knock you down and then use that as an opportunity to teach you a lesson about how the Colony operates, and that you can expect a lot worse from other people who aren't as nice or forgiving as him. It was also weird for Drax to tell you the exact opposite of what he tells you in the original game, when it comes to the strategy involved with fighting scavengers. That may be because the old tactic of "lure stuff out one by one" has been removed, since I never had any luck triggering similar behavior patterns in the remake -- they always seem to aggro together, and aren't as defensively neutral about standing their ground -- in which case the dialogue wouldn't make any more sense, but still, telling someone there's no strategy whatsoever feels blatantly wrong to me regardless of whether it matches the original dialogue.

I noticed several different types of accents and regional dialects as well, which I approve. I like the idea of a diverse group of people from different regions all being thrown into this one prison and thus appreciate hearing accents other than Received British Pronunciation. And the way people talk generally captures the more gritty, natural, lived-in sort of vibe that the colony is supposed to have. I believe "Ruhrpott" is the specific term in the original German culture, so I'm guessing the developers were very deliberate in trying to write a style of blunt expression and colorful vulgarity in the vein of that culture. Although I didn't like the repeated use of the term "freshie" to describe newcomers, since that to me feels more like some kind of cutesy prep school slang for a new student instead of new victims to this harsh and unforgiving prison. "Green-blood" works a little better in that context, since green implies rawness while blood implies vitality that might even be spilled, so I'm hoping they use more terms like that in the full game. And I'm not sure why but multiple characters were repeatedly mispronouncing proper nouns like Khorinis and Beliar, which is distracting given that we have multiple original games that all say those words a certain way, so why the sudden difference?  

I wasn't very fond of the camera during dialogue, at first; it felt inappropriately cinematic with its angles, over-the-shoulder shot-reverse-shot framing, extreme facial closeups, and a sort of "handheld" floaty nature, which felt at odds with the more immersive nature that the gameplay experience is supposed to have. The camera has fairly steady movements to it when you're in control of your character, even when you're moving around, and when it does bounce it makes sense because you're running over uneven terrain, so it feels inappropriate during calm dialogue where you're standing perfectly still for it to be suddenly bobbing around like that. Some of those extreme camera angles also feel like they're trying too hard to be artistic instead of just letting the scene play out with you as a simple observer, with sometimes frequent and unnecessary cuts to new or similar angles, to the point that it can be distracting. I mean, the camera angles in the original game worked well with not calling attention to the fact that the game was taking control of the camera away from you because it was usually just moving it to the side more subtly so you could actually see the characters in conversation. That blended with the actual gameplay better in feeling more immersive. But the longer I played the remake, the more I got used to it and the less it bothered me in practice. I still don't exactly like it in concept, so my preference would be to just stabilize the camera and pull back on some of the extreme closeups so that it might blend with the rest of the gameplay a little better.

Then we've got the floating subtitles, which I do not like at all. They're fine in actual conversations when they're just superimposed on the bottom edge of the screen, because then they're just part of the heads up display and you can choose to look past them to immerse yourself in the scene if you want, while still being able to read what the characters are saying -- but when you're eavesdropping on other conversations they turn into a speech bubble that gets tacked on to the top of people's heads, in a way that intrudes into the physical game space of the world. It's especially distracting when it happens to your own character and you have a speech bubble following you around while you move. To me, that feels like a cheap MMORPG where characters are like cardboard cutouts with question marks and whatever else above their heads; it's simply not as organic as just putting the subtitles discretely along the bottom or top of the screen. Then of course, there's an issue currently where they may not appear at all until you get close enough, but then if you get too close the characters' names and interact prompts will block out the subtitles, or even the subtitles themselves will overlap each other, preventing you from reading them anyway. That seems like an obvious issue the designers would be aware of and would have plans to fix, but I would personally hope for a different system closer to what we had in the original games, which would be more immersive and also eliminate those problems at the same time. While on the subject, it might be nice to do the same with enemy health bars during combat, in the interest of separating as much of the UI as possible from the 3D game space of the world. 

