GAME REVIEW: REDGUARD

• Part 1
• Part 2

We've split this article in multiple parts for ease of navigation. Part 1 was relatively spoiler-free, but going forward, we are going to openly discuss major plotpoints!

To the necromancer's tower

From our exploration of the Goblin Caverns, we learn that the missing priest Kithral is dead, and confirm that he was indeed in contact with Iszara. Maybe a lot of contact, even. But that trail is now cold, unfortunately for Cyrus and especially for Kithral.

So we decided to next venture out of town and figure out where the heck the necromancer's tower is. We received the quest to do this delivery for the necromancer the moment Cyrus stepped foot in Stros M'Kai, and we kind of said we would do it and then absolutely dawdled with it. Hey, after all, it doesn't sound so pressing in comparison to finding Iszara and uncovering the political conspiracies and whatnot. Also, yeah, we're being sent to the house of the necromancer to pick up a delivery to bring to the asshole Imperial governor, Richton, the one who had A'tor assassinated. We already know this isn't going to go well.

The first hurdle, surprisingly, is figuring out where the heck we're supposed to go. People keep telling us, follow the shoals to the north-west. But we have no map and no compass, so, uh. Where is north-west? And what is a goddamn shoal? We consult a dictionary. A shoal is a sand or pebbly dune out in the water that sticks up near or past the surface of the water. Okay, so probably we need to go the opposite way from town, because there's nothing like that in the water around town. We need to find water with... shoals. Whatever they look like in low-poly land.

We arrive to the beach of what must be the opposite side of the island from the port where we arrived, and we are attacked by the most soft-spoken pirate ever (A man and his pulse are soon parted~). We don't think much of this battle, but when the inevitable happens and he finds the other end of our sword, we loot his corpse, and he has a map of the island! Finally! A map!!

And it's a nice map! It's even got the copyright information that this was done by the local cartographer Maiko, dated to a few years ago, back when he still did maps of the island! We had previously asked Maiko if he could set us up with a map, but he says, he's done making them and fuckin' ask some rando for a shit-ass map, he's not doing top quality maps of the island anymore when the market is flooded with mass-produced shit. The economy, once again, is in shambles.

But now we luckily have our hands on a premium map, and we can open it up and review where we've been and where we're going... yeah, looks like the necromancer's tower is on an island over there, not very far. There's a passage of bridges over the shoals, and then probably a boat. Yeah, we were told there would be a ferry service, so don't forget the money. Good, alright. And with a dedicated map button, now we can find our way whenever.

We arrive to the bridges. These constitute a mini-platforming section all by themselves, because of course the bridges are rotting and they fall apart when we walk over them, as it is wont to happen in any story involving a suspended wooden bridge. To be fair, in this case, how many people do you think are using and/or maintaining the bridges that lead to the fucking necromancer's island? The townsfolk are probably wishing for when they will finally rot away and sever the necromancer's island from Stros M'Kai. But the bridges are the only way for Cyrus to go, because if he falls into the water, he'll be food for the mysterious Tentacle or for the sharks whose fins we spy circling around. So, uh, platforming it is. Argh. Save after every bridge if you don't want to do it again. Though, compared to the horrors of the mushroom jumping, this part was much easier.

At the end of the bridges, there's a ferryman! Oh, nice! He is —

It's a skeleton... no wait, it's worse, it's a skeleton kludge with a bone fin tail that is a boat and — the boat is the ferryman, and the ferryman is the figurehead of the boat, which is bones, and...

We pay the ferryman, and during the following cutscene of Cyrus's arrival to the necromancer's island, we discuss amongst ourselves that, well, we suppose that we're getting a rare taste of what's even the point of necromancy beyond wearing black robes and laughing evilly. This necromancer made a terrifying bone kludge that serves as a combination ferryman and boat. Well, at least it's useful.

As we arrive to the island, it was a dark and stormy day, of fucking course. The island is probably enchanted to have a gloomy mood forever. Well, if you were an evil necromancer, wouldn't you?

Traversing the island is not an issue, surprisingly. The map helps so much. We are attacked by skeletons and zombies, but the skeletons are Skyrim-style skeletons and not Oblivion-style skeletons, and they take only a couple hits before disbanding into a pile of bones, and the zombies have no swords and are very slow, so they're no match for Cyrus's sabre. Besides, like every random enemy in this game, they can be completely ignored and outran if you don't want to engage, which, in this very wide open area, is perfectly possible and probably recommended, since, how much do you think the zombies and the skeletons can give us as loot? Cyrus loots the skeleton and he almost laughs as he comments, lol, five gold pieces.

We love that he also has a line specific to seven gold pieces, which just has this like, underlying note of disgust. Why are we wasting our time?

So, ignoring the zombies...

We need to figure out how to open the gate that leads to the necromancer's tower. We found a skull-shaped lever mechanism that opened the door to a little niche, within which we found... a crowbar. That's right, how do we open the gate of the necromancer's tower? Try the good old crowbar. What, did you expect everything on the necromancer's island to be magical and bone-themed? Check your biases.

We arrive at the front gate of the tower, and we... uh... intercom the necromancer. And he just comes to the gate? We were so expecting this to be a boss fight, and the necromancer surely will try to kill us to have Cyrus join his undead ranks blah blah blah, and we'll have to kill the necromancer and find the amulet off his dead body to complete our quest.

But no, we're just really serving as a deliveryman and we're doing a pickup. Everyone is being so normal about this. When the necromancer comes to the door, we even have a conversation with him through the gate as we pick up the amulet.

The necromancer, N'Gasta, is a slugman. We thought we knew all the species of The Elder Scrolls, but this is one we'd never heard about before. He's a Sload, and he's the only Sload ever seen in any Elder Scrolls game we care about (until some lateral stuff in Online like 20 years later). As we will later explain in more detail, some ideas from Redguard would be revisited in every following Elder Scrolls game, while some others would pretty much never be mentioned again, and the Sload are in this latter category.

But beyond the surprise of what N'Gasta looks like, we are also extremely and positively surprised that we get to have a normal enough conversation with an evil necromancer. He explains what he's doing, how his necromancy works, that he's a student of the God of Worms, Mannimarco himself, and all about what he uses his necromancy for. Strangely helpfully, N'Gasta confirms that Iszara must not have died out on the island somewhere, because if she had, then her soul would have been caught in his soul-snare, which he has built to trap the wayward souls of everyone who dies in Stros M'Kai. So we can figure she's probably still alive.

One of his study subjects, by the way, is the soul of Kithral, the poor priest who was friends with Iszara. Aw man. Most of the quests of this game may be done in any order, and we happened to have already done the quest in the Goblin Caverns which led to us learning what happened to Kithral, but we assume that this dialogue with the necromancer could have been another way to learn that Kithral is dead. N'Gasta also notes, you'd think a priest of Arkay would be immune to such ensnaring, but something about this priest made him get caught. When we earlier spoke with the head priest Brother Nidal, he did mention that Kithral was untypically worldly for a priest. Nidal also said that he would have invited Iszara to become a priest in the temple also, but that was before the — the — nevermind. ...He evades answering this, but we wonder if Iszara and Kithral were caught fucking. Are priests of Arkay allowed to fuck? ...Seems like no.

Anyway, N'Gasta then uses the ensnared souls for necromantic research and for bartering with the Daedric Prince, Clavicus Vile. Cyrus (who is definitely not very religious) can reply to that, lol, Clavicus Vile? Really? That's his name? And N'Gasta says, hey, come on now, the etymologies of our words are derived from the names of the Daedra, so now his name sounds funny, doesn't it, but that's because the name predates the current language. Which is a really cool world-building implication, and a funny way to address the fans' snerking at, yeah, Clavicus Vile, lol. ...It's a really funny name.

So yeah, is this like the only time in anything ever that we actually learn what necromancy is even for in-universe beyond being Eeevil? Maybe so. Very cool.

But yeah, about the delivery job. N'Gasta says that the amulet is a present for Governor Richton, not because N'Gasta particularly likes him or the Empire or anything, but simply to ingratiate him so that Richton will continue to ignore the necromancer and all his necromancy going on over here on necromancer island. N'Gasta even discusses the design decisions for this gift — the red gem is an important Imperial symbol, and the amulet also has a cool dragon wrapped around the gem because Governor Richton commanded the dragon Nafaalilargus, which was a major factor in winning the war — N'Gasta really thought this amulet out! And regarding the whole political situation, he says, yeah, things are kinda fucked up, aren't they? But well, it means there's a lot of already-dead people for me to harvest, so, welp, lots of necromantic work to do. So, well, bye.

This was a really odd conversation to have with an evil necromancer. But not as bad as we feared.

We leave the necromancer's island, go back across the bridge hell which at least now won't rot any further so we can plan our jumps a little better, and we return on solid ground, smooch smooch, beloved ground, beloved non-zombie ground.

The governor and the catacombs

We return to town, and, since we had read a tip that Cyrus's money pouch can only hold up to 500 gold, we decide to spend some in the various shops. To be fair, we have been pretty stingy, going to random shops, talking with everyone, and buying nothing. So, time to do some shoppin'! From the general shop, we purchase an obscene amount of healing potions, and some random odds and ends, including a shovel which seems like it will surely become useful later, especially in the quest for the local lost holy grail, the Flask of Lillandril.

We also purchase a compass, especially after our earlier conversation about, uh, which way is even north-west? Gerrick the shopkeeper guarantees that with this compass, we'll never get lost again: the red gem always points north! And there we go, we have a little compass in our inventory, which we can open up and look at… but… is it broken? We bring it out and it looks stuck to north. And more often than not, opening the inventory to look at an object crashes DOSbox...

Wait, we have to enable the compass after we buy it, and then it's permanently in the bottom right corner, spinning happily. So, inspecting the compass, it appeared to be broken, but that's because that's just like a representation of the compass object and not really the function of the compass, which activates as an interface upgrade, but which otherwise looks exactly like the compass object that we can inspect. Why do we need to specifically go and activate it? Of course we want to use it — that's why we bought it! ...Well, this is an old game, from times where people loved to press more buttons and get more carpal tunnels. At least the compass upgrade is permanent, and we don't have to think about it again now that it's active.

This concluded, it's time to meet this game's shadowy presence behind it all — we can now go to deliver the amulet to Governor Richton as we had agreed. We realize that this is going to be a useful pretext to be able to talk to the governor, who is otherwise just holed up in his palace, as top cats in The Elder Scrolls are wont to do, like Vivec in Morrowind, Arch-Mage Traven and High Chancellor Ocato and plenty others in Oblivion... it's an Elder Scrolls thing. And even if this Governor Richton is small beans compared to the likes of God-King Vivec, fair enough, as this is a smaller game with smaller problems.

Though, Governor Richton is perhaps not quite exactly definable as a… small… bean. He looks like the villain from Disney's Pocahontas, like a circle on stick legs, with a dirty moustache, a big chin, and a tiny face scrunched in the middle of his head like a butthole in the middle of a butt. Well, this game is from 1998, Pocahontas from 1995, so it likely was an influence.

Now that Cyrus has a chance to confront Richton, he decides to go hard on the questioning. And man, does he go hard. At one point the governor says, if your sister's dead, it's because she got herself mixed up with thugs and murderers, and Cyrus retorts...

But Richton also does say that whatever happened to Iszara, it wasn't his doing — she is indeed on his list of political targets, and if he had gotten his hands on her, she'd be dead, and he'd know it. And Cyrus later retells to his friend Tobias that he believes what Richton said, because Richton is the kind of gross guy who would have gloated about it if he had killed Iszara. Honest in his repugnance.

The conversation over, Richton sics his guards on Cyrus. Cyrus even manages to take all of them down, but the governor's right hand man, Dram, a creepy dark elf assassin, sends a paralysis beam, and Cyrus later wakes up in the dungeon.

In the dungeon, we meet a dying man who says he is a member of the Restless League, remember the pirates from the beginning of the game? This prisoner is able to tell Cyrus that Iszara is in hiding with the League. He gives Cyrus a key to a lighthouse and tells him to go there and find out.

This man has been keeping the key secret from the Imperial guards by swallowing it... it's since come out the other end, and if Cyrus hadn't come along just now, his plan would have been to swallow it again to keep it hidden. Eeeek.

Unfortunately, we aren't able to ask this guy for any more details about Iszara or the Restless League or the lighthouse because he dies mid-conversation, as fellow prisoners in this kind of scene are wont to do. Dammit.

But gross key aside, now we gotta escape from jail. Time for a dungeon, literally. And this one is… the beautiful parkour lava jail??? Where they punish the lava for its crimes.

