Upon playing Risen, people who haven’t played Piranha Bytes’ older Gothic series might be a little nonplussed. It might seem to them like they’re playing an uglier version of Oblivion, a less elegant version of Demon’s Souls, or an extremely solitary MMORPG. If our hypothetical player was a longtime fan of the Gothic series, their reaction might still be something less than favorable.
Risen is a single player, “open-world” RPG that delights in being as obtuse, unreasonably hard, and finicky as it possibly can. It sports none of the handholding found in the Elder Scrolls series, and is as far from Demon’s Souls’ extreme fluidity as could be imagined. In Demon’s Souls, every time you die, it’s because you made a mistake. Rare are the times when you can attribute your death to bad design or unfair circumstances.
Dying and failing in Risen is almost always due to bad design and horridly stacked odds. But oddly enough, these are not necessarily bad things. The game inherits from its predecessors (the Gothic series) a stubborn, close-minded approach to the RPG genre. Everything is hard to come by, from money to life, and you’ll spend the first 5 or so hours of the game getting to a point where only ninety percent of the enemies in the game can kill you in one hit.
The reason Risen is so difficult is threefold: the enemies are tough and ruthless, the leveling process and item collection ramp up glacially, and the controls are awful. All of this strangely fits into the oppressively dangerous world of Risen. The island (Faranga) where the game takes place is constantly lit with moody, atmospheric lighting and effect. The enemies and locations (from valleys to swamps to tombs) are just as mysterious and darkly exciting as the lighting.
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