Which brings me to my next point: I have very mixed feelings about the User Interface. It's a definite improvement over the Playable Teaser of course, and I like the look of the main user screen that pops up on the left side of the screen to show your stats, quests, and inventory in one window. It's relatively sleek while being easy to read and parse information, while also having a neat little design aesthetic to it so it isn't completely generic. It doesn't pause the game, either, while also allowing you to see the rest of the world around you, complete with eating and drinking animations, which I appreciate. I don't see any quest arrows or tracking in the journal, which is a good thing, and there's some attempt at giving us entries from the character's perspective, although they're pretty sparse and really not much more use than just reading the abstract objective prompts by themselves, so I would like to see those journal entries expanded a little more. Otherwise, the UI is not as "pure" or "minimalistic" as the originals, but I feel like it's a fine enough compromise in being more modern without becoming completely overbearing. Things like the tool-tips that help to explain how stats or other things work is a fine enough addition if that helps people understand the game better without throwing obnoxious pop-up tutorial screens at the player all the time. Things like the item descriptions can be interesting to read as well for gaining extra insight into some of the lore and world-building, but it does stand in direct opposition to the core design philosophy of the original Gothic, which was coined by Stefan Nyul as "What you see is what you get," later described by Mike Hoge as being akin to "Show, don't tell," where they wanted you to be able to learn about the world explicitly by looking at things instead of reading a bunch of text. So, that's a little weird to have item descriptions telling you about the state of the world in ways that your character shouldn't be able to discern just by looking at those items themselves.

Then we've got a hotbar for quick-use item assignment, which again is to be expected from a modern game, but at least it's quick to auto-hide so you're not looking at it all the time. I just wish it would stay hidden all the time, maybe only flashing the icon in the bottom corner to show the thing you activated instead of the whole bar, and I wish I could have more freedom to assign other items into the first three slots. Like, how often am I really going to want to have quick access to a torch, why can't I put something else in slot three instead? And why only eight slots and not nine or ten? Is that just an arbitrary console restriction for a control stick only having room for eight symmetrical directions or something?

What bugs me most is the stuff for targeting and interacting with items, with the dreaded immersion-breaking "Press F to interact" prompt alongside a redundant and visually incongruous "pick up" icon, and also optionally a white outline around the thing you're targeting. I was previously critical of these kinds of things with the Playable Teaser and so I'm disappointed to see them all back again in some form or another in this Nyras Prologue. You can at least disable the white outline (although in my case it kept turning back on every time I loaded a save), and it's in fact kind of necessary to even indicate exactly what you're targeting in some instances when items are clustered together tightly, because the other icons aren't clear enough about what they're relating to and there's no other highlighting system to help indicate what you're actually targeting before you interact with it. There's also no way to identify what you're picking up until you've already picked it up, at which point you get the pop-up summary to the side of the screen, which is annoying when you don't recognize the object and don't know if it's something you might want to pick up in the first place. I'm a kleptomaniac in these games so I'm going to be picking up everything regardless, but that does pose issues when you're sneaking and worried you might get caught stealing something, for instance, and thus might not want to risk it over something that might not be worth it. So again, I will simply reiterate what I said before about wanting a more subtle highlight effect than that obnoxious white outline to let me know what I'm targeting, and then give me the name of the thing so I know what it is -- I don't need to be reminded what button to press to pick something up, and the graphic icon is unnecessary when the type of action being taken is implicitly understood already. The icon itself bugs me especially because it just looks so out of place, like it doesn't match the graphic design of the world around it. So perhaps if it had a different look to it, it might not bother me as much. 

That kind of applies to the targeting reticle for ranged combat as well, which feels like a stylistic mismatch with the rest of the in-game visuals and might thus be better served as something more atmospheric, or just more minimalist altogether. Ultimately I think I might prefer just a simple semi-transparent dot, or maybe the Gothic 3-style wedge in the middle of the screen and then let your stats and skill level affect your precision around that point, which could be modified by gravity, travel time, and how tightly you pull on the bowstring. Basically, let you feel that information naturally instead of telling it to you with the interface. 