These were once the catacombs of... the ancient Redguards? Or are these older and by the elves that were here once? Or the dwarves? Or were they refurbished at some point? They have beautiful arabesque details and celtic knots and way more crown moulding than we would expect to find in a prison. Absolutely gorgeous environments, especially for 1998, but dang, even today.

But, why the lava??? Just to raise the stakes about our jumps. Cyrus either makes the jump, or immediately dies in the lava. Then again, as we keep saying, in this game we can save after each jump, and we guess they were fully expecting us to do that, so the penalty of failure really does not matter, because we'd be reloading in any case. This kind of level design is suited for checkpoint-based games, yet this is an infinite savestate kind of game, so it really doesn't matter if we're falling into lava or just one step down: every time we fail at a jump, we're reloading from the save file nevertheless, because we never want to redo a single jump if we don't have to. This makes Redguard functionally more like the type of game where if we miss a jump we then immediately respawn on the same ledge to try again, but with the loading from the previous save in between.

Except for this, overall, the level design of this dungeon is fuckin' awesome. We're playing the granddaddy of Assassin's Creed here. If only the controls were actually any good. It's, once again, a really cool dungeon absolutely ruined by some of the jankiest controls that ever janked. Were the jumping and the parkouring enjoyable rather than agonizing, this game would be a classic. But instead we're just bemoaning what could have been.

Ultimately, we break out of jail, chased by all the guards. Now Cyrus is a wanted criminal, and when we go around town, guards will chase him. Ah, an Elder Scrolls classic. This also happens at a certain point in Morrowind for a similar reason, and it happens in Oblivion whenever we accidentally touch an apple on a table and STOP RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL SCUM!

So now we wonder, who was worse, N'Gasta the horrible necromancer, or Richton the butthole-faced imperial governor? Solidly the governor. Denise was wondering if the amulet we were delivering was cursed in some way, because N'Gasta was very particular about how we should hand it directly to Richton himself and hm... that is suspicious... but you know what? If it was cursed, now we're team evil necromancer. Screw the governor. Let him get cursed.

Saintsport and the observatory

At this point we're not sure what else we can do in town. Our only lead is that key to the lighthouse. In town, there's a watch tower, and a bell tower, but no lighthouse here, so we realize they meant the lighthouse in Saintsport, on the opposite side of the island. That's probably supposed to be read as Saints Port and not Saint Sport.

Midway between the two towns, we stumble upon the dwarven observatory. How many things have been inspired by the orrery in The Dark Crystal? Well, we bet this dwarven observatory is one of them, absolutely.

Unlike what we were saying about the Sload, the concept of a broken dwarven orrery seems to be something that later Elder Scrolls games tried to redo and redo and redo. A dwarven orrery appears in a DLC for Oblivion, which is practically identical to this one in Redguard, but with more stars and fewer colors. Something similar also appears in Skyrim, with fewer stars and even fewer colors.

We talk with the keeper of the observatory, an elf named Erasmo, who says he can't sleep because AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA flashflashflaaaaaash! He's fried. Too much dwarven coffee.

Erasmo is an expert on the dwarves, and he was hired by Richton to repair the observatory for reasons that are unclear to everyone, but they made him an offer he couldn't refuse, so now he's screaming his head off to get it repaired before the Imperials come back and decide to stab him.

During the repairs, there was an accident where the dwarven machinery burnt Erasmo's legs, so now he goes around in a dwarven wheelchair. After an injury like that, no wonder he's had enough of this job. But he can't quit, and he won't go down to the steam room with the fire anymore, and, he says, he's missing a gear. Well, yeah, we could tell he's got a certain amount of gears loose. But, also, the machinery is missing a gear. So, we'll need to come back with a dwarven gear for Erasmo.

The observatory features pictures of how the dwarves envisioned each zodiacal constellation. We know the constellations of this universe from the other Elder Scrolls games we have played, but in Redguard, we learn that the dwarves saw them a bit differently from the other cultures. Since the dwarves didn't believe in magic, they called the constellation that everyone else thinks of as the Wizard as the Engineer. Cool.

We can smell a puzzle here, but we don't understand how to solve it yet, nor why should we solve it. For now, we'll just let this be, and we'll go buy the in-game book about the constellations to have a reference on hand when needed.

When we first started playing this game, we didn't buy anything until we were prompted to do so. Gradually, we changed our approach, because we realized that this game needs to be played more like a point-and-click adventure — there is no weight limit to Cyrus's inventory, so there's no reason Cyrus shouldn't have all the options pre-purchased on hand for us to potentially figure out the use of on-the-fly. As long as we can afford it, which very quickly becomes possible. In fact, the limit of the wallet only being able to hold 500 gold is a much more pressing limit. So it's better to spend the gold and convert it into useful items that we don't know what they're for yet, rather than to fill Cyrus's wallet and find ourselves without a useful item later.

For instance, at the general store, one of the things for sale are Canah feathers, but since nothing pointed us towards the feathers, we didn't buy a single one. Later, we also encountered weird shrines in various places in the world that seemed to need an item to do something, but nothing really clues us in about what that could be. Guess which one it was?

If we had the Canah feathers on hand, we definitely would have at least tried to use the Canah feather at the shrine, and then we would have learned much much sooner that these are the "fast travel" system of this game. With an offering of a feather, Cyrus can transform into a bird and fly to the neighboring shrine elsewhere on the island of Stros M'kai. Which is an absolutely insane thing to just kind of have as a secret mechanic. Is anybody going to say anything about the rainbow bird who arrived from the other town and then transformed into a hunk?

Thinking about it, money in this game has a pretty ridiculous usefulness curve. In the beginning, we have way too little money, and way too many things to buy, so we end up just saving the money and buying nothing until we know that we specifically need something. Soon we accrued way too much money, but we'd be in the middle of a dungeon, where it cannot buy anything. And once we go down the list of the pending items and buy all we need, there's nothing more we need to buy. Wisdom of Confucius.

So for now we leave the observatory and proceed to Saint Sport. When we arrive, we are surprised to notice that Saintsport is completely deserted, except for one lone pickpocket who attacks us and we defend ourselves and he... dies of his wounds.

Every door is locked, and the only key we have is for the lighthouse. Huh. Nobody mentioned that Saintsport was abandoned or whatever happened. I mean, this whole island was just wracked with civil war and then the Empire invaded and crushed them all, so it's fair that things will be war-torn right now, but it's a bit weird that no one said anything. Was Saintsport abandoned even before the recent events and it's completely old news and that's why no one has mentioned it?

We go to the lighthouse with our gross key, and we know that there's something we need to do there, and Erasmo was constantly screaming about FLASH FLASH FLAAAAAASH at night, so we try to flash the lighthouse's mirror as described, but it doesn't seem to work. We wonder if the "at night" part is critical, and this is something that will need to happen at a different plot juncture.

Flags and bells

So for now we leave empty-handed. We return to the main town, and we realize there's a door to a house that we can access that was previously locked but is now open. Oh, this game does that? Aw man, that means we have to really check if each door opens every single time.

Anyway, in this house we find Rollo. We've been looking for Rollo because he won Lakene's locket at card games, and if we can manage to get the locket back for Lakene, he'll help us with a lead about the Smuggler's Den.

So we finally meet Rollo... but we can't say it's a pleasure. Rollo is drunk and lazy and doesn't like our face, so he's not inclined to help us with anything, and especially not to return something that he won fair and square. But he lets slip that he's got a nice gig with Gerrick the shopkeeper: when a ship comes to port, he needs to transport a box of cargo to the shop. He doesn't even have to work every day, only when there's a ship in port, so he just listens for the bell signaling an incoming ship, and he moves a box, and then he gets more money for more alcohol.

We realize that this is where the waving of the flag comes into play. This has been haunting us from the very beginning of the game, when we learned all about the bell and the flag and the feud between the belltower and the watchtower.

The system works so that the guy in the watchtower looks out with his telescope for any incoming ships, and when he sees any, he waves the flag to signal to the guy in the belltower to ring the bell. The guy in the belltower waits to see the flag signal, and then rings the bell to alert the town. But the guy in the watchtower is nearly blind. And the guy in the belltower is nearly deaf. And the guy in the belltower really wants to try waving the flag sometime, since it seems like so much fun, but the guy in the watchtower refuses to trade places even though he's nearly blind and so what good is he in the watchtower? These quirky old dudes.

So, we can't ring the bell directly because the bell guy is right there and he can see, but the flag guy is willing to let us borrow the flag in exchange for finding his monocle, so we can take the flag and wave it at the belltower, and the guy at the belltower sees the flag and rings the bell, and Rollo hears the bell and goes to check for the ship, and while he's off doing that, we can break into his house and open his chest where the locket is. Played him like a fiddle. We return the locket to Lakene, who gives us the password for the Smuggler's Den. This section was extremely point and click.

At the Smuggler's Den, we learn that Iszara is no longer there, but she was involved with the Restless League, and she traded away a Restless League insignia to obtain malachite from the smuggler's stolen stash (having previously failed to buy malachite from Gerrick the shopkeeper). We get back the Restless League insignia that Iszara had bartered with, but we don't know yet what to do with that, so, we still don't know what to do next.

Regarding the quest for the Flask of Lillandril, we have managed to find three out of four pieces of the map (and, huh, one of them is a note on the back of the Restless League insignia itself), but we don't have any leads about the fourth piece, so we can't continue with that yet...

But we suppose that going to the observatory gave us a new lead — a new quest to find the dwarven gear for Erasmo. We already had a log item about the dwarven ruins, so maybe that's where we should go next.

The dwarven ruins

The dwarven ruins have been appropriated by the Imperials, naturally, so there's a lot of fighting for us in this area. As we said before, the fighting is not actually mandatory, so we try to flee, but the corridors in this part are narrow so we can't easily escape, and attempting to escape just results in all of the soldiers being alerted to our presence and following us in a big crowd, all going HAHA! CROSS SWORDS WITH ME REDGUARD! TOO SLOW! HAHA! like an entire gaggle of Sir Didimuses from Labyrinth.

So, we have to engage in a lot of swordfighting while we're trying to explore the ruins. Man, if only the swordfighting in this game were any good. But it really isn't, the same as just about anything else in this game that involves overworld operation. We press the sword button over and over, and we can't really tell all the time if we're hitting the target or not. Sometimes our foe does a grunt, so we assume that's a hit? And sometimes there's a plinking sound, so we assume that's a block. But it's really hard to tell, and there's no enemy health bar or any indication of progress really. The only thing we can know for certain is when Cyrus gets hit, and that's only because of the health bar damage, not really from much else. Sometimes the guards taunt Cyrus by saying Too slow! or Too quick!, but is that a gameplay hint about how to hit the button at the right speed, or are the guards just taunting Cyrus and this has no gameplay meaning?

The manual implies that there are combos, but what the fucking hell combos are we doing with only one button?? We read a Steam review where someone was saying their strategy was to just spam the Strength Potions (to boost offense) and the Potions of Ironskin (to boost defense), because there's no skill involved in pressing the sword button and there's no leveling up, so the only improvement we can possibly have is from using potions.

The dwarven ruins are really cool looking though. That's another element that later Elder Scrolls games would harken back to, but honestly, none of the later iterations were as cool as the original, in our opinion.

Towards the end of the dwarven ruins, we find a giant beetle robot that is a transforming mecha. That's really cool, even if we don't get to ride it. Though, man, the dwarves had no safety protocols. Why is the transforming operated by jumping onto the robot and pulling the parts out by force of gravity and body weight? Maybe the dwarves had a special device for doing this? Though their elevators are really shit, and prone to squishing. And the stairs from the observatory are an excessive and dangerous way to do something that could have been an elevator. Maybe that's why they all disappeared. Nevermind the ontological implications of the profane tools, maybe they just made them poorly with the same disregard for safety as everything else they made, and at that large scale, instead of just squishing one poor engineer, they squished the entire dwarves out of existence.

The beetle robot puzzle was cool-looking conceptually, but shit in practice. It just requires a series of completely inscrutable manipulations caused by completely inscrutable button pushes and jumping on the robot to reveal completely inscrutable robot parts. We figured out that our final goal was having the robot pull one chain that opens the door, but we would have never guessed that this required turning the robot into the megazord, as opposed to having the pincers of the beetle pull it. We tried things aimlessly for a while, then we looked at the UESP for the step-by-step instructions, and we have no shame about that because we would have never figured that out. None of that made any sense. Pull out the wings, remove the legs, turn it around, get out the legs again. This was a lot like trying to build a complex figurine without instructions. Maybe this too was in the bonus guide?

