Gothic Remake hits 500k sales in a week, proving we still love eurojank

Gothic Remake crossed 500,000 sales in its first week, and it's sitting at Very Positive on Steam with 3,369 user reviews. Developer Alkimia Interactive's RPG has made a strong case that the appetite for uncompromising eurojank never really went away.

The game keeps everything that made the original Gothic notorious: wolves kill you in seconds, NPCs knock you out and rob you for being a smartass, and you have to buy a map that's neither cheap nor particularly useful. Plenty of quests make little sense without a guide. On the technical side, DLSS and frame generation are poorly implemented, NPCs occasionally vanish, and loading a save wakes up sleeping characters — something PC Gamer's writer discovered firsthand while trying to rob people blind. The game scored 60% in PC Gamer's review, though the reviewer who wrote this piece notes he's considerably fonder of it than the colleague who scored it.

Gothic in 2001 captured something specific about PC gaming culture — console players expected polish, but PC players wanted the weird, ambitious stuff even if it came with bugs and crashes. That spirit hasn't really changed. Gothic and Stalker are on consoles now, but they're still PC games at heart, rough edges and all.

Alkimia Interactive isn't calling it done, though. Patches are on the way, and the studio is reportedly considering fixes to the much-maligned lockpicking system. Most players seem to have gone in with eyes open — the jank is part of the deal, and right now the community seems fine with that trade-off.