Speaking of which, the ranged combat looks to be much improved from the original game, which is not hard to do since the original was extremely shallow in basically just pressing one button to automatically shoot at the target. So it's no surprise that a modern game would implement free-aiming with higher accuracy, damage, and range when charging the bow string longer. These things alone go a long way towards making an archery build potentially interesting to me, since I've frankly never enjoyed archery in the original games because of how straightforward and simplistic it was. I'm assuming that higher skill training would reduce the time it takes to reach maximum "charge" with the bowstring, or enhance the speed of the arrow's flight, or do something to make you more accurate somehow. I'm not really sure what's going on with the arrow flight path or accuracy, however; it seems like sometimes it'll arc with gravity, requiring you to aim up a little higher to hit distant targets, but then other times it will seem to curve unnaturally to hit a target that's outside of your targeting reticle, and then other times it seems to whiz right past or through an enemy that you should have a clear shot against. I had assumed you had a chance to hit anywhere in the circle and so the narrower the circle the better your accuracy, but I'm not really sure and didn't care to keep testing any further. So I don't know if these inconsistencies are due to unforeseen glitches, or if it's somehow operating as intended, in a way that I don't fully understand. As of right now, the archery therefore isn't very satisfying to me, but that could be due to having no skill training with bows, in the same way that untrained sword combat proves to be not very satisfying, either.

As for melee combat: the demo starts you out with untrained sword combat, which is predictably clunky and means slower combos while wielding your one-handed sword with two hands, but then once you train with Kirgo you can perform faster combos, parry enemy attacks (including those of creatures), and cancel out of the beginning of an attack animation by dodging. All-the-while, you have four different types of attacks: two standard lateral attacks with the left and right mouse button that are more likely to hit multiple targets; an overhead chop by pressing E, which is slower but does slightly more damage; and a thrust attack by pressing Q which has extra reach. That all seems neat for extra variety and versatility, since they do function slightly differently, but there are lots of weird overlaps that make these different attacks feel somewhat redundant in combination.

The overhead chop literally just repeats the same animation over and over again like it isn't even a combo, while the thrust attack mysteriously combos right into a chop if pressed a second time. The left and right mouse buttons will do horizontal right and left swipes respectively, unless you click somewhere in the middle of the combo in which case it will do the inverse attack; in other words, you get the same three-hit combo whether you click one button three times in a row, or alternate each button press. As such, left and right attacks are fundamentally the same thing, because I'm not sure they're hitting far enough to the side for you to ever specifically want to attack from, say, the left instead of the right, so they may as well just be the same button that automatically triggers the next type of attack based on where the sword happens to be at the time. Consider the thrust attack, which always plays out from the right side of your body; it would make sense if it could only follow a right attack, or if it would do a different attack altogether if coming out of a left attack, but you get the same end result in the exact same amount of time no matter where it falls in the combo.

So it seems to me, if there are going to be separate buttons for left and right attack like we had in the original, then I would think it should matter more, like it did in the original, where you had to be specific about each attack's direction so that it flowed logically from the previous point; if you did a left attack when your sword was already on the left, then you would interrupt the combo and leave yourself exposed to damage for a moment. Which meant you had to attack to the right instead. It also mattered in the sense of controlling your positioning in the fight, since you could do forward strikes which would move you forward to close the gap on your target, whereas left and right strikes would hold your ground a little more defensively. In the remake, every attack moves you forward, seemingly a variable amount like it's automatically closing extra distances to hit the target sometimes, so it just feels like you don't have as much precise control over what your character is doing, and that your specific inputs don't matter as much, because the game is doing a lot more of the work for you whether you might want it to or not. 