After this, we did an extremely complicated steam valve puzzle that, once again, could have been a good puzzle to figure out, had it not been set up in a way that made it near impossible to solve. Because, usually, we love solving this kind of puzzle. We've seen other games with puzzles where we turn the pipe to create a path for the steam, and we need to optimize the pipes so that it blocks the ones where the steam shouldn't go... there were puzzles like this in Machinarium, Opera Fatal, Professor Layton, Pipe Dream, and normally we'd be shoving pipes up our ass in joy. The steam puzzle in Redguard even does a crazy cool thing where the pipes run all through the dungeon that we just walked through, so we need to trace the pipes back through the dungeon, and that's awesome, and we love it.

But the solving of the pipes sucks actually, because the camera angles are such that we cannot possibly see everything that we're trying to achieve at the same time, and the low resolution doesn't do these thin pipes seen from afar any favors, and there are all these disorienting camera movements. We turn the wheel, and it shows that a pipe moved. Which one?! The camera was spinning all around, we can't tell which one moved. And there's a map on the wall that looks like a hint about what goes where, but we later realized, it doesn't actually mean anything, it's decorative. Goddammit.

But somehow, we get all of this done, and we follow the pipes all the way back through the ruins to see that we have turned on a Mechanical Giant, which serves as a boss battle. One that, once again, sucks, because of lack of information about what's being achieved. This seems to be the theme here. The Mechanical Giant's weak point is the back of the one leg, that's evident since it has a visibly exposed interior, but we try to hit it, but nothing seems to happen. So we think we're missing something, and we run all around the room and try to see if there was another more complicated thing that we need to be doing here...? But no, we were right, we're supposed to just strike that weak spot on the leg, but we need to get at it with such a specific angle, and only then will Cyrus's sabre make a slightly different dink sound that is our only clue that something was achieved, but the Mechanical Giant doesn't make any special movement or noise to signal that it has been hit. Just, if we manage to dink the leg six times, the Mechanical Giant collapses all at once. But in the meanwhile, we have no indication that we're even really achieving anything at all. And the rest of this battle involves simply dodging the robot's attacks by staying in the blind spot right underneath its legs, which is, by far, not the most cinematic experience. So, overall, this battle sucked.

This was all to acquire one freakin' dwarven gear for the observatory, which we rip out of the corpse of the Mechanical Giant. It doesn't matter which gear, any gear is a gear, right? Maybe they are all standardized. That sounds right. The dwarves had standardized gear sizes and also standardized stairs of death.

This was the moment where our playthrough was interrupted for a few months, because our computer died. In fact, it was right during the Mechanical Giant boss battle that the computer made a loud screaming sound like it was being murdered, and then indeed died. You know… mood. We're not sure how we even managed to gather the courage to brave all this horrible gameplay for the sake of the amazing story. As we keep saying, the story is amazing, but damn, at what cost? The fact that we even then had to do more troubleshooting to re-wrangle another DOS emulator knowing that we'd just be returning to this frustrating dungeon... but we gotta know what happens next, and we want to hear what Cyrus thinks of everything else that's going to happen to him!

One other bit of technical stuff we want to mention here, is that after we re-wrangled the new emulator and got the game playing again, we then immediately encountered a Redguard bug when we tried to walk out of the dwarven ruins: the screen went black for a very long time, and then the game crashed. This is the bug we mentioned in Part 1 — apparently this is a bug that can happen when Cyrus walks through any door, and we just so happened to hit this bug here and now on this particular door. Of course. Our other save files are from before the boss fight, and one from before the entire dungeon, and noooo, we are not doing that all over again, nooo! But, luckily, there is a way to workaround this bug!

So! Having gotten the gear, a brand new computer, another DOS emulator, and a solution for the door bug, we finally bring the dwarven gear to Erasmo at the observatory. This, however, requires another sucky dungeon. Since Erasmo lost his legs and won't go anywhere near the steam room ever again, Cyrus has to go there alone and install the gear himself. This is achieved with a dungeon that looks extremely hard, and we originally took the extremely hard route, except that UESP points out… that there is a freakin' straight path to the objective without any complicated platforming at all, if you go the right way. Goddammit. Good, but goddammit.

The folks we hadn't met yet

But even installing the gear and restoring the observatory to working order does not progress the story by itself. There must be something we missed.

It was Avik, the snake charmer. We realized from the beginning of the game that surely we'll be able to talk to him if we do something, but we just assumed it would happen later. No, it can happen in the very beginning of the game, the first time Cyrus walks by. We have to pay him! Oh man. Of course. And even guessing that we probably need to pay him, we were looking for the basket to put the money in, and Rosy realized, wait, we do this by equipping Cyrus's money bag and then using it! Old game!

When we finally get to talk with Avik, for a guy that wouldn't say a word unless paid, damn, does this snake charmer talk. He has a lot of dialogue, but even there, we have to coax the information out of him bit by bit through all this other information. We can't directly ask him about the Restless League, but if we talk to him about other tangentially related things, he'll go off on a rant, during which he will mention what he knows about the Restless League. Cyrus can even call him out like, didn't you say you know nothing about the League? And Avik will answer, ah, yes, I did say that, but smart people wouldn't just talk about that openly. Of course.

From this conversation we also learn about the Yokudan family that was chased out of town after the Imperials killed their son. We had met this family earlier, but they wouldn't talk to Cyrus. Which makes sense, because Cyrus is some random Redguard stranger and it sounds like the Yokudan people are oppressed by everyone.

But now we know the story of what happened to this family: the mother is desperately trying to prevent the soul of her dead son Hayle from getting trapped by N'Gasta (yeah, the boomerang plotpoint of the soul snare), and that's why she wouldn't talk to Cyrus — she has to keep singing the sacred song to hold his soul in place to keep it from leaving his corpse and becoming ensnared. How long has this been going on?! When was the last time she slept?! How bad is her throat right now? Poor lady.

We can now ask her other son, Coyle, about what's going on, and he explains that the reason why this ritual is so hard is because his brother was born under the sign of the Serpent, and the spell that his mother is making requires knowing the current position of the deceased's star sign, and the Serpent constellation moves irregularly, and they can't go off looking for this information because they're busy singing his soul in place. Can we do something about it?

Oh, so this is what the entire quest at the observatory was for. It so happens that we learned this information in this order, but this could have been something pending since the beginning of the game, and she would have been singing for all this time, and we would have known...

So we return to the observatory to figure out the current location of the Serpent, and this too is a complicated puzzle that unfortunately sucks. Theoretically, this could be awesome, once again. Theme of this game. But it isn't, because, like with the beetle robot, the answer is only apparent if we already know the logic to follow, and we can't really guess the logic unless we already know the answer. We need to figure out which symbols map out to which constellations and how the grid applies to the position of the sacred rocks, and there is a logic that surely makes sense to the developers that made it, and now that we know it we can get it too, but without us knowing the logic, we can't assume the logic, and it's all quite abstracted, and between the complicated 3D angles, the fact that we can't easily look around, the fact that the pictures are at a very low resolution, the fact that we don't have all this information visible at the same time, and the fact that we don't know what the constellations are supposed to look like according to the dwarves, this puzzle is so hard that we don't know how anyone solved this back in the day. We imagine it was weeks of gameplay jumping around and trying things until miraculously a solution was found. Which I guess we all had more tolerance for and more time for back in the day. But it aged extremely poorly.

We give up and follow a guide to solve this puzzle, and we put the sacred rocks into the correct position for the ritual, and the soul is saved, and now we can talk a little with the mother, Saban. She does not speak Common and only speaks Yoku, but her son Coyle can translate for us, though he apologizes saying that his Yoku is not so great. That's a detail that we really like. During the conversation, we can even begin to understand certain words. This imaginary language was actually written. I don't know if they went full-on Tolkien-level conlang, but they at least did something, and we appreciate that too.

It sounds like the dead brother Hayle was in the Restless League and that he knew Iszara before he died. Figures. Iszara wanted Saban's help with something involving magic, but Saban was so busy with the soul ritual that she pretty much just shooed Iszara away, and so she doesn't know what exactly she came to ask. So this trail too goes cold. But Saban has some level of magical foresight and she tells Cyrus that he will indeed reunite with his sister, which is the most hopeful we've been about that since the beginning of the game.

The Restless League

We're at another dead end. Now what? We decided to look it up...

Oh, shit, it turns out we could have done the lighthouse thing already. We even knew that the answer was flash flash flaaaash, two short flashes and one long one, but somehow not even this has straightforward controls. We were opening and closing the mirror and waiting a little longer on the last flash, but opening and closing the mirror always counts as a long flash, because a short flash is achieved by holding down the button, which usually suggests longness, but in this case it just winks the lighthouse. So actually we need to hold down the button, watch the animation flash twice, and then let go to make a long flash. So to do two short flashes and one long one, we're actually doing one long button press and then two short ones. What the fuck.

Doing this correctly summons the Restless League ship, which arrives immediately. Wherever they were, they saw the flashes, and came sailing at the speed of fuck.

Showing the insignia we previously got from the Smuggler's Den, we have clearance to be brought to the pirate cove. We're now looking for the pirate boss to ask for some information. But nobody around will tell us exactly where he is. He's on the west dock, they said. Where exactly is that? And the pirates complain if we poke random doors, because we shouldn't stick our nose where it doesn't belong, but at the same time, they won't tell us where to go. If they don't want us snooping around, they should just escort us!

Because of how difficult moving is in this game, somehow even the simple walking up the stairs and over the bridges of the pirate cove is a challenge. We keep miserably falling off the bridges without railings, which we are sure looks extremely embarrassing. This hunk comes along, he knows the secret lighthouse code and he has the insignia of the rebels and he's gotta save his sister, and he walks into the pirate cove like he owns the place, and then slips off the bridge. Thrice in a row. Cyrus even makes a little Oops sound.

But finally we meet the boss of the Restless League, Basil the grandiloquent. We have a long conversation with him, and for a series of reasons we end up having a duel with his extremely ornery bodyguard, Vander.

We win the duel, and Basil tells us, well, fuck it, here's the key to your sister's lodge, so go take a look and see if you can read her diary, because this is an Elder Scrolls game and she surely kept a diary. But once again, nobody will tell us where the heck is her lodge. We just try this new key on every door we find while all the pirates yell, hey, don't go poking around! This would be so much easier if Basil gave us her civic number! Or at least mentioned that it's the farthest possible door from where we started.

We do find Iszara's diary, but it is locked to keep her nosy brother out, as is typical. The key Basil gave Cyrus doesn't work on the diary. But after the duel with Vander, we strangely received bandages, and Cyrus strangely decided to keep a bloody bandage in his inventory, so. Hm. What about...

Cyrus's blood is able to open the diary, and inside, Iszara wrote a special note just for Cyrus in case he did that. We guess she knows him very well and knows he's kinda special like that. She wrote that Saban told her the premonition that she would meet with Cyrus soon, and even though she doubts it, she'll leave this message here just in case. And the message is essentially: Fuck off again, it's what you do best. Ow.

Because, yeah, even though the entire premise of the game has been Cyrus asking everybody he encounters if they've seen his sister, in reality, this is not exactly a concerned brother on a sweet rescue mission. Actually, their relationship is extremely strained, and they haven't met in ten years, ten years ago being when they had the Incident: in a politically-charged argument, Iszara's husband attacked her and her father, Cyrus stepped in to help, and in the following duel he ended up killing Iszara's husband. Immediately after the Incident, Cyrus left Hammerfell and he's been out of Iszara's life ever since. So that's why the note in the diary. He killed her husband and ran away, and she hasn't seen him since.

Also, now in pre-rendered cutscene, Basil can give us some more context about what Iszara was up to while she was with the Restless League.

Now it sounds like Iszara was also close to Prince A'tor, and the prince did not die in the dragon attack, but was pre-emptively soul-gemmed away by the late Archmage Voa, so that's why Brother Nidal is keeping A'tor's corpse preserved in the temple, so they can try to put his soul back into his body and bring him back to life. The Restless League would want to resurrect A'tor to have him as the figurehead of their resistance again, and attack the Empire with him at the lead. But Iszara took the soul gem, and nobody knows where she went with it or where she is right now. But now, that's our lead, even though that maybe makes us feel even more lost than before. To get a new clue, we need to find someone else who Iszara may have asked for help with the soul gem besides Saban.

By the way, just imagine, Iszara went to Saban to ask her to resurrect her soulgemmed boyfriend, and she was told that her estranged brother is going to show up. Her estranged brother who she last saw when he killed her husband. Like, geez, that's the last thing she needs. What, is he going to kill her new boyfriend too? What.

