Developer: Piranha Bytes | Released: 2012 | Genre: RPG, Third Person

I decided to start Risen 2: Dark Waters right after the first game in the series, while I still had fresh memories about it. I bought it on Steam including all DLC, so there will also be something about those. One contains pirate clothes and two are actual adventures lasting about one hour each.

The title screen music was quite nice but also revealed that it wasn’t the same composer as in the previous game. In fact, a lot of things had changed. The nameless hero, now drunk in the beginning and without access to magic, had a big mullet and no longer resembled Wentworth Miller. His voice actor was also different. From a tower in the very tiny harbour town, Caldera, Commandant Carlos and our hero watched a medieval ship being trashed by a Kraken. The only survivor swimming ashore was Patty, the pirate daughter from the first game, and she also looked and sounded totally different.

Typical Piranha Bytes – no regard for continuity there. The Gothic series also had the same problems.

The interface was also handled quite differently in the sequel. There were absolutely no window panes anymore. All looting, inventory, attributes, logs and whathaveyou were shown in dark, separate screens. How very 2010’ish. Even looting a chest showed a separate screen, and looting corpses just grabbed whatever. Along with the vastly improved textures, sharp lighting and the larger font for dialogs, all the improvements made me think of a similar jump between the Two Worlds games. The first one was also crude in many areas that the second game improved upon in much the same way.

And this time they even allowed me to rebind the quicksave key.

Developer: Piranha Bytes | Released: 2009 | Genre: RPG, Third Person

This was a third person open world RPG in control of a predefined male human – no character customization in this one. It had ruthless beginnings, unforgiving combat, expensive training, no loading in and out of most houses and dungeons, a great sense of verticality in the form of steep cliffs and meandering paths, and NPC that sometimes wouldn’t restrain themselves from calling you a moron and optionally kick your ass if need be.

In other words, a typical Piranha Bytes RPG.

In fact, it felt so much like the first Gothic games that it could almost have been called Gothic 2½. I’ve completed the first three Gothic games a long time ago. (Well, actually I’ve completed all four if you also count Arcania, but it wasn’t made by Piranha Bytes and had a different feel.) The first games in the Gothic series had very ruthless beginnings. I actually never quite enjoyed starting that far down the ladder and it taking so long to get the upper hand, but there is something to be said for finally getting powerful enough to stand toe to toe with the tougher enemies of the game. It gives a very palpable sense of progression in the later parts of their games.

The Piranha Bytes RPG have always felt crude to me in a strangely charming way – kind of like the Paul Norman games on the Commodore 64, such as Forbidden Forest and Aztec Challenge. Lots of cut corners everywhere. Roasting a stew without meat in the pan. Animations where items are just conjured out of thin air. Sound effects that sometimes feel like they don’t belong. That sort of thing. Even though Risen was a reboot with a new publisher in 2009, it still felt totally like a late part of the exact same series. It also still had all the strong trademarks too, like a solid AI for NPC going about their own business.