Piranha Bytes' Gothic is an unconventional game that takes place in an unconventional setting: a magically sealed prison in a stark, grim fantasy realm. Even though the developer calls it a role-playing game, Gothic is a hybrid game that features RPG, adventure, and action elements. Gothic does have standard role-playing elements, such as experience levels and character development, but it also places heavy emphasis on dialogue and inventory puzzles and has some real-time action sequences. And though it has an unusual and open-ended story, lots of spoken dialogue, and a substantial amount of gameplay, it also has frustrating action sequences and some noticeable technical problems.

Gothic is set in a magically sealed hard-labor prison camp.

The most interesting things about Gothic are its offbeat story and the way that you can interact with it. You play as a single character, an anonymous, soft-spoken convict who's been thrown into the game's world, which is both a prison and an ore mine. Though you'll start the game as a lowly peon with no skills or abilities, you'll eventually become an accomplished adventurer who will join one of the colony's three main camps, but not before you get into a tussle with some rowdies or with some of the colony's indigenous monsters. Both of these can and will squash you flat, at least at the beginning of the game. To Gothic's credit, these vicious enemies make the game's world seem as hostile and as unforgiving as you might expect a prison colony to be. However, once you start exploring and meet a few of the game's characters, you'll find most of them to be very talkative, even chatty, as they explain how to interact with the game's world, as well as give your character simple quests to perform. Most of Gothic consists of running back and forth to collect and deliver items for these quests, though at several points in the game, you'll also have to fight against enemies.

Unfortunately, Gothic's fighting system just doesn't work well. It's fairly simple; you ready a melee weapon, a bow, or a magic spell, target your enemy, and attack and defend by pressing the "use" key together with movement keys. Most single enemies simply come straight at you, and though they'll occasionally dodge to the side, you can usually wait them out by defending until they attack and then attacking yourself. However, Gothic usually throws groups of at least two to three enemies at you (presumably to reinforce the fact that you're in a harsh, hostile world). Multiple enemies can and will surround you, attack you from the rear, and cut you down before you even have time to angrily curse Gothic's largely unresponsive control scheme. Moving and fighting both require you to use your movement keys, so actively trying to dodge while fighting and defending is basically impossible. And using ranged weapons like bows can be even more frustrating, since attacking enemies from a distance invariably causes them to come charging straight at you--and they'll usually knock you out before you can even reach for your melee weapon.

You'll speak with plenty of characters all too eager for your company.

That's not to say that Gothic's control scheme is flat-out awful, but it does have problems--and so does the game's interface. For whatever reason, Gothic uses a fixed third-person, behind-your-character's-back view--a view that usually gets blocked as you explore the game's winding mountain passes and narrow caverns. Most recent third-person action-adventure games either feature an alternate first-person view or make your character transparent when it's pressed against a wall or corner; Gothic does neither. What's more, though Gothic lets you use your mouse to turn your character, the game doesn't actually have a cursor. This is puzzling, considering that the only way to interact with your surroundings is to target them by turning and facing them to highlight them; being able to use a mouse cursor to point at and click on whatever you want to interact with would have made the game easier to play. Also, Gothic has several characters that'll actually physically guide you through the world if you ask them. These characters display remarkably good pathfinding, but after trudging around after a few of these characters, you'll wonder why the developers didn't simply implement an in-game map, which would have made navigating the game's huge outdoor areas much easier.