Timing apparently doesn't even matter for pulling off combos anymore, either, since you can spam the mouse buttons as quickly as possible and have the same attack pattern as more methodically-timed clicks. It might even be faster to spam the attack button since that would guarantee you trigger the next attack at the first availability. And of course you're not punished for this like you were in the original game, especially since you can now dodge out of an attack if you end up triggering an extra one that you probably shouldn't have. This is where I would think that doing something like the first Risen would work, where properly-timed mouse clicks will execute the combo much faster, and clicking out of rhythm results in slower attacks and more opportunity to be interrupted. That way, there's more of an engaging rhythm to combat with more reward for players who can stay calm under pressure. In the remake, the only instance when timing your attack seems to matter, as far as I could tell, is after a successful parry, since clicking too early, or too rapidly, causes you to miss the window and just stand there passively, whereas if you wait a beat for your own character to recover then you can execute at least one, or maybe even two attacks before the enemy recovers. 

A properly timed block at the moment of an enemy attack will seemingly always stagger them with a parry, and this works on all enemies I tested in the demo, including scavengers. These attacks, by the way, actually do MORE damage than a regular hit, so there's extra incentive for you to pull these off. Successful parrying would therefore seemingly trivialize the difficulty, especially in one-on-one duels, which I fear is going to turn every single fight into a repetitive matter of just block-attack-block-attack over and over and over again. I mean, with that simple tactic, I was able to easily defeat Diego which actually says multiple bad things about the state of the combat as we see in this demo: 1) that the pattern is way too easy and rewarding, 2) that the stats aren't balanced well in this demo if I could do reasonable damage to someone wearing heavy shadow armor while using a rusty sword, and 3) that the enemy AI isn't smart enough to avoid falling into this repetitive trap over and over again. So once you learn how to parry, you become virtually untouchable, so I would hope there's some counter for this in the full game, like if stronger enemies or certain attacks couldn't be parried at all, or if they would occasionally feint an attack to throw off your timing. I thought I saw Kirgo feint once, but I'm not sure if that was a more advanced technique to cancel an attack without dodging, or if it was just a random glitch.

Regular blocks, where you hold it and wait for an enemy to attack will sometimes work and other times not, and I can't figure out why, like if it's a hitbox thing where their weapon is not physically contacting your sword, and thus they're penetrating your defenses, or if it's something else. The main lesson I learned is just "don't bother blocking unless you're going for a timed parry." Dodging likewise is a mystery to me, because it doesn't SEEM like it's giving you invincibility frames during the dodge, but then other times you manage to avoid all damage while dodging directly into a thrust, so, I don't really know what's going on there. I like the dodge mechanic conceptually if it works by just quickly moving you out of the enemy's attack radius or hit box, with no invincibility, but it's nowhere near as safe or consistent as just parrying. Which suggests the mechanics for these defensive maneuvers may need to be tweaked to make those other two options more viable against the vastly superior parry system.

Enemy AI is pretty suspect right now as well, with them easily getting stuck on terrain, or becoming incapable of figuring out how to get to you, or else getting glitched out or being really passive or predictable in their behavior. There's not much satisfying challenge with fighting any of these enemies on account of these limitations. I should also mention that you can chug potions almost instantly from the hot bar in the middle of a fight, while running, which could make you practically invincible with enough healing potions, so I'd prefer them to have a much slower or longer animation, perhaps while even forcing you to stop moving so there's some risk to when you choose to heal. 

Movement is also very clunky during combat, since movement is sluggish and unresponsive in general. Nyras has a lot of momentum so it takes extra time and effort to get him turned or positioned a certain way. This can make just trying to approach an interactive item much more strenuous than it ought to be, but it also mucks around with mobility during combat with trying to adjust your positioning or facing, where you're holding the forward button for a brief second trying to get him to move towards an enemy and he's just... not really moving at all. Or when you need him to turn to face a particular enemy and he's just... not really turning the way you need him to. You can't sprint or jump with a weapon equipped, either, which is yet more arbitrary restrictions that can make you feel "stuck" in an undesired state during combat, although I can see that possibly being good for balance to make it harder to out-maneuver opponents.

