PlayGaming

We tried The Iron Oath in Early Access, formed a band of mercenaries with many strengths and weaknesses, experienced the beginning of a dark, well-written story, and fought with bandits and spooky monsters.

In the game, you accept commissions for noble houses, send your troops into dungeons and battlefields, loot treasures, defeat wacky creatures and take care of injuries when the work is done. If you do well, your reputation will improve. You will gradually receive better contracts with more significant challenges, gain access to various upgrades for your company and get better prices on the marketplace.

All of this is presented with excellent pixel art and a great soundtrack, has perfect lyrics, but no voice output or cutscenes. In addition, the part currently only exists in English. The game still offers a very manageable amount of content, and the existing story part can be played through in an extended afternoon. But what is available already gives hope for a real genre highlight.

It suits you if
You like dark fantasy.
You want to experiment with group combinations.
You like challenging games with severe consequences.

It doesn’t suit you if
You think pixel art is stupid.
You want big battles.
Random elements annoy you.

The story: Not original but exciting
The Iron Oath is set in a medieval world infested with monsters. The villages and towns are looking for mercenaries who will find missing family members and smoke out monster lairs. Your job is to hire these mercenaries, pay them, lead them in combat and through dungeons, and equip and heal them.

You are also on the lookout for a gang of traitors who will play you badly at the beginning of the game. It is not original, but it is very well written and engagingly told. You hire mercenaries in taverns. Their class and properties depend on chance.

There are currently six character classes, ranging from more apparent units like the lightning-wielding Stormcaller and bow-wielding Huntress to the brawling Pugilist and the Pyrolancer, a cross between a fire mage and a lance-wielding tank.

In addition, your warriors have positive and negative character traits. When making decisions, a careless pugilist hits it more challenging and takes more damage, and stubborn mercenaries want to enforce their will when making decisions, and so on. Maybe your Huntress is deceptive and then likes to fib in dialogue options.

Names and appearance are also randomly generated, but you can change and adapt them freely by hand, unlike the class and character traits. Initially, you can hire up to eight mercenaries if you have the financial means, and your roster can be expanded with upgrades. The maximum group size for dungeons and fights is limited to four characters. Adventures and battles with more characters could follow later but are not yet planned.

The fights: tactically shallow but fun
Combat isn’t complex yet, with melee fighters surrounding dangerous units and trying to lock them in, dishing out attacks of opportunity if an opponent tries to flee. Positioning is critical, and each class has some interesting abilities. Ranged fighters set traps and use cover to attack from afar while minimizing damage.

A Guardian can heal allies and equip themselves and companions with protective shields, a Valkyrie teleports weak-chested heroes out of harm’s way, and the Stormcaller can cast an overwhelming lightning bolt that perfectly grills most enemies in one hit but takes some time to channel.

You can power up these abilities by leveling them up by giving them more potency, range, or additional charges—because you can only use them a limited number of times and then have to rest to gain access to them again. Your adventures usually occur in dungeons with limited supplies, and setting up camp often attracts enemies.

It’s friendly and atmospheric but costs you experienced fighters. In addition, before you take a break, you have to choose whether you want to regenerate your skills or rather your life points, for example. If you run out of healing potions on the way and you run into an ambush, mercenaries sometimes give up the spoon permanently. Successful, long-lived mercenaries may not fall in combat, but they age over time, reducing attributes like maximum health. If you lead a happy and long life, you will eventually retire.

The scope: still little campaign, but a lot of sandboxes
Especially in dungeons, you make many decisions: Do you help a wounded adventurer, or do you flatten and loot his corpse? He who dawdles suffers! The loyalty and morale of your mercenaries will rise and fall depending on your actions. As the playing time in a dungeon progresses, you collect adverse effects such as more dangerous traps or a greater risk of surprise attacks.

In the game, you deal with death, injuries, long recovery times, age, pay, and repairs because The Iron Oath is not only a turn-based strategy game and a dungeon crawler but also requires some management.

It’s not easy, but at least the level of difficulty is very flexible and customizable, from sliders for experience points in combat to regeneration times for wounds to the amount of gold you start the game with. You can adapt many details and rules to your taste.

You don’t get an awful lot for the 20 euros you have to shell out for early access. After a few hours of the story, there are sandbox-like random tasks. After 15 hours, you’ve seen each of them. A roadmap in the game shows you when new classes, content, and features are coming.

This is beautifully transparent. The announced updates look realistic and not exaggerated. Above all, what is already inside is good. However, if you haven’t fallen in love with the game at first sight, you should watch it and wait for the following few content updates to appear.

After successfully repelling evil, most role-playing heroes from The Elder Scrolls experience mysterious fates: while the protagonist in Daggerfall is either completely wiped out or never seen again, the Nerevarine from Morrowind has been missing since he left for Akavir. And in Oblivion? If the Dragonborn from Skyrim doesn’t top that – we’ll probably only find out in Elder Scrolls 6 – hero number 4 is the (lucky?) winner of this strange ranking.

Together with Skyrim expert Ardko, we explored what became of our old character and why she had to sacrifice herself to save the world. But if we’re honest: The new entry is probably the coolest in the whole TES series.

The prince of madness and his dark secret
As a reminder, in the final Oblivion DLC, Shivering Isles, we fought a god of crystal, Jyggalag. This final battle will decide the future of the Shivering Isles, a realm deep in Oblivion divided between happiness and sorrow, to which we have been called to aid.

