"Skyrim": Initial Impressions

I’d love to tell you about Skyrim’s deep and involving story. I’d love to tell you about the complex characters. I’d love to tell you about its rich and scintillating dialogue.

But I can’t, because I’ve been playing this game off and on for about four hours (it pays to have friends who work at major consumer electronics retailers), and haven’t even started the main quest yet. I haven’t even started a side quest yet. That’s because I’ve been too busy running around seeing if you really can eat most things, which you can, seeing if you really can go anywhere you want, which you can (you’ll just probably die), and deservedly getting killed by pretty much any armed mob that I stumble over, because I haven’t bothered to gear up decently and I tend to decide to smack them in the face for giggles.

Seriously, if you have ADHD, you are never finishing this game. The attention to detail that I’ve come across so far is nothing short of ridiculous. I tend to have problems with games set in high fantasy settings: “Oblivion” lost a lot of points for me when I discovered early on that I was expected to kill rats in a sewer because, seriously, I haven’t killed enough rats already? But this is just nuts.

Basically, all the enthusiasm for this game is, so far, deserved. I’ll have a more detailed review once I actually start the main quest. Or any quest. Hey, I wonder if that’s edible!