All of that stuff combined with some slightly awkward attack animations that don't string together in the most visually fluid way, make the whole combat system feel much more clunky to me than the original game. I am obviously biased in this regard because I'm so familiar with the original that everything comes as second nature to me, whereas I'm still very new to this demo's systems, but the original game's combat did actually become pretty snappy and responsive once you got some basic combat training, whereas the combat in this demo feels much slower, harder to control, and less satisfying to execute attacks or blocks successfully. Perhaps with more time and better sword training it will grow on me, but based on what we see here, I think it still needs work. You can actually be quite successful with this system so long as you get the hang of things, so it is functional, but it feels lacking in depth right now and still extremely rough around the edges. Still, I like the foundation they have here and think it could work well in the full game: I would just hope to see more purposeful distinction between the different attacks, more emphasis on rhythmic timing for combos, faster animations, more consistent rules and hitboxes, more responsive controls, fewer restrictions on movement, more restrictions on healing, smarter enemy AI, and so on. 

I will say, though, that I like how Kirgo actually explains the new combat mechanics to you with actual in-world terminology. That's how it should be, of course, given the precedent established by the original game and how much more immersive that is than using pop-up tutorial windows saying “press control at the right moment to parry” or something, so it's not exactly high praise but I'm very glad to see that. I also like that sword training does a little more than just give you faster combos, so I'm interested to see what more can be done with this system with extra unlocks as you advance in training. It's unclear if they're still going to have just two additional levels of sword training or what, but I would be happy to see that expanded with some extra tiers or new special abilities. It's also worth mentioning that the one-handed club actually has a different special attack than one-handed swords, so it's possible we might see more diverse movesets from different weapon types in the full game, which might be interesting so long as the distinctions are actually significant. 

Exploration is more straightforward this time around with more restrictive climbing, since it would appear that you can only climb on specific surfaces that you're actually intended to climb. For many rocks or ledges that would seem accessible, your character just awkwardly jumps in place. So that already limits the range of possibilities by restricting you to flat land more often, and I'm not sure that it's realistic in this day and age for us to expect complete freedom to climb anything, but we really should have more than this in a Gothic game. I appreciate moments when the character steps onto or over small obstacles, however, since that actually helps with the feeling of mobility; I just wish you had more control over when he does it, since Nyras would do it of his own volition, sometimes against my own desires, while sometimes refusing to do it when I wanted him to. It is nice that you can pick up items from underwater now, however, so that's one aspect where they've actually added more depth to the exploration, but there's probably not enough deep water sources in the Colony for this to completely balance out the more restrictive climbing. We do however get to see a few expanded areas in this one starting area, with the formerly closed derelict mine shaft now open to explore, and of course more stuff to discover in the lake by the lift, which are positive additions in my eyes. A little tent area requires that you crouch to get inside, so that's an extra little thing that could be utilized to possibly add a little more nuance to the exploration.

The quest mechanics seem pretty simplistic in this demo, which is not a great sign if this is meant to showcase the game's potential. There aren't many role-playing opportunities, here, where you can affect the outcome of a quest by picking different dialogue options or doing things differently. Most of the time it seems like a binary choice of either "do the quest or character interaction in this way, or don't do it at all." If you try to convince Diego to let you sleep at the exchange zone, he murders you, forcing a restart where you have to skip that option and go find another bed to sleep in. And you can't just sleep in any of the other beds you come to and risk being killed by the Shadowbeast or the owners, you HAVE to do the quest with Drax and Ratford to get them to invite you into their camp. With Ratford, nothing you say will get him talking to you more until you find Jorik, regardless of whether you've met Drax beforehand or not, and with Drax, you either agree to the scavenger hunt with him, or he gets mad at you for stealing his game and murders you. With Kirgo, you either act nice on your first impression to unlock his full dialogue and combat training, or pick the other option and lose access to all further interactions. With Orry, you either agree to fetch him a beer on first prompt, or lose that quest altogether. So while some of these choices do come with consequences, they're not really satisfying, because it's like instead of opening a different door in the quest, the game just slams the only door in your face for picking the "other" choice. Even the Playable Teaser had more meaningful choices with variable outcomes, with choosing to spare that one guard or kill him being a pretty notable example. The only interesting changes I found were just minor variations in dialogue depending on the order you do things in, like you lose the ability to copy Diego's "wrong place, wrong time" line if you don't hear it from him, first, and the dialogue with Drax and Ratford can be slightly different depending on who you talk to first or whether you find Jorik before or after talking to Ratford. While those reactive changes are nice, they're just minor details in the grand scheme of things compared to making interesting, meaningful choices.

