Don't sleep on this if you like adventure and role-playing games.

"The Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos" isn't just a Gothic mod, it's its own game and it's great at being one. It's an 80 plus hours adventure packed with content including a rich story and fully dubbed (in Polish) dialogues.
The story itself starts off slow and makes it clear right away that you, as the character, are a nobody in a foreign land and that if you want to achieve something you have to earn it.
You begin your adventure wearing rags and knowing absolutely nothing about swords, magic and crafting, and many other things. For a few dozen hours you will struggle.

Everything in this world looks at you with hostility at first, and I'm not just referring to the monsters and animals that populate Archolos, but its human inhabitants too. You're a refugee, after all, escaping a war as well as many other people and hoping to start a new life on this small island you've just arrived on. In this new chapter of your life you are accompanied by your brother.

Unfortunately for you, your visit won't be a cakewalk. You are distrusted by those who settled there before you, you and your people are called slackers, sometimes they treat you like a thief and you often get beaten up and deceived by the locals. Survival becomes the key to your success.

So for this and other reasons you start running errands for people to increase your social status along with their trust. It's a slow process but you're perseverant and you'll eventually end up becoming someone, opening up new possibilities, raising the stakes, making a difference.


Archolos borrows most of the Gothic 1 and 2 core systems and manages to expand on them. You have your standard leveling progression where your character levels up by completing quests and killing NPCs, but you also have a complementary horizontal progression in the form of gathering resources: as is tradition from Gothic games once you've acquired enough learning points from a level increase you can decide to spend them learning a skill from a trainer. When it comes to harvesting resources like minerals and wood though, you can either decide to spend your points on improving your proficiency or you try firsthand to collect the resources without prior knowledge on how to do it, and in the process, by failing to do so, you increase your skill in that field.
The activities you can decide to partake in are many: cooking, alchemy, blacksmithing and bowmaking. These professions are linked to their gathering counterparts: collecting herbs, fishing and extracting resources (like wood and different kinds of metals). To become proficient in most of these crafts though, you must apply for apprenticeship to one of the main city master crafters, but before you can do that, you will also have to become a citizen of the city of Archolos.

This is important because what the game does best is create in the player a sense of belonging. You feel like you are a cog among others in this busy and dynamic living world. Most of the people you see in your travels have their own schedule: they work the fields, they extract ores in the mines, and they live and eat and sleep in the city. Everywhere you look something is moving and as the chapters progress, many things, people and places included, change. Meanwhile, the story doesn't advance just because of you. On the contrary, it is set in motion by other actors and you're caught in it.

For those that haven't played one of the first two Gothic games let me explain briefly what the combat system is like: Archolos is an action RPG with directional combat and (if you decide to play melee) a combo system. Animations are representative of your current skill level. Right at the start swinging a sword will feel clunky and slow, but as you learn more about fighting your attacks become faster and start to connect. You will be able to keep enemies at bay by learning their attack patterns and striking them when you see an opening, but that's not your only option. There are many ways you can approach a fight: there is magic, that allows you not only to throw fireballs and such but also to put your targets to sleep, make their movements slower, shrink them to a laughable size, freeze them in place, and so on. In many cases, you can also use the environment to your advantage and climb hills, rocks, and buildings only to strike them from above, either with a ranged weapon or magic.

The Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos let you approach the game as you wish. The main character is a blank slate that you're going to fill with your play style.

The same thing could also be said about the story: while the main quest will feel linear at times and the end result will be the same for everyone (kinda), your actions and the decisions you make will determine the outcome of many important events as well as the fate of most of the characters you will meet.

Archolos is a great adventure and there would be many more things to say, but this review is already too long. Something I didn't mention but deserve to be talked about before my closing line is the level design. The world-building of this game is just special. In the first few dozen hours, you will be lost in the intricacies of the game map, but once you understand what is where you will realize how carefully things are placed in the world and how everything is interconnected. Once I got a sense of direction, it blew my mind.

So, again: Archolos is not just a mod, it's a great game. It is one of the best RPGs of the past few years. Play it.