Cyrus's little problem

Earlier, Avik the snake charmer told us about his friend Joto, a Mages Guild member who is currently in jail. At the Mages Guild, we ask the receptionist Falicia if she knows anything about what happened to Joto. She says, Nooooo~ I'm not supposed to talk about that~. We keep asking her questions she doesn't answer, and finally she looks left, right, left, right, left, and then... spills every bean that has ever bean. Falicia thinks the Iszara/A'tor ship is confirmed. And, she says, yes, Iszara was working with Joto to figure out how to put the prince's soul back into the prince's body.

This is when the nasty new Archmage Jaganvir busts down the door and is pissed that Cyrus has learned all this potentially treasonous information. He threatens Cyrus, and Cyrus tells him: Back off, Sparkly. That's fantastic, we love him, but it turns out to have maybe been the wrong thing to say, because the archmage then transforms Cyrus into a gremlin to ensure his silence on these matters.

Now Cyrus is stuck as a little gremlin that hops around. This is not what we were expecting from this game. We can try to talk to people as the gremlin, but Cyrus cannot speak properly in gremlin form. The talking options at this point are no longer the usual topics, but to just yell HELP! And it comes out of the gremlin as, LALOO!!! And most of the people we talk to are either, aww, how cute, or eww, gross, or, it seems like it's trying to talk to me, but I don't understand what Laloo means...

It's hilarious that one of the options is to attempt to yell ISZARA! Because that's what Cyrus has been doing the entire game, asking everyone if they've seen his sister. But it comes out as BAK!

As a gremlin, Cyrus can only (attempt to) talk with people who are out and about, because he is now too short to open doors with his little stubby gremlin arms. :< So that includes:

• Siona the whore, who immediately ends the conversation with You're disgusting!
• Kotaro the contractor at the dock, who yells Get your ass off a' there! when we try to jump up on the table to see him better and get his attention.
• Trithik the old sailor, who is clearly superstitious about all of this, shouts Babble to the righteous, thou offal-ken!
• Avik the snake charmer, who answers as if he understands, although he clearly doesn't, That's right, little one and I'll take that into consideration.
• Mariah the weirdo, seems to find gremlins cute and enjoys listening to its unintelligible sounds, That's very sweet and What was that, dear?
• Crendal the drunk, who thinks this is merely a hallucination, Figment of the good drink, you are!
• Lakene, the guy we helped with the locket, thinks this weird critter is just looking for food, I've no food on me, sorry.
• And if we go really out of our way, we can talk with the Yokudan family. We talk to Coyle first, whose reaction is, Shoo! Go away! But when we talk to Saban, she must have immediately identified this gremlin as Cyrus, and Coyle reacts to what she says with, You mean that's Cyrus? and he hopes that we will be able to find someone to help us. If we return later still as a gremble, he sounds a bit worried that we haven't found help yet. If we talk more with Saban, she mostly laughs at us, but not in a ill-natured way. Just, lol. We're a hunk turned into a gremble.

Also, we want to give you a warning to watch out in this part of the game, because it's a bit buggy, as to be expected from a radically different special part that is only accessed once. If gremlin-Cyrus jumps into the well, he will be trapped inside with no way out and no way to die either. Water usually kills Cyrus in gremlin form, but for some reason not inside the well. And don't try to loot any defeated guards that might be left on the ground from earlier, because if you do, the game will get stuck, because gremlin-Cyrus doesn't have an inventory and wasn't coded to handle this interaction. Attempting to use an equipped item or a healing potion will likewise crash the game. Don't do anything that seems impossible.

So, what can we do as a gremlin? Our other lead before we got gremlinitized was to break into jail and find Joto, who also knows magic and might be able to help. As a gremlin, Cyrus can break into jail by carefully jumping through a tiny window. Oh, that's how we do it? Earlier we were trying to enter by sneaking through the bars of the door, which are totally wide enough for a gremlin to pass, but that's not the way, it's the window only.

And yeah, we find Joto in jail. But even Joto is not sure what gremlin-Cyrus wants. He's all, I don't understand you, little gremble.

Wait a moment... the gremblish talking word sounds... they're a puzzle! The words stack, so if you start by saying Help!, you say Laloo, and if you then say Iszara, you say Laloo Bak! The trick is, can we assemble these gremblish words into something that someone else can understand in the common tongue?

CHA ENG MEE BAK!!

Oh!!!!! Change Me Back!!

Once we know how to say this, it's unlocked as a straightforward dialogue option, and we can try to say it to everyone we tried to speak with before. When we do this, the most interesting differences are:

• Avik the snake charmer realizes, ah, we must be Cyrus, yes, I see you have the little red vest, aww, why didn't I notice sooner. You're so cute like that by the way. This must be the doing of archmage Jaganvir, yeah, it's his favorite trick. But unfortunately my own magic isn't so vulgar, and I don't have the skills to change you back. Even though Avik is a hobbyist mage, he implies that it would take studying gross magic to even know the counter-spell. At the very least, it's nothing that Avik touches with a pole. Understandably.
• Crendal the drunk says, Change you back into what? Something worse???
• Saban explains, with Coyle translating, that this is eastern magic that she's not familiar with, sorry, you'll need to ask someone affiliated with the mages guild to take care of this.
• Coyle gets expanded dialogue about how, we really can't help you, but we wish we could. We hope you find someone soon.

It's so nice that they thought to give special dialogue to Saban if we went to ask. It is quite out of the way to reach, though she is also at the top of the list of people we thought to ask for help. This entire puzzle and this whole part of the game is very, very fun.

But in jail, we can ask Joto, and he knows the counter-spell. Poof. It sounds like he has to be at the ready to do this counter-spell fairly regularly, with Archmage Jaganvir being a jackass like this.

It must be pretty hilarious from Joto's perspective to see this tiny little gremlin that comes to see him in jail, it puts all of its gremlin effort into yelling CHANGE ME BACK! and when he changes him back, poof, a hunk. Belle Beautyandthebeast wasn't quite so lucky.

The quest for the holy grail

The story we get from Joto is that he and Iszara figured out there was a way to help the prince and it involved......... the Flask of Lillandril!!!!!! Ohhhhh. Jeez. The thing that we've been sidequesting for since the beginning of the game as a distraction from everything because we guess why not? It's actually critical!! Wow. Jeez.

The only person who might have enough magical ability to restore a soul to a corpse, now that archmage Voa is dead, would be none other than N'Gasta, the evil necromancer. But it'd be a really really bad idea to go ask this guy's help with the prince's soul, given the whole evil necromancer part.

But the Flask of Lillandril, as we've well learned, is a countermagic measure, so it would be the only thing that would protect Iszara from N'Gasta if she goes to see him and he gets any evil necromancer ideas. We still don't know how anyone planned to convince an evil necromancer to help with this goody-goody cause, but at least don't just deliver a soul gem package with a little bow on top to the evil necromancer tower of the best friend of Mannimarco.

Unfortunately, Iszara rightfully wasn't willing to wait for a mystical artifact that maybe doesn't even exist to somehow materialize even though treasure hunters have been questing for it for hundreds of years... so... she just went to visit N'Gasta with the soul gem and the little bow. If we want to follow her into N'Gasta's lair, we better bring some protection for ourselves, and we're already so close, so we just might be able to actually find the Flask of Lillandril before Cyrus also gets too impatient about saving his sister and decides to just charge off to the evil necromancer tower in the nude (with a little bow on his --).

Joto gives us the last piece of the map we will need to hunt down the flask, the last piece that we couldn't find no matter what, because well, Joto had it, and he was in jail. Joto would tell us more and help us more, but suddenly the dark elf assassin Dram appears and snipes Joto dead. Noooooo!!!! Joto!!!!

And now we have a duel with Dram! Until he poofs away. Though, as he says, he's had 200 more years of experience at fencing, so how is this exactly fair or glorious on his side? And he lost. Embarrassing.

Given that Cyrus broke into jail as a gremlin and that passage is too small for his usual hunky form, we need to bust out of jail. Again. We find a door that leads to the roof and... oh no... it's a parkour dungeon. In this game. Noooooooo.

Luckily this part doesn't go on for too long, or maybe we've gotten the hang of understanding the jumps of this game, but it wasn't as terrible as we initially feared. There's one part where we need to jump down onto an awning, but the bounce is kinda forced to be right if we manage to land on it at all (unlike the bouncy mushrooms where, not only did we need to land on the mushroom, we needed to aim the bounce too). And, as always, battles can be skipped. It's better that way. And funny. The guards are all yelling, swordfight me swordfight me swordfight me, and we just climb onto the next roof and they can't follow. We don't even give them the pleasure of a fight to the death. Look, you're not worth my time.

But yeah, once again, if the jumping mechanics were in any way good, this would have been an awesome part of the game, yes, like Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, yeah. As it is, we just bemoan what could have been. Though, as we said, this part is not the worst, just because it has the decency to not be too long.

We get the sense that by this late in the game, the developers realized that this game engine has certain problems, and we can't be doing things like crazy jumps bouncing along the mushrooms. So while this part is much less ambitious than, say, the goblin dungeon... it's better that way. Which is sad, because we do appreciate what the other dungeons were trying to do, but... not in this engine. This is a sloppy jalopy. It can't handle that sort of bouncing over the acid. Maybe just give us a few careful jumps over approximately seven rooves, have the one that cracks so we have to quickly jump to the next one, and yeah, that's enough, we got it.

During this part, we get to see the famous Old Quarter that was mostly destroyed during the civil war that we kept hearing the news about from different townsfolk. We were totally expecting to go there at some point during the game, as some sort of investigation mission, but actually, this is all there is about it. We just get to see it from above while looking down from the rooftops.

At the end of this part, we found a good place to drop down from a lower roof to the ground safely and... we're back in town. We were in the overarching overworld the entire time. In other games, there would be some sort of transition for this kind of thing. Like in Oblivion, where the inside of the cities are in a whole other space than the wilderness, and you have to pass through the city gates to load the wilderness, and if you manage to do some crazy parkour tricks and jump over the city walls, you'll find that the wilderness that you can see from within the city is a fake low-res wilderness just to be a backdrop, not the same as walking out of the real door and having the real wilderness load. But here, in Redguard, this part is in the overworld literally! Which is... kinda crazy. Have those guards been dancing around on the rooves the whole time while we were walking everywhere else???

So yeah, we arrived down to the ground, and we were both kinda worried. Our game savviness made us go... uh oh... have we arrived to an inescapable fake town? But, uh... there's Lakene. We can talk with him normally. Huh. We dunno if we trust so easy… We're having a weird mental disorder where we're convinced that everyone has been replaced by replica low-poly versions.

After all that, we went back to the Mages Guild, thinking that Cyrus would be like, yo, I'm back, and that gremlin thing was out of line! Returning to taunt Archmage Jaganvir would be incredibly poor judgement in real life, but with meta-knowledge, we know the only way to be restored from being a gremble is to talk to Joto, and Joto is now dead :( so in gameplay logic, that must mean we can't become grembles again, so we're safe.

And so we are. We can even talk again with Falicia the receptionist, who somehow wasn't fired for what happened, and Archmage Jaganvir is back to ranting and raving about the battlespire behind the locked door, so whatever. Weird place.

So we suppose the next thing to do is to manage to acquire the legendary Flask of Lillandril, now that we have all the map pieces. Easy peasy.

We struggled a lot with following the treasure map. Our first problem was finding a way to assemble the map pieces in-game. We can't combine them, Maiko the map maker doesn't have new dialogue options about it… How do we put them together?

Oh, right, this is an old game, and we are supposed to look at all of the pieces of the map one at a time and assemble them in our head and keep re-referring to each of them as we go. Uh... sorry, no way. We're going to look at the UESP for the assembled map all in one place.

Even when we look at the assembled map, there are still a few twists thrown in. The map is not oriented to north, but rather rotated 90 degrees. How would we figure that out while we can't see all the pieces at the same time?!

The primary landmark of the map is the long tree which is long dead and there's no sign of it anymore, not even a rotten stump. It appears to be the primary landmark and we just gotta ignore it.

There are also numbers on the map. The UESP says these represent the number of paces. And while this is a standard trope of pirate treasure maps to be written in paces... nothing hints to that at all. We count the paces, and don't forget, you have to step in walking mode. We've been spending the whole game in running mode, as one is wont to do, and that meant our steps weren't the right size, and we got lost. You gotta walk slowly and carefully and count your steps. Realistic, but a gotcha.

Ultimately, the final destination is sorta near the dragon skeleton, but actually nowhere near it at all. Here, this is precisely where it is:

So we dig up the Flask of Lillandril. It's fucking hilarious, Cyrus is there digging with the shovel:

Digdig, digdig... Nothing
Digdig, digdig... Nothing
Digdig, digdig... Hm, found some gold
Digdig, digdig... Nothing
Digdig, digdig... THE LEGENDARY FLASK OF LILLANDRIL!

When Cyrus unearths the flask, he does appropriately say: MAGNIFICENT!