The actual tasks you do in the demo, meanwhile, are really simple and mundane affairs, like "bring this dude a beer," or "kill three scavengers" or "find this dead guy's body a stone's throw away from here" – which are not very engaging gameplay scenarios, with only the most barebones plotting around it to justify these actions. So I'm not very impressed with the quests on display here and hope this is not meant to be representative of the final game. I'm not too concerned about this, however, because they would presumably be copying a lot of the existing quests and even expanding on them with extra options and consequences. These quests, here, are just not a great demonstration of what their creative potential might be in that department.

One conversation with Kirgo got me thinking about some possibilities for what new quests we might see in the remake, when he was talking about how a couple of women escaped and are hiding out somewhere in the colony, which might present a new opportunity to track them down and bring them back to Gomez, or help cover up their disappearance, or sell them out to someone else. So something like that might be fun to add on to the existing content. That same conversation is also cool with how it ties together some of the lore from the entire series, with talks of Khorinis and the mining operation in Nordmar, which is something this remake has the benefit of doing in hindsight, since the original games were making up the lore and world-building as they went, and so things didn't always line up from one game to the next. But now that they already know where Piranha Bytes took the later games, Alkimia can plan ahead and work those references into the first game more coherently, which is good to see them already doing. I just wonder if you'll get the chance to ask Diego about Gerbrandt.

That's about the main extent of my thoughts on the demo. There's plenty more small stuff to comment on, like the pleasantry of being able to loot stuff with a weapon drawn and now having a dedicated "take all" function, or the tedium of the looting animation for enemy corpses being a little long and also completely locking up the camera in the process, or the nicety of just having a simple sprint key instead of juggling sprint potions, or the bizarre "progress meter" when frying meat which feels a little too "video gamey" for the interface, or the goofy-looking torch spike animation and the nuisance of having to wait for it to burn itself out before picking it back up again to stow it in your inventory, or a few weird glitches like seemingly losing experience points at random times, or cutscenes getting stuck, or the controls just randomly becoming completely unresponsive, but most of that stuff is pretty minor and not really worth making a big deal about, other than a quick mention.

In reality, I'm sort of resigned at this point to the fact that the remake is going to be what it will be, and I don't want to get bent out of shape by expecting it to be something that it might not be. I'm not sure that it's possible to completely recapture the magic of the original game, so I just want to play the game and enjoy it for what it is, which will hopefully be a decent enough game that is at least respectful of the original source material, if not a perfect faithful recreation of it. Because not everything needs to be the exact same and not everything about the original game was exactly perfect or worth carrying over into a modern game. Frankly I don't even want to play a one-to-one remaster, since I've already played Gothic and I don't need to play the exact same game again, just with better graphics and quality of life improvements. I want new things to experience so it can feel like a new game to me, so I can experience one of my favorite games for the first time all over again. 

And so far, this demo is doing a much better job of respecting the source material while still doing its own original things, compared to what they started with back with that Playable Teaser at the end of 2019. I'm not utterly offended after playing this demo, like I was after playing the original Teaser; I actually enjoy a lot of this demo and think they're on the right track with things. It just seems like there's still plenty of room for improvement, not necessarily from the stance of making things feel more like Gothic, but just in making it a good game. So overall, I'm much more optimistic about the remake now than I was five years ago, but I'm still cautiously trying to keep my guard up with a "wait and see" approach, because we still haven't really seen enough to know how the full game will be, and it doesn't seem like we're approaching a release date anytime in the near future.

So that's all I have for this one -- if I've forgotten anything or any other thoughts come to mind, I'll add them in the comments. Meanwhile, let me know what you think of this demo -- do you feel like they're on the right track, and would this be a game that you think you'd enjoy if the full game were like this?