A worthy successor to Gothic.

Good melee combat, good follow-up on the "3 camps" Gothic formula, good exploration (not quite as good as Gothic 1 and 2, tbh, but still good), mostly good dialogs and voice acting and characters, pleasant background music, a different protagonist but still working out well, and some welcome improvements to QoL.

And speaking of VA, it has Cersei Lannister speaking as Patty.

The overall story isn't as good as I'd hope, and the very last stretch of the game including the boss fight is not the climax we'd hoped for. But the journey to get there is worth it.

(Unfortunately, it's the only game in the Risen series worth playing. Risen 2 has the distinct honor of being the only game that has ever managed to truly piss me off.)

Fair warning, I can't vouch for the Steam version, as I only ever played retail and GoG and I heard there's been some patch since then. Hopefully they didn't screw up too much.

Very nice classic RPG, decent story, challenging, nice range of options to finish a quest. Immersive (albeit small) open world, atmospheric, especially when you see the npc's having dedicated cycles. A lot of good work went into making this a living world, where npc's remember your actions. For instance, when you kill someone on the street, bystanders will remember this and stop talking to you, which can ruin some quests. This is an immersion level which even some modern games lack.

I was surprised the game has full controller support, this makes it a perfect game for the Steam Deck. If you're playing this on PC, you can slightly improve the graphics by forcing FXAA in the Nvidia control panel (the game has no AA otherwise).

My only con is that the combat is a little clunky. Thankfully you can put anything on the hotbar, including potions and such, but using them locks you into an animation cycle, which can feel a little frustrating when you're being attacked. Also npc's can dodge lightning fast, which sometimes feels a little too fast. Also using spells is a little inconsistent as using the hotkey sometimes instantly 'unequips' the spell.

Chapters 3 and 4 discourage any desire to continue the game and reach the final, the most interesting chapter is only 1.