Enderal is Amazing and You Should Play It

A few weeks ago, I was looking for something to play, as I seem to have stalled out on my current Mass Effect playthrough, I’d finished the game I had been playing before that and really wanted something new.  I sort of toyed with the idea of re-installing Skyrim and picking up on a playthrough that had gotten messed up due to fucking up a quest I wanted to do one way and realized I had done things the wrong way and would have to backtrack a few hours of playthrough to do it right.  And then while toying with the idea I remembered Enderal.

Enderal is a total conversion Skyrim mod – if you already own base Skyrim (not SSE) it’s free.  (Otherwise you need to buy base Skyrim, which most of you already have.)  **UPDATE 2021 – There is now a SSE version of Enderal!  So whether you have base Skyrim or SSE, you can get Enderal.  AND IT’S STILL FREE.  OK back to the post.**

By total conversion I mean it’s an entirely new world, new characters, new story, etc.  It’s not really even a mod more than it is an entire new game built on the back of Skyrim’s engine.  It incorporates a ton of mods you’d already want naturally, has its own section on the Nexus as well, and changes a lot of Skyrim gameplay elements like the leveling system is very different. If you liked Skyrim but don’t really wanna play Skyrim again, which is where I was, Enderal will scratch that itch.

What I expected was a fun Skyrim-lite game to bide some time in, and to be amused by an amateur-ish attempt to recreate Skyrim in someone else’s D&D-like world.  I didn’t expect to finish it, just to play around for a few hours, roll my eyes at some cliches and give up halfway, tbh.

Instead, what I got was near-professional level polish, with several aspects outshining Skyrim (and many other games I’ve paid big $$ for) drastically, including level design, characters, and especially story elements.  I got an experience that was engrossing and deep, tense, grim, emotional, and to be honest, took something extremely familiar to me and made it not only new, but did it significantly better than the sources it felt inspired from.  I gasped, I cried, I mourned, I cheered, I was delighted and depressed, I want to play it again.  Now that it’s over I’m going to miss those characters as much as I miss my Bioware faves.  I want to tell every video-game playing friend I know to play this game.

I’m going to do my best in this post to be as spoiler-free as possible, and leave places where I need to do heavier spoilers until the end.  I’m going to post some screenshots, but there are so many things you should just see for yourself that most of my “best” screenshots I can’t post because I just don’t want to ruin things for you when you play it.  This is going to be long, but I have so much I want to say.  Hear me out.

Keep reading