Daggerfall Unity, the 10-years-in-the-making rebuilding of The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall in the Unity engine entered full release last week. It’s an impressive project, making the massive yet dated 1996 RPG look and feel fantastic on modern PCs, as well as opening up the game to modding, which I’ve been fully embracing.

One of the most iconic aspects of Daggerfall is not only its massive world—which has thousands of towns and multiple nations for you to explore—but the dungeons, which are infamously huge; massive labyrinths of repeated textures, dead ends, and secret doorways that people have been known to spent untold hours lost in. I’ve even heard tell that the skeletons dwelling therein are in fact the raised bones of players who never made it out.

So I decided to tackle one of these behemoths myself in Daggerfall Unity, laying down figurative strings for myself like Theseus in the Minotaur’s Labyrinth to try and navigate this treacherous place.

Here’s my diary of the experience.

Day One

Speaking to a woman in need in the sleepy town of Oxwick, Daggerfall, I’m told of a girl who’s been kidnapped by Orcs and taken to the Nest of Aneloth, a few days’ travel west of town. I’ve heard of how treacherous these dungeons can be, so as I enter—the ominous music amplifying the plentiful dread I’m already feeling—I go in with a plan. The dungeon demands respect, lest it swallow you whole, so I decide that I’d fully explore a single floor before moving onto the next one. With a cumbersome but functional 3D map of the space, I should be able to gauge any passages I haven’t gone down, as well as log what I’ve already explored.

I encounter a lever, one of those dastardly ones that you pull but get neither the acoustic nor visual feedback (beyond the lever moving to the opposite position) to suggest that it’s done anything at all. While I ponder this, a rat begins to nip at my heels, and after I slay the thing, I need to curl up and rest for six hours to recover from the injuries it inflicted on me. I have 17 days to rescue my quarry, and can only hope that not every encounter is so taxing on health and time.

I proceed to chart the entirety of the first floor without much fuss beyond some oversized spiders capable of paralyzing me. I descend to the next level, then come upon stairs going back up. Expecting to see on the map that this ascent would be a satisfying loopback to the original floor, I was concerned to find that it in fact led to a separate, disconnected, and previously uncharted area of the original floor.

Scrap that: it turns out I’d descended two floors when I only thought I’d descended one from the ground floor, so this was a perfectly legitimate floor between the entry level and the one I was ascending from. Reassuring in one way, but clearly my sense of navigation was already failing me. Heading up the ramp, it transpires that there’s yet another floor between the floors, meaning there are two floors sandwiched between the entry level and the one I’d descended to from there. Already, my mind is starting to get foggy…

Meanwhile, a Giant Bat dies somewhere nearby; I don’t see it, but the dungeon kindly notifies me with bold yellow font. It’s some small comfort to me to know that the creatures dwelling here are as likely to attack each other as they are me.

I take another rest.

Day 2

I continue exploring this mystery floor, looking for an ascent that’ll finally link back to the entry floor, which would be vital for me get my bearings.

There’s a box on the ground, and I’m terrified, partly because these dungeons are remarkably clutter-free and clean, so any objects like this—however innocuous—instantly get my alarm bells ringing. As I cautiously approach the box, a Giant Spider emerges from a secret door in front of me, and a Spriggan from another one immediately behind me.

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I begin praying to the Nine to spare my lowly Level 2 life, and clearly at least one of them hears me (the perks of polytheism: a higher probability that at least one god will answer your prayers). The spider accidentally hits the Spriggan, causing the two to start fighting. Together with my temporary arachnid ally, we fight the Spriggan, which gets paralysed by the Spider’s poison, just long enough for me to hit it a couple of times before it starts moving again. It kills the Spider, and its twiggy frame descends on me with deadly intent. Weakened, however, it’s no match for my blade, which finally connects after about 20 failed RNG slashes to deal the death blow.

I make an uneasy alliance with a Spider, and together we take down a Spriggan

After the gruelling encounter, another rest is required. I curl up on the ground, hoping that I find a path that will better orientate me soon…

Day 3

After this, I find my first loopback to the ground floor, giving me a much-needed reprieve. Sticking to my system however, I head back down to continue exploring the below-ground floors rather than getting tempted by the upper floors. Regular map checks are critical here, because the map is blank in areas you haven’t visited, and even reveals secret doorways that to the naked eye are just walls.

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As I make my way down to the third floor below ground level, having fully explored the previous three, I hear the now-familiar clack of Spriggans nearby. Peeking in the gap between the door and the wall, I see two of them facing a wall. I open the door, take a quick look around to see if there’s anything of interest (and for it to register on my map as an explored area), then back out and close it again. I decide to leave the two Spriggans to their business. They never asked to be spawned (and besides, they’d almost certainly kill me).

‘Respect the Dungeon,” I keep telling myself. “Respect the Dungeon.”

So I make my way down this new descent. Several scuffles later, I happen upon some kind of cave system below the dungeon. A trio of Spriggans, which I spied earlier from a bridge above, stand amidst a pile of Giant Bat and Spider corpses in a spike pit. I quietly move past them to reach an end room, where a pair of skeletons ambush me. I attempt to lead the leering creatures into the Spriggan pit, hoping to foment a Spriggan-Skelly war, but it doesn’t work. I instead end up with all of them—two skellies and three Spriggans—giving chase to me.

I just about manage to escape the Spriggans and take down the skellies. It’s been a tough day, and I’m tired. Ever so tired…

Day 4

Upon finding another loopback to the ground floor, I conclude that I’ve explored the lower parts of the dungeon, only to find that there’s another stairway going down from the ground floor to some other lower-dungeon section. Given the choice between ascending to the upper parts and fully exploring the lower parts, it has to be the lower parts, just so that that’s fully cleared and that my exploration remains orderly. I’ve done well so far, and mustn’t let complacency set in.

I feel my skills with the Long Blade improving too, as I cut down a Giant Bat with a single swipe where before it would’ve taken three. A further two skellies attack me, but I deftly dance around them, overcoming their slashing resistance to dismantle them back down into the inert bones they’re meant to be.

I open a door, and beyond it, like out of a horror tale, a girl holding a doll sits before me. My instinct, blood-frenzied from my days spent in this dungeon, is to attack everything on sight, including this child before me. But then a glimmer of humanity sparks up in me. It’s the girl! The one I’ve been sent to rescue; my very purpose for being here which I was losing sight of. I chuck her in my inventory like a leather pauldron, and make my way to the surface.

It’s dawn when I arrive back in the frozen overworld, and never have I appreciated a sunrise quite like this.

Epilogue

It was definitely part-luck that I never had to explore the upper floors of this dungeon, and some subsequent research told me that Aneloth’s Nest is built up of eight ‘Modules,’ whereas the biggest dungeons have 16 or even 32. Nevertheless, approaching the whole process in a rigid ‘floor by floor’ way meant that I almost never got lost in the place, and honestly doing so made the whole experience pretty satisfying and rewarding, because rarely do dungeons in modern games force you to actually plan how you approach them or pose a genuine threat of you getting lost in them. It was an experience.

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