We started our journey back to N'Gasta, but wait, can we waggle the Flask of Lillandril in anyone's faces who didn't believe it could be found? We go into town and try to pester Maiko the mapmaker for being such a skeptic about this, or show off such an amazing elven artifact to to Gerrick the shopkeeper, but there's no new dialogue. Aw man. Though, to be fair, Cyrus in-character would run immediately to save Iszara, and there's no sense rewarding us for being out-of-character. So, off we go!

To the necromancer's tower (again)

We jump back over the whole broken bridge which is now fully broken, so no more surprise jumps. We pay the fucked up ferryman, we run past all the zombies, we charge through all the already opened doors to get to the big gate where we previously spoke to N'Gasta over the intercom. This time, he answers with, Come, this one has what you seek.

Yeah, Iszara was in the necromancer's tower all this time. The worm lied to our face. He pulled some sly shit about, well, you asked me if I ensnared Iszara's soul in my soul snare, and nooo, that's not how it went...

So yeah, we do indeed have to confront the evil necromancer. Just, not the first time we meet him, but much later. It's like a delayed time bomb. The first time around... huh, strange... that was too cordial. Then the second time around, HA, it was you all along, you bastard!!!

We go through the gate and into the evil castle and we are immediately greeted by two abominations that instantly tear Cyrus apart. We saw Cyrus's health drop from 100 to 20 before fully loading the room. Luckily though, these abominations aren't very bright. Cyrus can run in circles all around, and the abominations will chase straight for him, and not notice the only feature of the room in which they are being kept: the giant pit of acid in the middle of the floor. Bye guys. Enjoy the bath.

These are vermai, a type of daedra. A book in other Elder Scrolls games mentions that the vermai are daedra that fear nothing and have no thoughts. Yeah, we see that.

Since the vermai only appeared in this game and in the other spinoff Battlespire (1997), and that the aforementioned book originally was in Battlespire and then just carried forward into every game since, we wonder if vermai are still actually canon or early installment weirdness or what. Not even Online did anything with them.

Well, with that taken care of, we look around the room and... hm, there's not too much going on here. There's the stone slab where necromantic experimentations take place, there are shelves of necromantic shit that Cyrus specifically says he wants nothing to do with, there's a glass vial that might be useful, and a cauldron full of piss-yellow potion. We try putting the potion in the vial and then dripping the vial into the pit with the dead vermai, and BOOM.

And we see that the spiral staircase is broken. Oh no, do we have to use the explosion to boost our jump to reach the stairs?

Before we waste any time trying to do this, we look it up, and yeah. Unfortunately yes. We have to use the explosion to boost our jump.

The good news is that this is the only jump of this entire dungeon. The bad news is that we have to manage to do it. Timing the jump is tough. Aiming the jump is tough. The UESP page says we are aiming for the bottom of this broken bit of stairs, but the time we managed to succeed, Cyrus soared all the way up and caught onto the edge of what we would call the middle of the stairs, not the bottom. To aim the jump, we noticed that Cyrus will always shuffle around to a particular spot to drip the yellow potion into the pit. Trust the angle that Cyrus is picking, and just do the jump from there. Also know that the timing is surprisingly forgiving. If we jump even after the explosion seems to be over, sometimes it will still work, so try anyway. Just save at the edge and do this as many times as it takes and maybe with these hints, you'll need fewer tries than we did.

We recommend you save when you land on the stairs, because it's kinda easy to fall off. And we recommend you save again when you get to the top, but before you go into the door. Also, equip the Flask of Lillandril if you haven't already, you don't want to be dealing with the menu while this part is happening.

The first time we walked in the next room, Denise saw the Orc's blood on the shelf and had Cyrus go look at the Orc's blood first, and he said, I have that already. And only then did the cutscene activate and, oh, shit, Iszara!!! She's right there!

But something is wrong. Iszara just says MMMMNNNNNN.... Oh dear. And N'Gasta poofs into the room to gloat about how he's an evil necromancer, as evil necromancers are wont to do.

So, Iszara had the soul gem containing the prince's soul, and she got too impatient waiting for the Restless League farting around instead of doing anything worthwhile. So she took the soul gem and tried to solve the situation with Joto, and Joto made the mistake of saying that there's no sorcerer in Stros M'kai that could do this, well, except for N'Gasta, but lol. And Iszara took him seriously, and Joto even tried to help her like, well, okay, if you really must go to N'Gasta, at least don't go defenseless, let's get the Flask of Lillandril, but of course that was also too slow, so Iszara got impatient again and just went to N'Gasta thinking she'll sell her soul if he will resurrect the prince from the soul gem. And N'Gasta said yes, and took her soul, and then said, though, you didn't stipulate when I need to resurrect the prince from the soul gem. Maybe I'll consider it in a few centuries from now, when it will be completely irrelevant. And in the meanwhile, he fashioned the prince's soul gem into an amulet and —

YES. It was THE amulet. AAAAAAAAA.

Redguard is all about the random subquests that seem irrelevant, and we take them as something that will help us investigate or something... Actually they're all relevant to the main plot! We just didn't know how yet.

So, this means that we hand-delivered the soul of Prince A'tor to Governor Richton himself, so he could wear the soul of the defeated prince around his neck like jewelry. And it sounds like Richton knew the significance. Or, at least, N'Gasta knew the significance. And nevermind the whole story about how it's a present and the gem symbolizes this and that. And he had us deliver it unknowingly! While Iszara was inside the necromancer's tower all along! And then N'Gasta had the gall to even decide, well, Iszara's soul isn't particularly useful for himself, so instead, he'll trade it to Clavicus Vile for whatever Vile gives N'Gasta in return for souls.

Cyrus keeps yelling for N'Gasta to reverse whatever happened to Iszara and put her soul back right now. And N'Gasta is like, No. Or else what? And Cyrus says, I'll kill you and I'll go deal with Clavicus Vile to get Iszara's soul back myself. Which, man, the balls on Cyrus.

N'Gasta isn't swayed because he's an unstoppable evil necromancer, and Cyrus is just a guy. A hunk, but just a dude. At this point Cyrus retorts with, say, if I kill you, will your soul get stuck in your own soul snare? Or do you just go straight the fuck to hell??? oooOOOoooo

And so the battle begins. N'Gasta shoots magical orbs that will kill Cyrus in like two hits. But with the Flask of Lillandril, Cyrus can catch the orb and fling it back at N'Gasta and kill him with his own magic. He melts like the slug he is into a puddle of blue goo.

The battle was probably supposed to be really climactic and awesome, but in reality it kinda requires a lot of work from our imagination. Like, Cyrus goes in and meets Iszara, and she's just standing next to an empty wall. The evil sorcerer's tower is... mostly empty actually. If we were to make fanart of this moment, we'd kinda have to make up a lot of it from scratch because it's just not enough oomph somehow. And the battle involves ping-ponging a few orbies. Just a little ping-pong. Not exactly as glorious as we would have wanted.

Also, did we misunderstand? We thought the Flask of Lillandril negates magic. As in, we would walk into the room with the flask in our inventory, and N'Gasta would try to cast his magic on us, and it just wouldn't work. Kinda like what happens with Mannimarco in Oblivion. And while he's there going Huh?, Cyrus would take out the sabre and stab him. Maybe even as a cutscene. Instead they have this weird magic ping pong match with the legendary ping pong magic bottle.

But, either way, this was a magic ping pong match to the death, and N'Gasta is ping pong dead now. Now we need to face Clavicus Vile somehow, to rescue Iszara's soul, but first, we need to go to the Plane of Oblivion ruled by Clavicus Vile. The necessary sigil is already conveniently on the floor, possibly as a semi-permanent fixture, since we suppose N'Gasta goes there like every weekend... and there is a book with the necessary ritual steps written as a riddle that we need to decipher the meaning of... and just... just read the walkthrough. Once again, this is a puzzle that can only be solved if you already know the answer, so it sucks. And even when we know the logic, it's way too spurious and arbitrary, and not clever.

So the right answer is to combine objects matching the two colors implied by each line of the incantation. And implied is perhaps too strong of a word.

The first line says:

The jacinth wakes the rising sun

What the game intends here is that jacinth represents orange, and rising sun represents red. So we're supposed to mix the amber which is orange and the orc blood which is red, and drip that onto the sigil.

By the way, what the hell is a jacinth?

Jacinth (/ˈdʒæsɪnθ/,[1] /ˈdʒeɪsɪnθ/)[2] or hyacinth (/ˈhaɪ.əsɪnθ/)[3] is a yellow-red to red-brown variety of zircon used as a gemstone.[4]

In Exodus 28:19, one of the precious stones set into the hoshen (the breastplate worn by the High Priest of Israel) is called, in Hebrew, leshem, which is often translated into English as "jacinth".[5] The true identity of this stone has been a source of confusion since at least the first century; the modern identification of leshem with jacinth seems to have been popularised by Martin Luther, who may in turn have been following a fourth-century tradition.[6]

In Revelation 21:20, one of the foundation stones of the New Jerusalem is hyacinth (Greek: hyakinthos).[7] However, Strong's Concordance and Thayer's Greek Lexicon describe this as a stone of the colour of the hyacinth plant, i.e. dark blue.[8] The stone intended may be the sapphire.[9] In Revelation 9:17, the word appears in adjective form (hyakinthinous, "hyacinthine");[10] this, again, is thought to be descriptive of a blue or purple colour, with no reference to the modern jacinth stone.[11] The primary issue with the idea that jacinth (hyakinthinous, "hyacinthine") could have been referring to the sapphire, is the conflict that we see in Revelation 21:19-20, which lists both sapphire ("sapphiros") and jacinth (hyakinthinous, "hyacinthine") as completely different stones.[12]

We went to look it up, and it's a sacred gem mentioned in the Bible whose identity is shrouded in mystery. It's typically thought of as being a yellow-red to red-brown zircon. That already doesn't particularly scream orange. But then, depending on your interpretation, it might be blue or purple, since the name is etymologically related to the hyacinth flower.

While the vibes are absolutely right to have the daedric ritual include a reference to a biblical stone mentioned in the Book of Revelations, maybe it's a bit too much to make a puzzle that requires the player to already know this obscure information of ambiguous right answer. Like, collectively the two of us are pretty knowledgeable about gemstones, flowers, Latin, Greek, and mystical biblical bullshit, and we never heard of this before. And back in 1998, if it so happened that there wasn't an entry for jacinth in the family dictionary or the family encyclopedia or the brandy new encyclopedia on CD-ROM (!!), the remaining option would be to go take a special trip to the library and ask the librarian for help with this word we don't know. Right now this information is just a search on Wikipedia away, but back then... we would have been pretty stuck at this part.

And even if we were already knowledgeable about jacinth, probably instead of this clue becoming obvious, it would instead become even harder, because if we knew enough to know about it, we'd know enough to know the religious-interpretation drama and get confused. Like, do they mean it in the Lutherian sense following the 4th century tradition, or are they using the alternate understanding of the name being derived from the hyacinth flower which is blue or purple? And that's even if we knew that the point of this puzzle is all about the colors, which is already a leap that we only know because the guide said so.

And the mention of jacinth is intended to point us to the correct answer of amber, but jacinth is a mystical gemstone and amber is also thought of as being a mystical stone. Why would we think a specific mention of the stone jacinth would mean to use the specific item of amber? Wouldn't replacing jacinth with amber in magical stone magic be completely wrong????

This trainwreck about the color of jacinth is so bad, that it almost doesn't even seem worth it to also complain that the rising sun isn't necessarily red.

And by the way, the words jacinth and rising sun are bolded when presented on the UESP to highlight the hint, but in-game they aren't, and there is nothing pointing to particularly these words of the incantation. Geez.

Anyway, the next line goes:

and snow blankets the grass.

Snow is white and the unicorn horn is white. Presumably. At the resolution of this game, we can barely even see the unicorn horn, and we only can recognize it as a unicorn horn because the label says so. We are reminded of the Sims 2 DS Jackalope.

For the second ingredient, grass is green, and the available hist sap is green. So we mix the unicorn horn and the hist sap and have that be the second drip onto the sigil.

And the next line goes:

But night o'ertakes the mid-day sky,

And night is black, which means the Daedra's Heart which, in this game, is a nondescript black lump. We were a bit thrown off here, because in Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim and beyond, Daedra Hearts appear to be various shades of dead-organ red-brown, so we guess the idea that they would be black has been very much retconned. Pity, and that's not the fault of Redguard... ✽︎

And continuing with the incantation, the mid-day sky is blue, and ectoplasm is blue. So we mix the daedric heart with the ectoplasm and drip it and there we go.

and the gate is opened last

We thought this was also important, like, last? Is there something else first? No... did they mean "at last" because, yeah, I imagine if we were brute forcing mixing all combinations of all the many different items in this room until somehow it worked, we would absolutely be going, goddammit, finally.

