A prequel to Gothic 1 made as a total conversion mod for Gothic 2. Calling it a mod doesn’t do it justice because it straight up looks like a full game expansion or hell, even an entire new game, all made with love, care and passion to be as much of a true Gothic experience as possible, from the prologue on the ship all the way to the ending.

The world feels alive as pretty much everything was placed by hand with purpose encouraging exploration, quests can be completed in many ways and which way to complete them does matter and major changes occur as you go between chapters. There is enough content for multiple playthroughs where you can take different choices, side with different factions or go for a different playstyle.

As for gameplay though, TCoM makes a lot of improvements over Gothic 2. You no longer have to save items that permanently increase your stats for the endgame to get most benefit, you no longer need to unequip stat increasing items to spend less LP on increasing stats, there is better fast travel, you can make food/potions in bulk and so on… Some things just can’t be changed though. Combat didn’t change much from Gothic 2 and the control scheme is still just as cumbersome (but it can work well on a controller if you install a mod for it). Difficulty-wise it seems a bit easier than the Gothic games, however you are still going to get your ass kicked if you’re not careful.

Also I’m really surprised how this game is fully dubbed (only in Polish though, but still), even more so the dub is actually decent, however there are a few situations where the characters’ speech doesn’t fit the situation at hand. The soundtrack is really good as well, some songs are remixes of music from Gothic games and some songs are entirely new.

Unfortunately though this still runs on the janky, ages-old Gothic 2 engine so getting it to run well on modern PCs can be a real pain sometimes, and you may need to do some extra modding for a better experience. For my playthrough I installed the D3D11 renderer as well as Union and a few Union plugins, including zGamePad for controller support, zBugFixes for engine fixes, zMarkItems to mark new inventory items and zNoFriendlyFire to avoid accidentally attacking friendly NPCs. With that setup I could play with very few issues and and 3 crashes.

And if that weren’t enough, the devs are still not done with the game, as they are working on a 2.0 update with new content and improvements as well as hardcore difficulty.

I really love this game, maybe even more than Gothic itself. I even went and donated to them because I just want them to keep up the good work and I’d love to see any future projects if they do end up making any. If you liked Gothic then this is a must-play, but if you didn’t but like similar hardcore RPGs then you’re gonna have a great time with this game. Heavily recommended.