After a final blow, the god falls to the ground. Enough, I’ve been defeated. The gray march is over!’ exclaims Jyggalag. You have completed the cycle. Now you wear the cloak of madness. It’s over. I will go, and you will stay, mortal. Mortal? King? God? That is unclear. This kingdom is yours!. What he means by that will only be revealed after a long time.

Skyrim, Two Hundred Years Later: Entering an abandoned corridor in the Palace of Solitude, the Dragonborn is suddenly drawn into the mind of the late Emperor Pelagius. In a misty playground of madness that is strongly reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, we meet our character from Oblivion again.

He’s now white-haired, always happy, dressed in purple and red. » I’m a mad god, THE mad god, strictly speaking. It’s a family title. Lend it to me every few thousand years, he proclaims. Call me Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness. Delighted.

Skyrim expert Ardko classifies the curious twist for you:

In The Elder Scrolls, the Daedra are known to be demonic lords who always have fun with humans. Sheogorath is considered the most powerful of them and appears in all games. He belongs to the pantheon of Dark Elves, who believe that Sheogorath will always test them with trials in life. He’s insane and messy, like the Joker from the Batman universe. Therefore, it is not surprising why he is so popular with the players.

However, many players are unaware of its interesting backstory, which is told in Oblivion’s Shivering Isles DLC and ultimately explains the fate of the Oblivion player. Because initially, Sheogorath was not the god of madness at all but the god of order: Jyggalag.

The eternal struggle between order and madness
It is said that all other Daedra both feared and envied Jyggalag. Because of his power and his plans, explains the YouTuber. But since Daedra are immortal, they couldn’t just take him out. So instead, they put a curse on him to hinder him. Thus, he became Sheogorath, using his power only for chaos and nonsense, as we know him from the games.

In-game books such as The Sixteen Chords of Madness tell stories about the prince and his nature. So he kept organizing competitions with the other Daedra. For example, with Hircine, when it came to creating the worst monster. While the Daedra of the Hunt created a terrible nightmare, Sheogorath chose a small bird instead.

The competition of different monsters had a surprising ending: the bird flew around the beast, and the beast tore itself trying to catch the bird. This is the mad lord’s hallmark: Sheogorath always solves it with cunning no matter what the contest.

‘Clever as Sheogorath appears, the danger is not over. The problem is that his curse is temporary. At the end of each era, Jyggalag returns. Then two different personalities fight for control in the same body, Jyggalag for order, Sheogorath for madness. Similar to Gollum and Sméagol from The Lord of the Rings. In this regard, Sheogorath is calling for our help as Oblivion players and is taking us via a portal to his realm, the Shivering Isles, to stop Jyggalag and his so-called Gray March of Order.«

Fascinating: The architecture perfectly reflects the personality of Sheogorath. The happy, colorful lands of Mania represent his euphoria, the dark, sad lands of Dementia his depression, motifs also reflected in his split dress style. Over several quests, we bring one island area after the other under our control in the DLC.

Eventually, despite our actions, Sheogorath fully transforms back into Jyggalag. The colors fade, the extremes disappear, and the god of order appears in pure gray and hard crystal. The sad end of the Chaos Lord? No, not at all, explains Ardko:

The player wins the battle, but Sheogorath is lost. The only way to save him and end the curse forever is to take his place. In TES, there is the process of mantling, which states that if two people become more and more alike, they can merge into one another. For example, Tiber Septim also became the god Thalos. And the character who took back the Shivering Isles was now enough like Sheogorath to sit on his throne.

Jyggalag disappears into Oblivion. We stay and also get some extraordinary abilities. We can summon troops, control the weather, and teleport to the palace – now we can rule as we like as Sheogorath!

A joker forever
In the Skyrim quest The Spirit of Madness, we travel into the mind of a deceased emperor and meet the Oblivion player in the form of Sheogorath. To end their wicked banter with Emperor Pelagius, the Dragonborn must endure some curious trials from Sheogorath. Knowing that we’re facing our Oblivion character gives new meaning to certain statements made by the Daedra, Ardko says.

Butterflies, blood, a fox, a severed head alludes to the murder of the Emperor, the Thieves’ Guild, and other events in Oblivion. Likewise, his idea could be used to reference the mantling itself when he says, It’s a family title. Bestow it upon me every few millennia. Is there anything else we can elicit from the Oblivion character who is now Sheogorath?

A lot of the statements are difficult to pin down to our last character or Sheogorath since they are now the same person anyway. However, nuances can be seen in some places, says Arko. So, for some reason, Sheogorath ranks Emperor Martin among the best sevenths, although history would contradict here. This good opinion could have come from the Oblivion period when we spent a lot of time with the Emperor. Furthermore? We can say that the Oblivion hero not only accepts his destiny but enjoys it completely. There seems to be no conflict here, unlike Jyggalag and Sheogorath.

Whenever The Elder Scrolls 6 comes out, we can be very confident that the Prince of Madness will grace us again. And inside him, hidden somewhere deep down, also an old friend, namely our former Oblivion character. The fun fact at the end: The name Sheogorath references HP Lovecraft’s Shoggoth monster and is also named after the game designer and TES co-creator Theodore Peterson.