For a 10-day period the summer of 2006, in between handing in my resignation at my first job on a games magazine and returning to Scotland to start university, I did almost nothing except eat, sleep and play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360. I hauled my TV from the living room of my small, unpleasantly warm flatshare into my bedroom so I could play uninterrupted; it was all I could think about. My character was a Khajiit thief, a kind of manky lion in black-leather armour with excellent pickpocketing skills. One afternoon, I decided to see whether I could steal every single object in the smallish town of Bravil, and got caught by the guards a couple of hours in. I did a runner, dropping a trail of random plates, cheese wheels and doublets in my wake, and the guards pursued me all the way to the other side of the map, where they finally got entangled with a bear who helpfully killed them for me.
I bet a lot of you will have had a similar experience with a Bethesda game – if not Oblivion, then Skyrim or perhaps Fallout 3. There’s something intoxicating about these role-playing games, the way they lay out their worlds for you like a buffet, inviting you to gorge. Go where you like! Learn some weird spells and try them out on bandits! Nip into a cave to fight a necromancer and end up getting ambushed by vampires! Open-world games such as this are exhaustingly common now but Oblivion was the first one I ever played. Lately I’ve been devouring it all again, after Bethesda surprise-released a remake last Friday.
I say it was a surprise. In fact, the Oblivion remake/remaster has been one of the games industry’s worst-kept secrets for months, just behind the Switch 2. Nonetheless, I am thrilled about it. Oblivion has, over two decades, become at least as famous for its technical weirdness and amusing glitches as for its pioneering design, and I was relieved to find Bethesda has not tried very hard to fix it. Characters still get stuck in walls, repeating their asinine lines of dialogue. The facial animations are still off. The game crashed on me two minutes into Patrick Stewart’s opening lines as the soon-to-be-murdered emperor of Cyrodiil, and I have twice fallen through the world into the endless void beneath. Weird stuff happens all the time, and it’s rarely intentional. They’ve even preserved an infamous voice-acting blooper. It is a perfect time capsule of 00s accidental gaming comedy, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
I remembered Cyrodiil as enormous and picturesque, full of gently glowing magical ruins and rivers that caught the light in just the right way. By 2025 standards, though, it is weeny, perhaps the size of the opening section of any current game’s gigantic map. (I’m thinking particularly of Avowed, the recent Elder Scrolls-alike from fellow Microsoft studio Obsidian.) The imposing-looking Imperial City at the centre is a village of tiny interconnected districts with around 30 people in it. I don’t know how I managed to spend more than 100 hours in such a relatively small space as a teenager, but as I rode around last weekend I found, unexpectedly, that I still knew it intimately. I’d meet a new character and remember details of some quest I hadn’t thought about for years, or ride around a corner on my armoured horse and know exactly where I was from the view.
In Oblivion, your character develops according to what you do with them. You don’t meaningfully have to choose between magic, stealth and strength; pick up a greatsword and start using it and your heavy-weapons stat will start increasing. (The trick back in the day was to crouch into a sneak position, use a rubber band to pull the controller’s analogue sticks together, and spin around in circles until your stealth stat hit maximum.) This is part of what makes it feel like a buffet: you can become a master thief, run the mages’ guild and be a combat arena champion all at once. It is a game of choice with no consequence, beguilingly frictionless and generous. A small world that revolves entirely around you.
I have a theory that the Bethesda RPG spell only really works once. You get one life-consuming experience with an Elder Scrolls, and then whatever you play next feels like a repeat; I played Skyrim and Fallout 3 for ages but never finished either. It turns out Oblivion is still my game; I can lose myself in it for hours where newer, more sophisticated open-world games start to get on my nerves. I still hate the Oblivion Gates, portals to a generic hellscape where you have to spend a tedious 20 minutes fighting demons in towers with flaming corpses hanging from the ceilings; their vibe is very 00s metal album art. But the beauty of a game like this is that you can effectively ignore the entire plot and fool around as you please.
The Oblivion remaster illustrates that old games don’t always need fixing. It looks different, but it’s got the same soul. I imagine my teenage self would say the same about me.
What to play
If you haven’t yet played Blue Prince, stop whatever you’re doing and download it now. You are the teenage heir to a giant mansion, with one catch: if you want to keep it, you must find its secret 46th room. Also, every time you go to sleep, the mansion resets, so your route through it will be different every day, drafting each room from a random selection of blueprints, occasionally finding a chamber you’ve never seen before.
I spent 40 hours playing through this with my eldest son, who acted as note-taker, and it is up there with the best puzzle games I’ve ever played. Even after you’ve found Room 46, there are deeper mysteries to probe at; a couple of people I know have truly gone off the deep end with it. Its sedate pace and intellectual challenge were both ideally suited to playing during a period of convalescence. Wonderfully, your reward for playing is always more knowledge.
Available on: PC, Xbox, PS5
Estimated playtime: 30-plus hours
What to read
Sydney Sweeney is to star in a film adaptation of Hazelight’s co-op game Split/Fiction. How is that going to work? My partner and I are halfway through this game and, though it’s a blast to play and enjoyably bizarre when it wants to be, the plot and characterisation are … not the most complex.
Via Video Game Chronicle, some details on October’s Ghost of Yotei, the sequel to the gorgeous but bloated Ghost of Tsushima. “The game will see the player hunt down the Yotei Six, a group of warriors who have caused death and destruction across Japan,” they report. “As the player hunts them down, a sash worn by the protagonist, Atsu, will display the names of the Yotei Six that she is pursuing.” How very Arya Stark.
Call of Duty’s Warzone has become famous for it’s odd celebrity tie-ins, which have allowed you to, say, gun down dozens of peers as Nicki Minaj or Lionel Messi. The latest choice? Seth Rogen, as part of a new (lord help us) “weed-themed” content package.
A very important essay here from Gizmodo: isn’t it past time we got a good Predator game?
What to click
Playing to win: are video game movies replacing superhero blockbusters?
Why novelists are becoming video game writers – and vice-versa
Atomfall might have been an apocalyptic classic if it weren’t for all the walking | Dominik Diamond
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 – reality-bending daftness | ★★★☆☆
Until Dawn – efficient, if unscary, video game horror | ★★★☆☆
Question Block
This week’s question comes from reader Toby:
“Video game movies and TV shows are all the rage, and I’m curious to see how they adapt The Last of Us Part II. I thought the interactive medium really enhanced its emotions and themes. Can its story still have the same impact in a passive medium? On that note, what great video game narratives do you think absolutely cannot be adapted into a movie or a TV series?”
I have just watched the third episode of the second season of The Last of Us, and it’s clear that they’re diverging more from the game’s plot this time than they did in season one. They kind of had to, because as you point out, the game’s impact largely comes down to playing it from both points of view, which won’t necessarily work on TV. That said, the first game also owed a lot of its emotional heft to the fact that you, Joel, were the one doing terrible things, whether you as a player agreed with him or not. The TV series couldn’t pull those same levers, so it expanded The Last of Us by showing new perspectives, going into deeper detail on things that wouldn’t have been practical or fun to play through; I’m thinking particularly of that wonderful episode about Bill and Frank, which would never have worked in a game. This is the art of the adaptation: finding something fresh to offer.
On that basis: there is no great video game narrative that couldn’t be adapted for film or TV by a sufficiently talented and understanding writer. The key word there is adapted, not transliterated – because a film or show has to offer a new interpretation or perspective. That said, there are plenty of games whose plots are simply too bad to ever make for a good TV show or film. It’d take a true visionary to get anything worth watching out of, say, Heavy Rain.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