But that's not a good thing, and we are really glad we could just look this up, and really glad that we did just look this up, and really glad that we didn't waste our time with this, because, yeah. It sucks. Which sucks, because we would want this sort of alchemical mystical riddle to be cool. But this is so not cool.

Clavicus Vile

So we enter the portal and we are transported to the realm of Clavicus Vile. It's cute. There's green grass and a little creek and a little bridge over the little creek and nice picturesque trees and an adorable little house and Clavicus Vile is reclining in a chair, hewn out of a tree, outside with his dog waiting for Cyrus to arrive.

Clavicus Vile is sitting in lalitasana posture, with one leg dangling from the chair, used in Hindu and Buddhist art to convey relaxed kingliness. And Clavicus Vile has horns and pointy ears, and the boots of Jareth and a little slutty vest, and he's playing with a bright red yo-yo. Right, a yo-yo. And besides him is a giant brown dog that communicates its feelings by small amounts of shape-shifting. ✽︎

...Wow, this is awesome, and now in retrospect we think the portrayal of Clavicus Vile in later Elder Scrolls games absolutely failed this character. We were first introduced to Clavicus Vile in Oblivion and out of all the Daedric Princes, we really didn't like him. But now we see that his portrayal in Oblivion is a completely defanged version of this concept in Redguard, which was really cool.

Clavicus Vile is SCARY. But he's not like Mehrunes Dagon all MWHAHAH STOMP GRRR. Clavicus Vile is a little guy, he's like a slutty prince, he's a friendly dude with a cottage and a dog, and he's welcoming and... we're not going to the usual realm of fire to meet the demon of RAWR, we're going to this guy's yard and he's sitting there with his dog, and this is so normal except this is about as abnormal as it gets.

And Clavicus Vile is friendly, but he's also dangerous. He has Iszara's soul, and he's not just going to give it back to Cyrus just because Cyrus shows up and says, give it. It belongs to Clavicus Vile now and Cyrus's usual tactic of charging in, hurling insults, and having a swordfight... yeah, that isn't going to work here.

At least Clavicus Vile is amused by Cyrus's brash demands, and doesn't just immediately do something really horrible to him.

But even while they are talking in a way that seems to be cordial, Clavicus Vile makes it clear that he knows all about Cyrus's life, and especially about Cyrus's biggest regrets. Clavicus Vile teases Cyrus about how he stabbed Iszara's husband and ran away like a coward, and Cyrus is even brought to a rare subdued state where he says, yeah, I am really not proud of that moment. He still thinks he was in the right to strike him, but he admits that he was not in the right to run away from the consequences.

And amid this difficult conversation, Clavicus Vile also points out that the followers of Hermaeus Mora believe that the Daedric Princes present mortals with opportunities to learn and that they reinforce the goodness of humanity through trials... and Clavicus Vile laughs and says, I just like fucking with people. I'm bored, and fucking with people is just one way I get my jollies.

Nevermind the benevolent trickster figure who is challenging the hero with the secret trickster goal of helping him grow as a person. If Cyrus can find a learning moment from this situation, that's good for him, but that's not what Clavicus Vile intended. Clavicus Vile just wants to have fun. And if he's not getting enough amusement from this conversation with Cyrus, who knows what he will do instead to have more fun. He's like a child with a magnifying glass observing ants, and if watching the ant gets boring, he can set it on fire.

The conversation turns towards what could Cyrus potentially barter to get back Iszara's soul, and of course it heads towards the possibility of Cyrus's soul entering into this equation. But, Clavicus Vile says that a soul is worthless if the person involved doesn't recognize the value of their soul. So before Cyrus can offer his soul, Clavicus Vile needs to explain to Cyrus exactly what he's offering. Which is interesting... someone who doesn't believe in souls has a soul that isn't worth anything and therefore cannot barter with it...

Clavicus Vile tries to explain to Cyrus the concept of eternity. Like, you think you offer me your soul and then it's like you're dead and then it's over. No, forever goes on for a really really long time. We're talking eternal torment here.

He also keeps mentioning that he's doing something with Iszara's soul. Right. Now. That he quite enjoys and doesn't want to give up doing. Which is supposed to get a rise out of Cyrus, but also we presume is true somehow, although we have no idea what it means, just, by the way his voice goes dark, it's definitely not good. Like, is her soul giving him an astral blowjob right now, that we don't see happening, but it's happening? Or is Iszara's soul in the yo-yo getting all spun around? Or is he like, munching on her? There's something happening that we don't know what it is, but it's bad and it's forever and you won't like it and he'll do it to Cyrus too if he can get his soul.

And Clavicus Vile tries to explain to Cyrus the concept of free will. He says, this is something you are used to having, but here, you don't really get to have... see, let me demonstrate. I want you to grovel and apologize for being so rude to me before. And even though we pick the option of Defy, Cyrus winds up saying word-for-word what Clavicus Vile instructed him to say, with only small pauses between the words, with Clavicus Vile laughing and saying not to fight it.

So like, Cyrus is really not safe right now, and his soul is hanging in the balance.

While bargaining for Iszara's soul, we first try to offer something else. Clavicus Vile is even like, why don't you offer me a gift. So we figure, how about the Flask of Lillandril, that's an awesome magical artifact that's been missing for centuries and let us defeat N'Gasta. And Clavicus Vile goes, oh, that's a thoughtful gift, I'll put in my large collection of similarly rare legendary bullshit. I've got a ton of that. And Cyrus is like, well, alright then, now, Iszara's soul? And Clavicus Vile is all, :O but what are you saying Cyrus, that was a gift, not a transaction. How dare you.

You're bargaining with a demon, Cyrus, and this is not going so well. Beeee careful.

The options keep saying, Offer Soul, and we keep trying to avoid the option. Let's not go there yet. Do we have to go through all the other things first? We try to offer all our gold, and, predictably, Clavicus Vile says, gold is just metal and what do I need that for. It's not like there are any shops in the horrible magical realm of the devil, or anything that he needs to buy.

Finally though we manage to get the option to say, let's wager soul against soul. Clavicus Vile said he's bored, right? Cyrus says, let's play a game, and if I win, I get Iszara's soul, and if you win, you get my soul. And while this is still mega dangerous, it's still better than Cyrus accidentally offering his own soul as a gift and presumably reaching eternal torment and Game Over.

Oh yeah, and Clavicus Vile also likes picking on Cyrus's shortcomings. He knows that Cyrus is brash and hot-headed and that he didn't have a classical education, as Vile says. Clavicus Vile does the underhanded insult of giving Cyrus the well-known riddle of the two doors with the one guard that always lies and the other that always tells the truth. Clavicus Vile even calls this an old chestnut.

This puzzle instead is brilliant from a meta-perspective, because Cyrus doesn't already know this, this is the guy who doesn't even know the zodiacal signs, so Clavicus Vile is insulting him to even do this. But it also lets the developers present a well-known riddle, without it being seen as an obvious cop-out. And they added their own spin to it, by giving Cyrus a lot of unexpected dialogue choices in this part. And it lets the characterization come out that Clavicus Vile is the kind of demon that is well-versed in the classic riddles. He's the riddle demon. He maybe made this one back when it was new. It's tough to present a demon that does classic riddles, if you don't have the classic riddles. Also, an in-universe classic riddle can only be such if it's something that has been a returning plotpoint in a long series or something... but it wouldn't hit us in the same way the first time we play this game. So they took a classic riddle from our own universe, and then we can have both the in-universe and out-of-universe implications. And Clavicus Vile even gives the citation that this riddle was discussed in a book and he even mentions the author, which both drives home the classicness of this riddle in-universe, and is teasing Cyrus by even telling him the book with the answer that he has no access to right now.

So there are the two doors with the two guards, and one door will lead to Cyrus losing his soul, and the other door will lead to Cyrus recovering Iszara's soul. And the one guard always tells the truth, and the other guard always lies.

We walk up to one of the guards, and we already remember the right question to ask, but let's save and see all the other options first.

We immediately laugh at: Which door would the dog choose? (What the dog doin'?) One guard answers: He would choose both. Which... I don't know what we were expecting from an unfathomable daedric dog that shapeshifts to show its emotions.

So, we give the classic question of: What would the other guard say is the correct door? The way Cyrus says this out loud, he sounds so done. Like, maybe Cyrus did know this riddle already, and is just holding in how upsetting this is.

After this part, we encountered a bug and had to reload from the save before the riddle. We knew already what the correct door was, so we tried to see what would happen if we skipped talking to the guards altogether and just walked through the correct door. And what happens is: Cyrus instantly loses. The point is solving the riddle, not choosing the correct door.

So we ask the correct question and figure out what is the correct door, and we go through the door...

And Clavicus Vile sees Cyrus leave and we get to hear him say, well done, Cyrus, you solved this one, but you've now played a game with Clavicus Vile, and once people play a game with Clavicus Vile, they tend to keep playing games with Clavicus Vile.

Uh-oh...

Unfortunately, this shoe never really drops. Maybe it was something that would have been explored in a later game, had the Adventures series continued.

Iszara is back

But we don't have time to worry too much about that, because now we get a cutscene! Iszara's soul is restored, and she wakes up as if no time has passed, even though it's been three months and she doesn't have any of the updates yet. She sees Cyrus is there and goes, what the fuck, why are you here in the necromancer's tow-- nevermind, I am very busy, I gotta go restore the prince's soul because N'Gasta agreed and she goes NYOOM down the stairs. Though she does pause and yell back to Cyrus, so are you coming or not??! Bro! Literally!

She's had three speaking lines and we immediately can tell that Iszara must be a whirlwind to be around, even when she hasn't just been revived from losing her soul for three months. Now everything everyone was telling us about her makes more sense. And in retrospect, we can see that she and Cyrus are related. Neither of them are willing to just stand around until the good answer arrives. They have what they have now, and they are going to go unarmed to bargain with the necromancer, or they are going to kill the necromancer and figure out how to fix the soul situation later, and they'll go punch Clavicus Vile if they have to. She's going to defy the leader of the Restless League and she's going to ask the old witch even if she's Yokudan and everyone else wants nothing to do with the Yokudans. She's going to date a priest of Arkay and the Prince of Hammerfell. Like, yeah. We get it.

It seems like Cyrus didn't get to have one word edgewise the entire time it took for the two of them to leave the necromancer's island and until they were on the boat to the hideout of the Restless League, and even there, they don't get to talk about the recent developments about the prince's soul or whatever, but they do talk about the incident when Cyrus killed her husband. Iszara even admits that yeah, her husband was trash, but she tells Cyrus that it wasn't his place to do what he did, it wasn't his war, and neither is this one now. And when Cyrus fled the situation, she says, like that, Cyrus robbed her of the two most important people to her in one day. She decides to forgive him, but he's not allowed to run away again.

We also learn that Iszara is the older sister. Ah. We would not have assumed so, but that makes so much sense. She's acting in the older sister role to him, and Cyrus never ever specified.

They arrive to the Restless League and have a heated conversation with Basil and all the pirates. Basil is pissed that not only did Iszara steal the prince's soulgem and take it directly to the evil necromancer, now she lost it, and now we don't even know where it is. And Cyrus jumps in all, no, I know exactly where it is. Richton has it. And Basil goes, oh, what, how do you know that, did you see it while you were imprisoned? And Cyrus just answers, I handed it to him myself. With NO clarification whatsoever. Which is funny, because in how he says it we can hear that Cyrus is pissed at himself also, even though he shouldn't be. He didn't know. We had it in our inventory for a surprisingly long time and we didn't knowwww.

Cyrus and Iszara have a conversation about, we need to do something! And Basil is like, no, we need to be careful! And Cyrus and Iszara are like, yes, but we need to do something! And Basil is like, no, we need to be careful! And Cyrus is like, if you guys are supposed to be rebels, when the hell are you going to rebel?? And Basil stands up to give an impassioned speech that he's surely given before — Iszara comments, Here it comes. Basil says that we are pirates and we are the most true rebels because we are careful and we hit where it hurts and we drain the Empire's resources both in terms of wasting the military's time and in stealing their gold, and we make them fear even when we don't do anything, and the way it works is that we don't get caught, and we don't get caught because we are careful!

And Cyrus says, I think you are just scared of the dragon. And Basil answers ...and we are scared of the dragon.

And Cyrus goes, well, what if I go and kill the dragon for you, what then? And what if we go and resurrect Prince A'tor. Will you openly come to his aid then? Can the prince count on you when it really matters??? And Basil says fine, if you kill the dragon and resurrect the prince, I guess then we will come to your aid. Low bar here.

