Risen Review

Developer Piranha Bytes has been making ARPGs for a long time now. Their name has become synonymous with the term “jank”. Once that may have been a term of derision, but in the intervening years it has itself become synonymous with passionate, big ideas but not technically proficient games.

We’re rewinding time now with one of Piranha Bytes’ earliest open-world ARPGs, Risen. Remastered for modern hardware fourteen years later, how does it hold up today? And, more importantly, should you play it?

Let’s get the most obvious part out of the way first. How much of a remaster has been given to Risen? First, it’s been reworked to work on modern hardware, specifically PS4, Xbox One and Switch. Along with that are higher-resolution textures and a higher resolution. Does that mean the game looks up to snuff concerning modern visual standards? Well, no. Risen, even at its initial release, was not a particularly good-looking game. It certainly looks better than it did, but that’s not really saying much as the same problems that plagued it back in the day, plague it now.

Specifically the rather muddy overall look of the world and its design. We’re talking muddy-looking textures for just about everything which makes it difficult to discern the wildlife from its surroundings, so you can expect to literally walk into enemies at times because you couldn’t pick them out from the surrounding area.

Risen is also a very darkly lit game. There are no gamma settings at all, which is one aspect that I really hoped would have gotten some love. We’re talking pitch-black levels of darkness here, especially at night. I expect that’s part of the overall game design but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating not being able to see where you’re going or what’s lurking around the corner because of low light levels. Even with my Switch Lite’s brightness setting pushed to the max, there were plenty of moments where I couldn’t see a damn thing, an issue I had with the game at its original release.

I can’t say whether or not the game’s models and assets have gotten a higher-resolution makeover but they certainly look better than I expected. Not 2023 is better, but we are talking about fourteen-year-old assets that nothing short of complete remodelling could improve. Let’s just say, they get the job done.

Finally, at least on Switch, there seems to be a dynamic resolution at play with distant vistas looking particularly blurry. Thankfully the game’s performance was pretty rock solid and I didn’t experience any frame rate issues or slowdown.

With that out of the way, how does Risen stack up today?

The answer is, surprisingly well if you can overlook its anachronistic design and are prepared to put a lot of patience into it. For all its flaws, and there are many, Risen is a fun, entertaining experience that has just enough depth and choice-based design to keep you engaged.

As a shipwreck survivor, you wash up on an island in the throes of its own crisis. Mysterious temples have burst forth from the ground all over the place, spewing hordes of monsters out and, to make matters worse, the Inquisition has rocked up onto the island and taken over. It’s your job to survive this situation any way you can and stop the inquisition from unleashing a Titan imprisoned in the heart of the island.

If you‘ve played any open-world RPG in the last couple of years, then you know what to expect. You’re going to have to talk to everyone around you and solve their problems while ingratiating yourself with the island’s two factions, the bandit-like Don and his men and the Inquisition.

Risen lets you go where you want to from the get-go, but beware, you’re weaker than a newborn and will get killed repeatedly until you’ve done some levelling up and gotten better equipment. Doing every quest is paramount as the world uses a semi-permanent world state, with early enemies and NPCs staying dead when killed. Resources, including gold and XP, are limited, so you can’t ignore any quest that comes your way.

Faranga, which is small by modern standards, pretty much has everything on your doorstep, removing the tedious need for lengthy back and forths. An early quest to kill some wolves in a cave, for instance, has said cave literally a couple of feet behind the quest giver’s house. You’ll find that this is the case for much of the game.

Where Risen does suffer is in its poor combat system and poorly thought-out menu systems and quest tracking.

Combat is imprecise and full of bugs including poor collision detection, making for a frustrating time until you’ve levelled up enough for monsters to be weaker than you. There’s no lock-on system making the design for a mouse control scheme reasonably frustrating. Risen gets most of the controls onto a controller fairly well, but it fails in combat.

Finally, there are far too many pages to do simple things. The game map and quest tracking system are poorly thought out, requiring three separate map tabs just to figure things out. There’s a World map tab, a local area tab and a quest tab and if you want to see quest markers for NPC you have to have the quest selected and the requisite tab selected. The game doesn’t explain this at all. In fact, it explains very little outside of a starting basics tutorial leaving you to figure it all out yourself. It all could have been better streamlined.

To be fair, the point of this remaster is to get Risen onto modern hardware, not to remake it entirely. So you are you getting the game as it was originally designed and intended and that’s pretty much what retro enthusiasts want. In that sense, the developers have certainly succeeded.

While the game may be small in scope by todays open world standards, it still holds a certain janky charm to it that made the hours I spent playing it worth the initial frustration. Risen is a game that is best enjoyed knowing that you’re getting archaic and buggy design that promotes exploiting its systems. It is, ultimately, a shipwrecked holiday that is worth taking.

Grab your copy here https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-games/Risen-2331202.html

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