36 hours in, and I find myself atop a snow-covered peak in the far north of Skyrim, perched on my proud steed (best 1,000 gold pieces I’ve ever spent) and looking out on a gorgeous vista of woods, lakes and mountains. I’m slightly lost, the weather has come down, with a nasty blizzard starting to blow, and there are a couple of deadly sabre-cats prowling around down below the treeline.
Problem is, as well as my horse – to whom I’ve grown quite attached after our numerous adventures – I’ve also ended up with a dog called Meeko in tow. I found him out in the wilderness, sitting by his dead master’s bed in a little hut in the middle of nowhere. He attached himself to me, and I’ve become rather attached to him. He’s a splendid fellow, but a bit too gung-ho for his own good. I know he’d go for the sabre-cats as if they were a pair of mud crabs; but with their great teeth and vicious claws they’d make short work of poor Meeko. The best bet, it strikes me, is to gather up my little menagerie (I just can’t help but feel responsible for their welfare), attempt to find a trail down the other side of the mountain and head, temporarily at least, for home.
After all, back in the bustling city of Whiterun I’ve managed to buy a cosy little house called Breezehome, converting my dungeon spoils into home comforts; with the help of Tamriel’s equivalent of the Ikea catalogue, I’ve kitted it out quite nicely, too – big kitchen with a roaring firepit to cook on (venison stew is my speciality); bookcases for the various arcane tomes I’ve picked up on my travels; my own alchemy laboratory for experimenting with the flowers, fungi and other substances I’ve harvested, combining raw ingredients to make (when my weird mixtures actually work) potions, poisons and restorative tonics. I can leave the horse at the nearby stables, park Meeko in front of the fire and sit down and rethink my strategy for retrieving the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller and returning it to those mysterious greybeards in their temple on High Hrothgar. Perhaps I’ll take a stroll around the city ramparts and just watch the eerie beauty of the Northern Lights. After all, a break from adventuring is as good as a rest.
As you’ve probably gathered, Skyrim has taken over my life for the past few evenings – so let this review be a warning to you. Yes, it’s crammed with every fantasy cliché you could think of, and then some, but it’s so beautifully realised, richly and wittily detailed and compulsively playable that you’d have to be quite a curmudgeon to care about that.
As always seems to be the case in such fantasy tales, you start out as a complete nobody, caught up in a rebellion and heading for the executioner’s block, only to find that you’re actually a very special person indeed – the Dragonborn hero foretold in the ancient prophecies. You’re not quite sure what this means or actually involves, but it sounds quite good and means that you can learn special magical shouts a bit like the ones dragons use (to talk to one another, I suppose).
Dragons are much to the fore in this latest Elder Scrolls incarnation. Amidst political turmoil that threatens to turn into all-out civil war (should I side with the Imperial forces or the nationalistic Stormcloak rebels?), these fearsome, wonderful beasts of distant legend have returned to Tamriel to wreak their own havoc for reasons that – 36 hours in – remain mysterious. As well as bearing on the main story arc, these impressive beasties also make randomly generated appearances, which leads to some truly unexpected and tremendously exciting encounters.
All will become clear, I’ve no doubt, given time – which is something you’ll need plenty of to tackle this truly epic creation. Anyone who has played one of the previous Elder Scrolls titles will know that developers Bethesda don’t skimp on content. Skyrim is a massive, open-world game that you can explore at your leisure – and if the claim that it contains some 150 explorable dungeons is true, then there’s as much of it below ground as above.
It’s probably possible to focus on the main quest and power through it, but where would the fun be in that? If, like me, you’re an inveterate poker into nooks and crannies who always wants to have a look round the next corner or at the other side of the hill, then you simply have no chance of playing Skyrim quickly. There are compelling, multipart side-quests galore, and the nature of the lush and populous gameworld means that you’re just as likely to spend time hunting, reading or pottering in your lab as actually adventuring with any particular aim in mind. Your character – there’s a good choice of races to start with – is also constantly developing skills, basically through using them – the more you employ certain weapons, the more proficient you’ll become with them; or you can focus on your magical abilities, even training with some highly accomplished mages. You’ll need all the skills you can muster: there’s a wonderful variety of foes out there to deal with, from bears and bandits to undead horrors and evil necromancers.
Skyrim has its little faults – the interface for keeping track of your weapons, potions and powers is a bit of a handful, to be honest. And many PS3 users have reported such massive problems with savegames that it probably can’t be recommended on that platform until this is fixed.
However, as I am an old-school PC gamer, this strikes me as a true masterpiece, as satisfying and unputdownable as a big, fat novel. Your other half will probably not be pleased, but you owe it to yourself to step through the wardrobe and into this magical land of myths and monsters; and if, at any point, you should remember our own world of credit crunches and Eurozone crises, you could be forgiven for never coming back at all…
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