Risen Xbox Series X Review 7/10 "Risen Has Risen Again" 🏹 @Piranha_Bytes #GameDev #IndieGames

I originally played Risen back in 2010 on Xbox 360, it was a port that wasn’t particularly well-received at the time, but it came from a period of my life where I was hips deep into janky RPGs such as Boiling Point, Hard Truck Apocalypse, White Gold: War in Paradise and Precursors – so some dodgy controls, graphical glitches and ropey AI were par for the course for me at the time, and as such I had a lot of fun with Risen.

This re-release isn’t a re-master or remake – as the upcoming Gothic will be – but instead is a sort of lightly ‘touched-up’ version that adds full controller support, reduces – but doesn’t fully remove – loading times and has an improved UI. It does run at a mostly solid 60fps, which is a huge leap over the aforementioned Xbox 360 port, although probably level with the original PC version. 

The game begins with the player character surviving a shipwreck and washing up on an island, an island on which strange ruins have recently risen from the ground, causing havoc with the various factions that pepper the land. The game is split into a handful of chapters and sees your protagonist taking definite sides of various fracases as he makes his way through the various locations and ruins, nicking stuff and levelling up as he does so.

This being the 1st in a second trilogy from Piranha Bytes (the first being Gothic), the team clearly know how to roll in terms of world-building, lore, quest lines, and dialogue. All of these aspects are solid, but the fact that this is a fourteen-year-old game comes through the most in terms of the mechanics and gameplay, it’s here that problems – or ‘idiosyncrasies’ – arise.

For example, at the start of the game, you effectively choose one of two paths, joining a rogue’s gallery that resides in the swamp - all the hunters and fighters, etc. or you can head to a town where you will be taken to a monastery for indoctrination into the cult of the Inquisition.

I opted for the latter, and within a couple of hours, hit a snag in the form of an enemy that I had absolutely no chance of killing to progress the main quest. After a brief look online, I found another way around the problem – but the game had bugged, meaning that the person I needed to interact with would not speak to me. This meant that I ended up re-loading a save from a couple of hours ago and heading towards the swamp instead (which makes for a much more fun, and wider opening chapter).

I continued to enjoy my traipsing around (and especially my ‘special move’ of leading monsters towards the main camp so that I could loot their corpses after my cohorts had sacrificed themselves in the name of my greed, good) until I had a quest from Don Esteban himself, Lord of the Swamp – to head to Harbour Town and check if any of his men were still loyal to him. Of course…as I approached Harbour Town, I was beaten down and captured, starting off the Inquisition chapter, and all my Swamp quest lines were automatically cancelled and failed, so I had to load a previous save. So it’s the lack of quality-of-life updates that really stand out. 

The game auto-saves for you, but you have to really be aware of everything you do and save often. You might think you were unseen when you popped into someone’s sleeping quarters and ransacked their belongings, but – unbeknownst to you – someone may have seen you and then refuse to give key dialogue later in the game. It was almost whimsical how often I paused to save, it’s been a while since I played a game in this way, and it was admittedly quite bizarrely nostalgic, although I can imagine it would be infuriating for some not familiar with standard RPG gameplay from that era.

Risen is a fun, if fractured, game and I have to say that I appreciate that these games are becoming available to play on modern consoles, especially for those of us who have fond memories of them. That said, please be aware that this isn’t a remake / remaster, it’s a pretty straight port of the original PC version, and you need to approach with expectations as such.