And Vander, the bodyguard whose ass we beat earlier, goes, ooo, he says he's gunna kill the dragon, wow. Can I feel his muscles?

Here, Basil is right, but Basil is wrong, but Basil is right. Basil is right that a subtle careful resistance that steadily presses against the oppressors and doesn't get caught is an extremely effective form of resistance. There's only so many members of the Restless League, vastly outnumbered by the Empire, and they can't afford to lose anyone, let alone to foolishly throw themselves openly against the might of the Empire. But Cyrus is right that sometimes it's time to do something. The status quo sucks and if they keep doing the same things in the same way, that'll take forever to change the status quo. Sometimes it is time for a grand stand. Then again, both Cyrus and Iszara are so impatient, and sometimes if they just waited a bit, maybe they would have been able to act from a better position, and maybe they are making the same mistake now. Iszara didn't wait for the Flask of Lillandril before going to the tower of the evil necromancer, but she also couldn't hope that a long-lost holy grail would somehow appear now for her to make her big gambit. Sometimes you have to do something!!!

So now the last thing to do is to get the goddamn soul gem back. And kill the dragon that's scaring the pirates so much.

Iszara even had the key to the catacombs. Cyrus's adventures would have been so much easier if she hadn't gotten caught by the necromancer and she could have just handed Cyrus this key ages ago. But then again, if Iszara hadn't been missing, Cyrus wouldn't have come to Stros M'Kai at all…

The catacombs, part 2

So we return to the catacombs, which we explored back when we escaped from jail, but this time we're in a different part. This is the part of architecture for assholes. They said the dwarves built this? Man, the dwarves sucked. The dwarves were drunk for this part. Imagine, a giant room connecting to various hallways, with stairs in the middle of the room bisecting it, but not where they usually are, they are perpendicular to the entrance, just jutting out into the whole middle of the room until the other wall, so that to even get on the first step you have to squinch between one wall and the stairs. And then the stairs in question are super narrow and, of course, no guardrails, these are the dwarves we're talking about. There is a secret passage leading to a not-secret-at-all balcony, which anyone can see from the floor, that can be directly accessed by dropping from the stairs. Or maybe climb up a rope and go all around the world. Later there's a part where a perfectly normal corridor has then this randomly steep crevice with stairs going down at a random angle. This looks almost like they installed stairs in a cave and had to follow the shape of the cave, but this was apparently all just built this way. What the fuck?

This area includes a lot of puzzles which aren't really very good.

The first one goes: press the buttons to raise the walkway. There are two buttons, and if we step on either of them, the walkway raises. But if Cyrus steps off the button, the walkway goes down. Yeah, yeah, we've seen this before in other games, we need to find a block to weigh down the button so that we can casually walk over the walkway. And so the actual puzzle is going to be how do we get the block from wherever it is onto the button. By standing here on the button, we are getting a glimpse of the conclusion of the puzzle, but the real puzzle is elsewhere.

But we look around all the areas that we can reach at this time, which is relatively limited, and there's no big heavy moveable object in sight. What? So we check the UESP yet again and... Wait... Cyrus can simply step on the button and then run and jump onto the walkway before it goes down and do this stunt, while the camera turns around to dramatically show that the walkway is rising. To achieve this, you have to do the stupidest looking jump that Denise thought was a glitch, and then, with the camera turned around laterally, somehow manage to walk forwards, which is near impossible. Oh, this sucked. For such a simple thing, no less.

Later we find ourselves in like a marble game as the marble. With blades for incentive. There are several layers of round rooms all rotating, and we have to find the ways to drop down to the next level to eventually reach the floor. We reach this room from above, and there's a button that starts and stops the rotation, and the starting stage shows these arrows on the walls all aligned, and when they begin moving at different speeds, the layers misalign and the arrows are no longer aligned. We spend so long trying to figure out what do the arrows signify and where would we want them positioned, because we think, we want to rotate the layers until the correct configuration and then stop it. That's why the camera went above and why we have access to a button that starts and stop the rotation, right?

No, actually, you have to press the button once just to start the rotation, and you have to solve the puzzle while it's rotating inside, and the arrows mean nothing. Maybe a hint that we want to go down. As if it isn't obvious. It's the only way!

So, this is just puzzles where we are in difficulty because we understand how these puzzles normally go, with proper game theory, in which when we see an aspect of a puzzle, we assume it to be related to the puzzle. If this was supposed to be always spinning and we should never turn it off, the button should either be unstoppable or better yet, there's no button at all, and this thing is just spinning always as soon as we arrive. And the arrows on the layers mean nothing. If you really wanted to be super obvious, it could have been a sign, like from the goblin caves.

The only puzzle in this area that was fair and pleasant to solve was the weighted steps one, even though the rules were not clearly explained, but we figured it out. Stepping on a button causes the blades to come out and slice Cyrus in half, which is not good. The way you stop a blade from coming out is by putting a weight on the button, and now you can step on it, and no blade will come out. Why would having more weight on the button stop it from having the blade come out? And putting down a weight causes the other two adjacent buttons to also be safe to walk on. And also, the first and last button are excluded from all this mayhem and are always safe, even though they look exactly the same as all the other buttons. Three buttons have stars on them and if we put the weights on those starred buttons, the door at the end with the same symbol will open and we can leave.

Once we know all these rules, this is a good puzzle, and we can solve it. Though, we preferred to do it on paper, as the camera view in this part is not conducive to solving the puzzle. But sure, it's like a puzzle from 3 in Three, it's good. But once again, the rules could have really been clearer. We only were able to appreciate this because we looked at the specification of the rules in the wiki before we got too frustrated, and then we solved it ourselves. In general, when you have a puzzle, you should explain the rules. That's kind of the point. It's even better if we can determine the rules naturally with a little experimentation, but in this case, any experimentation results in Cyrus being sliced in half, which seems to us like a deterrent. We were only able to tell some things because we saved right before and did some pre-emptive testing, but the game shouldn't be designed where we have to save on purpose, fuck around, and find out — by watching Cyrus getting slashed in two. Which by the way, in two. Yes. Like in Dead Space. D: As we said, not good.

Done with all of this puzzling, we arrive to the room where the dragon is. We had two tasks remaining, and they are conveniently at the same place. The dragon has the soulgem.

So, we meet the dragon, Nafaalilargus. And well, this is The Elder Scrolls. In The Elder Scrolls, a dragon is just a guy. In fact, in this case, he's actually just, more like an employee. We have a whole conversation that he's just a mercenary and they pay him well, and this is just a job, and no, enough of calling him Richton's pet dragon, if Richton has a pet that'd be his assassin Dram, excuse me. And the dragon can even tell that Cyrus seems to have a mercenary background too, so he says, surely you'll understand, this is nothing personal. The dragon even offers to accept a bribe to give Cyrus the soulgem, with, what will you do for me in exchange for the soulgem, and Cyrus says, I'll spell your name right on your tombstone. Woah, woah woah. Cyrus, that's so mean, the dragon is just a guy. There probably was a more diplomatic and less aggressive way to approach this, but this a cutscene, so we have no power here, and Cyrus is choosing violence.

The dragon sounds so incredibly done with this shit, by the way. And also kind of intrigued by Cyrus's arrival to his den. Nafaalilargus started the conversation all, let me close the door so we can have some privacy... a little candlelight... yeah, that's nice. Like, the dragon was maybe offering to have a nice date in exchange for the soulgem. Or maybe that's how he'd like to dine upon Cyrus but, still... He's a guy!

But anyway, now we have to fight the dragon. Oh no! We're fighting a dragon! This is scary and difficult! ...well, no, the dragon goes down in a few hits and is maybe one of the easiest enemies of this game once you know the one little twist. The dragon is impervious unless you heat your sword in the brazier that the dragon specifically lit for, as he said, mood lighting. Which is kinda weird. Why would a heated sword work against a fire-breathing dragon? Why would that be any more effective than a cold sword? Heated with his own fire, no less. Odd. And we accidentally heated our sword before we even knew what were doing because we saw in the cutscene this strange red thing behind us, and so when we could move, we investigated it, and it didn't say anything, but we saw the sword was now yellow. And this is easy to accidentally do because you don't even have to get into the sweet spot and press E when it says Heat Sword in Brazier like it does for pretty much every other action in the entire game. In fact, we think it's literally every other action in the game. Don't quote us, but we're not remembering anything else like this in the whole game where you can just waggle and it happens.

So with the heated sword, we now have to go stab the dragon, which is easily achieved by running in close to its body, like how we did with the Mechanical Giant. And when we are that close, it cannot hit us with its fire-breath or its beak, and apparently this dragon doesn't know how to kick. So, paradoxically, the closer we stay to the dragon, the farther we are from harm. Wisdom of Pippin. Be close to the feet, and you are safe. We don't know how the hitting in this game works at all, but it seems that everything hits with a strange range, and too close can't hit.

And it only takes a few hits with the heated sword, and there's no wrinkle. The dragon doesn't change its pattern or get serious with a second form (good), just... it all means this battle is so underwhelming. It somehow makes Rosy long for the Skyrim dragon battles, and most people would agree that those are mostly an interruption. But at least the first dragon battle in Skyrim is properly climactic. But this... we go and talk to this tired and somewhat amenable dragon, Cyrus insults it, and so it's gotta fight us, and then it doesn't even kick us, and Cyrus kills it dead, no final words, no final cutscene, and that's it. This was the dragon that was teased since the beginning of the game, and just… Couldn't we have been friends? :(

The dragon even said, oh yeah, I am being well paid, kept well in this nice room with lots of gold, of course, as the symbol of the empire they treat me well... If Cyrus was a bit more of the cunning type, he could have said, well, what would it take to have you be the symbol of the rebellion instead? And man, imagine that, Cyrus returns to the Restless League with the dragon on their side, aw yeah. And the hit that would been to the morale of the Imperials. But Cyrus is not the cunning type, and he must have already hit his limit with this sort of dangerous haggling after the whole thing with Clavicus Vile before…

Ah well, we kill the dragon and recover the soulgem. We talk with Brother Nidal, who has been guarding over the prince's body, and we confirm that we have the soulgem with the prince's soul, and the magical ring to gain access to the prince's body, and we have every possible object we will need, but we still have the standing problem of not knowing a mage powerful enough to pull this off. Aw man. Joto is dead, and Iszara already confirmed he wouldn't have known what to do anyway. N'Gasta was probably powerful enough, but he was evil, and he's dead too now. And the current archmage Jaganvir is a shithead and won't even talk to us, and he's probably not powerful enough anyway, his specialty is turning people into gremlins, not soul gem shenanigans. And Falicia the receptionist is clearly overqualified for her position of receptionist, but this task is probably beyond her too. The snake charmer Avik is a hobbyist mage, and we can ask him, and he says this is beyond him. So we think, well, let's try asking the old witch Saban. When Iszara previously tried to ask her for help, she dismissed her before even hearing the request because of the death of her son and the whole needing to sing his soul out of the snare. So let's actually make the request for real now that her son's soul is safe and we're all friends now.

So we go to ask. This time, Saban greets Cyrus in Yoku, and Cyrus even answers her back in Yoku also. Awwwww. He's paying attention and learning and being polite and dawww.

He needs translation help from Coyle for the request though. Is she familiar with soul gems? She says those are old, eastern magic, very tricky. And yeah, we previously heard from Dreekius the Argonian barkeep that something like soulgems have even been used in Black Marsh for a long time. The Argonians use stillborn eggs to hold the souls, which... yikes, the symbolism.

Cyrus asks Saban, are you powerful enough to deal with soulgems? And Coyle doesn't even have to translate and ask, he just answers, yes. Will she help? Cyrus will sneak her past the guards and into the temple to do the magic, and they all agree, and Coyle says, I'll come too. And Cyrus says, no, I need you to contact the Restless League and tell them it's time to kick off the rebellion!! And Coyle is like YAYAAAAAY :D I get to do that?!????? Oh man, how do I do that???? And Cyrus answers, On On Flash as like, a joke to himself. Coyle is like, what, and Cyrus says, don't worry, I'll explain as we go!

Sidenote: Erasmo said Flash Flash FLAAAAAAAASH. The actual button press went LONG-HOLD Boop Boop. And now Cyrus says it as On On Flash. Was this changed a few times in development and the voice acting didn't catch up? Hmm. Maybe that's why that part was so inscrutable. Anyway, we take the joke as it was intended.

