I have deep trauma associated with the Elder Scrolls franchise. When I first played Morrowind, my ex wife was going through a rough time. She would come home from work at the paper mill and smell like literal hot manure. She would corner me in the kitchen and demand access to my liquor stash. I would tell her no, that I couldn’t watch her do this to herself any more. And she would swing at me. She would get me real good, right on the temple. I’d be laying on the vinyl floor, spinning from her flurry of blows. I was powerless to watch that buffalo of a woman down an entire bottle of Woodford Reserve, vomit purple slime (she had a terrible obsession with nerds candy), and sulk off to our disgusting bedroom to lay in wait (or in her case, weight) for my inevitable, defeated shuffle towards the stained mattress in the hopes that I might get just a few hours of rest before my shift at the waste management facility outside of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

My only solace, my only comfort, was the few hours that I would spend playing Morrowind. Then, a few years later, once she’d replaced drinking with a new habit - huffing paint out of a plastic shopping bag - God Howard himself blessed me with another escape. While my wife was seeking oblivion, Oblivion found me. Just what an n’wah like me needed. Game had me straight chimming.

I was first struck by the resemblance of many of the game’s likeable and compelling npcs to my monster of a wife. Still, they were nothing like her. I couldn’t smell them. Yippee! My favorite part was when a guard asked me if I knew where somebody was, only for that exact man to emerge out of the ground like some sort of apparition, only to inform me that he was hiding from the guard that was standing quite literally 1 inch (3 pp inches) from him. How humorous!

Oblivion is a game full of goofs and gaffs just like that, like the time I tricked two kind families into killing each other in exchange for a cursed sword from a satanic archdemon. Such laughs! That quest was a real highlight for me. It reminded me of how broken my own family is, especially after Uncle Joe did what he did to you know who.

Anyway, I can’t believe I haven’t talked about how much I love Oblivion’s in-depth skill system. You really feel like you’re naturally developing your skills, like how I got really good at sneaking, because I would go into people’s houses at night. I wouldn’t take anything, I’d just stand over them and watch them sleep! I loved drinking an invisibility potion right when they woke up, so they’d catch a glimpse of me and wonder whether or not it was some sort of sleep paralysis episode, or if there actually was a lizard sneaking into their house at night watching them sleep! LOL! What a thrill! Watching people sleep like that! It’s so funny, Oblivion is really a fantasy game! I could never do that in REAL life, they would hear me breathing!

5/5 Imperials are Italian, and I like that!