Games worth discovering

One of history's forgotten RPGs is available on modern hardware, but it deserves a better port

11K View2023-02-05

Even if you adore role-playing games, I'd totally believe you might never have heard of Risen. First released on PCs and the Xbox 360 way back in 2009, Risen was the first of three RPGs in the series from German developer Piranha Bytes. That name may not have the weight of, say, BioWare or Square Enix, but for fans of janky European RPGs (i.e. me), Piranha Bytes has earned a following of its own.

If you've heard of any of Piranha Bytes's works, it's probably the Gothic series. The first Gothic, released in 2001, was one of the earliest fully 3D RPGs, and despite controlling horribly, it was incredibly ambitious and ahead of its time. It had a large open world full of multiple factions vying against each other, and the player character could massive choices that would shape the storyline—and it was doing all of this with at least some degree of success way before any of that was popular in video games!

But I'm not here to sing the praises of Gothic. After two more Gothic games, Piranha Bytes went through a messy breakup with the publisher and copyright holder for that franchise and found itself having to come up with something new. Enter Risen, which would in time become its own trilogy of spiritual successors to Gothic.

Where Gothic was fairly traditional high fantasy, though, Risen had more of a pirate theme. The player character finds themselves shipwrecked on an island after their boat is attacked by a bizarre creature. Much of the early portions of the game are just about surviving, getting your bearings, and figuring out where the heck this island is and who lives here. And similar to the Gothic games, the island is largely open for exploration right from the start (if you're willing to dodge high-level enemies, at least), and there are different factions that offer different approaches through the main story.

While I wouldn't try to argue that Risen is a masterpiece. Even back in 2009, the game received scores in the 7/10 range from professional critics, and those scores seem about accurate from my perspective. But while a 7/10 may not be a great game, it's also far from a disaster. And Risen is a strong 7, in my opinion—an evocative, interesting, and underappreciated RPG that's worth discovering for yourself, as long as you're open to a certain level of unpolished design.

Well, thanks to publisher THQ Nordic, now the owner of Piranha Bytes, it's easier to discover Risen for yourself than ever. Last week the game launched on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch—and those last-gen versions are, of course, also playable on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X. Awesome news, right? Well, not so fast...

Risen is a messy game, and what I found revisiting it on PlayStation 5 was certainly a mess...just not in the ways I was expecting. Unfortunately, these new ports are riddled with experience-ruining bugs and technical issues. When Risen released on Xbox 360 over a decade ago and kind of ran like trash, I was annoyed but not surprised. But there's no excuse for a game this old and this visually bland to have stutters and slowdown on modern hardware. It sometimes felt like I was just playing an emulated copy of the Xbox 360 version of the game!

Maybe that would explain the other, much bigger problem I ran into: game crashes. Like, a lot of game crashes. Risen locked up on PlayStation 5 at least once every forty to sixty minutes during the several hours I tested it. Curiously, this didn't freeze up the whole system, so I was always able to exit to the PS5 dashboard, quit out of the game, and reboot it. But keep in mind that this is an old-school RPG that relies on manual saving for the most part. I definitely lost some progress at a few points, and I can only imagine how frustrating it would have gotten if I had continued playing.

I'm bummed to report that, as much as I have a serious soft spot for Piranha Bytes in general and Risen in particularly, you should probably avoid these ports. The only good news is that they are straight-up ports—not remakes or remasters or anything fancy. That means you won't be missing out on any new content or improved visuals or anything like that if you just pick up the nice, cheap PC version of Risen (currently available on Steam for only $14.99).

That PC version has the benefit of being fully patched up and always having been the best way to play Risen anyways. And then you can move right in to Risen 2 and Risen 3, both of which improve on the original and lean much more heavily into the pirate themes to provide an epic adventure.

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