The ritual for the prince

And now we have a cutscene... Cyrus sneaks Saban into the temple while the Imperial guards are none the wiser. Brother Nidal reveals that the prince's body was hiding inside the altar the whole time. Oh, that's why he got so annoyed at us walking on top of it, beyond the obvious. One, that's disrespectful like woah, and two, uh, the, uh, undead body of the prince is secretly in there, please don't do that. But now they open the altar, and Saban does her chant, and in the meanwhile we see the Restless League arrive and defeat all the guards and storm the temple, and everyone is there, and Basil arrives and Coyle arrives and Iszara arrives, and they all watch in awe as Saban finishes the magic. But she shakes her head and apologizes, and Coyle translates, it didn't work, I'm so sorry.

Cyrus realizes that the prince's sword is glowing, and he picks up the sword and goes, oh my god, the prince's soul... is inside the sword. And Basil is like, well that's just fucking great, how am I supposed to do a rebellion with the prince's soul stuck in an inanimate object, this whole thing has now completely gone to hell and we're outta here.

And Cyrus goes on this impassioned speech: no, it's not a mistake, it's... it's SYMBOLISM!! The prince chose to inhabit the sword to tell us all it is time to strike!!! All this time, he's been trapped in the soulgem, and in frustration, his soul latched onto this sword, and with this sword, we should all be led into battle! If you cannot follow your prince into battle in the form of a sword, what more would you want!! Let's all charge together!!! YAAAAA!!!!!

And we want to say that yes, this speech is so very impassioned, but also, it's like... we can't stop laughing. It's what the prince would have wanted! To be interred in Zelos's homemade curry. And we have the feeling that, if the prince's soul had gotten stuck in any other random-ass object, Cyrus would be there somehow managing to spin it as, no, don't you see, the SYMBOLISM!!! He's inside the bracer... he's telling us we should BEAR ARMS!!! He's inside the candle to LIGHT OUR WAY INTO BATTLE!!! He's inside the underpants so that we may CHANGE!!!! YAAAA!!!!

The pirates' reaction to this incredible speech is kinda .... (looks at each other) ... well, okay, I guess. This is probably just the limitation of the animation, but lol.

And so the League is finally Restless, and the rebels are finally rebelling! Meanwhile, Cyrus gets inside the palace grounds with the help of Prince A'tor's soul and a magical door. Our goal is to get to the dirigible where Governor Richton is getting ready to flee.

Previously, Richton was pissed at the assassin Dram for not killing Cyrus when they had the chance, and ever since then Cyrus has been causing all sorts of problems.

But Dram is all, oh, I did it to be sneaky... a dead Redguard could not have unknowingly led us to the Restless League hideout, mwhahahahaha. So, there's a moment where we go, oh shit, Cyrus has been doing all that investigation to find the Restless League, and Dram has been monitoring him and getting ready to attack the Restless League's no-longer-secret hideout! And if Basil hadn't been moved to action and instead had just continued sitting there in the cave as he would have wanted, Dram and Richton would have launched a surprise attack on them in the hideout, and the Restless League would have been completely stamped out. So Basil was indeed wrong to be careful and play things safe, but not for the reason he thought. And it's good that the rebellion starts now, because now, Dram was about to launch his attack on the hideout, and nobody's home, and Governor Richton can be all, you idiot, they're HERE attacking US, and the REBELLION we were supposed to QUELL is HAPPENING right NOW, because of that REDGUARD that you didn't KILL and what do I PAY YOU FOR????!?!??!

You pay him so that he can afford the cigarettes, so that he can talk like that.

The final confrontation

So in this part, Cyrus is infiltrating the palace. Instead of his usual sword, he's now wielding Prince A'tor's sword which is possessed by Prince A'tor's soul. This sword is three times more powerful than Cyrus's usual sword, which is good because the palace is full of tough guards in golden armor. There are so many of them that we choose just to run past them whenever we can, because we've got no time for this shit, we're at the end of the game!

The primary reason for fighting any enemy in this game is to get them out of our way, and most likely receive a reward of gold, and occasionally a potion. We mentioned before that we already bought everything we possibly can and yet still find more money, but at this point of the game it becomes a Problem.

We cannot leave the palace, so we cannot spend any money or use any of our ingredients even if we wanted to (so much for our boatload of leftover aloe and our kilogram of feathers). We have the health that we have and the healing items that we have, and that's it. If we take the time to fight every guard, we will inevitably eventually be hurt, and our limited supply of health and healing items will be used up, and then what?

When we are cornered by too many guards and we simply must fight them, it's very important that we loot their bodies to perhaps find a potion that will help bolster our limited health supplies. Sometimes things are dire enough that we must find a potion even while more guards are coming for us. But when we loot the body, and only find gold, Cyrus stops and takes the time to say the very long line of: I'd like to, but I don't think I can carry any more gold.

Which is very well voice-acted, very cute, with the little laugh in the back of the voice, but it's wasting our time and he keeps repeating this line as we try to loot the bodies, but we've got to loot the bodies to try to find the precious potions and there's just money, and, I'd like to, but I don't think I can carry any more gold, and aaaa, the guards, aaaa. Enough with the gold. We have so much gold.

In fact, we have so much gold, that after we fought the dragon, we tried to scoop up the horde, which would have auto-filled our wallet, but Cyrus's wallet was already full! Imagine that. We are bursting with gold, can we dump it out our wallet in the dragon room instead?

And by the way, the only things that are helpful to loot in this part are the health potions and the Potions of Ironskin.

The Strength Potions are bugged such that they make Prince A'tor's sword weaker rather than stronger, so if you kept them in your inventory for the end of the game, well, shucks.

So yeah, we run through this dungeon of the palace trying not to get into any fights with the guards, and not using our pile of strength potion that we kept in the inventory for the end of the game, and wanting to find another health potion, mostly to heal the damage we took from falling trying to do that jump in the chimney (why was it so hard?).

And so we work our way to the top, we ride the Dwarven Teacup ride, and we press the switch to bring the elevator to the dirigible down into the courtyard, and then we go all the way back to the courtyard, chased by a million guards all yelling He's only one!!, but joke's on them, we're in the elevator where they can't follow, and BYE.

And so at the top of the elevator, we use some of our last Potions of Ironskin and now we fight Dram! Again! And yet again, he poofs away just as we were winning, the coward.

We go to the dirigible, and as we do the jump, the camera zooms way out to show us that, inexplicably, the whole dock system for the dirigible suddenly collapsed. Yet, in that moment, we also happened to miss the jump, so we also get to see cinematically the tiny silhouette of Cyrus completely missing the enormous dirigible and quietly fall a million miles down. Oh god lolooooollllll. Classic Elder Scrolls nonsense.

Okay, we reload and we fight Dram again, and SAVE and now we'll correctly jump onto the dirigible without doing this comedy skit, there we go. It's time to fight Richton.

He takes a ton of hits. We were expecting him to be easy compared to Dram, because otherwise, what does he pay him for, Dram is the super special assassin bodyguard, right? But, huh, maybe Richton is right and he doesn't need Dram so much. He's holding his own very well in this fight and it's taking us way longer than we would have thought.

Ultimately, Cyrus disarms Richton and holds him at swordpoint, and Richton says, Parlay. Surely you wouldn't murder an unarmed man in cold blood, I am requesting your protection as a political hostage, and you couldn't just then kill me like that. You're honorable and proud of your Redguard honor, are you not? And Cyrus is simultaneously there like, try me bitch, but also like, rrrrgrgrrrr but it's true.

And then Dram appears again, disarms Cyrus and holds his neck with a dagger. Richton says, kill him.

And Cyrus is all, I'm unarmed, what was all that shit just five seconds ago about not killing an unarmed man and political asylum and all that jazz. And Richton goes, dohohohoho, those rules are for gentlemen, and you are not. Goodbye.

That's when Cyrus says, by the way, the sword is possessed, and Prince A'tor is not dead! And the sword moves through the air on its own and stabs Richton, and then cuts Dram vertically in half ooooh mannnnnnn.

And the dirigible is falling, and Cyrus uses Dram's dagger to slow his fall and get off the dirigible, and the sword stabs down next to him as if to say, good job, bro, we did it.

In the epilogue, Iszara has taken leadership of Stros M'Kai with the Prince A'tor sword at her side. She married the sword, and she's now Queen, and the sword is the King, and she is ruling on behalf of her New Sword Husband!

And the rebellion at Stros M'kai has shown the Empire that it's not just going to conquer Hammerfell like that, and let's have a diplomatic conversation instead, and Emperor Tiber Septim is coming for the talks, and this will all be good. And now that all is good, Cyrus is off to go on some other adventure because he's not into all this political stuff, and Iszara says I love you anyway.

Connecting this resolution to other lore, we guess the implication is that Hammerfell agrees to become part of the Empire but as their own self-governing entity. Which is kinda weird, but this is a prequel and the later situation is that Hammerfell is part of the Empire, so it has to end in that way somehow. Prequels are hard, so let's just end on a good note and forget that anything that happens in every Elder Scrolls game winds up being a tragedy where the actions of the protagonist are at best completely worthless or even made things worse somehow...

In conclusion

This game was so awesome, and we cannot recommend it to another soul. It's one of the best games we've ever played and also one of the worst games we've ever played. We already feel like we might want to replay this game in the future, but we also feel like we would never want to redo certain parts of it again. If we do ever replay it, we should record it so we can watch the video instead of ever playing it again. The experience of playing the game is abysmal, but the experience of the game is awesome. It makes us simultaneously want to stop and continue. This is possibly the single most diametrically-opposed-to-itself game we've ever encountered.

Our final verdict is that you probably don't want to play this. But if you could experience the story and the flow of it, you'd adore it. We suppose it would be best to watch a longplay and piggyback on someone else's suffering, because really, don't bring this upon yourself. Back when our computer died, we were almost wondering if we should just watch a video of the rest of the game, but we couldn't find a completed let's play. Now we found one! Here you go.

The story is well-written in all ways, well plotted from beginning to end, it has characters, it has themes, it has it all. Even minor characters are fully written. Like, hell, Erasmo is extremely memorable despite having a very small role. AAAAAAAAA! I feel like we're friends with Avik the snake charmer. We have no criticisms about this game's writing and its plot and its treatment at all, which for us is extremely rare. Redguard knows what it wants and knows where it wants to go, and we're just here for the ride with no disagreements. And for a prequel that had kind of a foregone conclusion of a downer ending, actually, it was full of surprises. And the ending was actually pretty satisfying all considered.

Cyrus is fucking awesome. Very lovable guy. An extremely written person with flaws and strengths and strengths that are flaws and flaws that are strengths. A distinctive voice and personality. And this in a game that's relatively short, and it feels like we know this guy completely, and he just reads as very real and alive. And also, a black protagonist? One that's fully written and not a joke? How many games get that? And it's a game set in a world of mostly black characters, no less.

Iszara is fucking awesome, in spite of her smaller role. Even though the plot was shaping itself to be a classic save-the-girl kind of plot, it ended up subverting a lot of expectations, and even before Iszara is back, she's not merely a goal for the protagonist, but definitely a presence. The narrative is centered on her and her adventures, and the whole first part of the plot is about Cyrus doing practically detective work around all the things she was doing and why.

There's not a single part of the game that's irrelevant to the overarching plot. We had the surprise boomerang about the amulet actually being the soulgem. The seemingly superfluous quest of the holy grail of Lillandril is actually critical for rescuing Iszara. Even the detail about how she was looking for malachite at the shop and the Smuggler's Den... she needed it to magically stabilize the soulgem, and N'Gasta repurposed it to make the dragon carving of the amulet.

The music is good, but there's so little of it. We would wish for maybe one more special track for cool moments, but we understand there were constraints.

The game is fully voice acted to standards that are rare to this day honestly. Like, Erasmo. And Cyrus himself, that's amazing. There's so much personality in every little thing he says.

We found the visuals charming. The palace and the catacombs were our favorite settings. We like how everything in this game is super textured to conceal the few polys.

The gameplay, as we said, makes us want to pull our own teeth. Maybe it would be easier, and certainly faster.

So yeah, this game is great. Too bad it sucks.

References

• The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages section on Redguard, including an installation guide, gameplay tips, images, and tons of information.
• The UESP also has the companion comic The Origin of Cyrus!, available for reading.
• The Internet Archive hosts a browser-playable version of Redguard, though when we tried it, the framerate was abysmal and we don't have access to the DOSBox configuration that way to try to improve the situation... but hopefully it works for you!
• The Internet Archive also hosts the game guide, The Redguard Companion, so we can play like one of the rich kids back in the day and have the official walkthrough that was, at the time, sold for $19.99.
• As we said, the screenshots come either from the UESP or from Vazz's Let's Play on YouTube.
• The photo of the PC Tower running Windows 98 is by DualCay0te on Reddit.
• The zircon and the hyacinth come from Wikimedia Commons.