The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review (AssMan69)
A long time ago, Christmas of 2010 (I believe), my mum purchased Red Dead Redemption and a second-hand Xbox 360 for me at a car boot sale. This was an apparently shameful expense for her to justify spending, and so I was told to tell people (should they ask) that it cost her only £40.
What it actually cost, I’m not sure.
By the next Christmas, the house had been repossessed, and we began the process of packing our lives into cardboard boxes whilst awaiting the purgatory of an emergency shelter. One of the last rooms packed was my mum’s, and, whilst doing so, she uncovered two gifts she had misplaced before Christmas; Halo: Reach, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Though all three of these games were voraciously played to a point far beyond the natural lifespans of their available content (even without the internet to access Xbox Live, I still managed to grind my Spartan through the notorious Warrant Officer ranks and beyond), Skyrim was the one that seemed to totally captivate a desire within me to immerse myself in the world held within its little silver disk. I wanted to experience everything it had to offer.
In early 2013, we were moved from the shelter to a council house, where, for the first time, we got at-home internet access. This opened me up to a world of Skyrim YouTubers playing on PC, with mods, and (after all the hours I’d already spent playing Skyrim) I wanted to emulate what I was seeing. I did this by enforcing certain “immersive limitations” on my playthroughs by doing things like: regularly sleeping and eating, restricting the use of potions, forbidding the use of fast travel, and refraining from treating my hirelings like begrudged bipedal pack animals.
I’m convinced I eventually spent somewhere north of a thousand hours wandering, and exploring, and experiencing everything from the deep autumnal birch forests of The Rift to the edges of Haafingar’s desolate tundratic coast. I was totally and utterly enthralled by the depth of it all.
During all of this, the things in our life that were bad only seemed to ceaslessly creep towards ‘worse’, yet Skyrim managed to occupy and distract my mind enough to help float me through a time so low in my life that I almost can’t recall it. I’m not saying Skyrim fixed a broken 14-year-old’s life; however, I reckon it did help him find a bit of solace at a time when his home life was really not so great.
For me, Skyrim was a dense, content-rich world with so much in it to discover. It’s one of a small number of truly unique games I wish I could forget all about, should it allow me to experience it, once again, for the very first time.
I hope that one day I’ll return.