I grew up playing the original Oblivion for hundreds of hours almost two decades ago as a young lad. Playing this remaster is like that scene from Ratatouille where the food critic, Anton Ego, eats the eponymous ratatouille made by the protagonist rat chef, John Ratatouille, and flashes back to his childhood when his mom made ratatouille.

Todd Howard is Alfredo Linguini on roller blades who just delivers the food to the table then stands in the corner, Virtuos is John Ratatouille doing all the work, Bethesda is my mom, the internet is Chef Skinner sitting at the other table judging the game without playing it, and the game itself is a “peasant dish” that’s being served in an upscale restaurant where you’re charged $50 for it because significantly more was spent on presentation and the overhead to keep the restaurant running.

I stepped out of the sewers, bleary-eyed, staring at the sun and gazing across the water of Lake Rumare. Having been given a quest to deliver the Amulet of Kings to Jauffre and save the world, I immediately booked it towards the Imperial City to pawn off all the ♥♥♥♥ I looted in the sewers, and then went straight to the Imperial Arena to fight as a combatant for some quick cash. I got a few thousand gold (and stole 500 gold from the arena chest) and bribed a beggar to tell me about the Gray Fox so I could join the Thieves Guild and make some real money fencing stolen goods.

Yadda yadda, suddenly over the span of a few weeks, I have Martin, Jauffre, and the Jemane brothers tagging along my adventures across Cyrodiil as I became overemployed as the hypercompetent guildmaster of every organization in the region, making everyone else in the entire world look like a bunch of lazy schmucks. Martin and Jauffre wanted to go to Cloud Ruler Temple while Reynald and Guilbert wanted to go to Weatherleah, but nobody seemed to mind the rather long detours as we played the entire game together.


This is not Oblivion remade in a modern game engine with upgraded mechanics, this is a remaster: a redo with upgraded visual and audio quality.

The game runs in the original Gamebryo engine with the exception of the rendering pipeline in Unreal Engine 5 to give the updated visuals. All of the same quirks, exploits, and bugs (some gamebreaking and requiring you to reload a save) have been perfectly preserved.

They hired like 15-20 new voice actors and actresses to do some of the voicelines so that not every single background NPC and quest giver share the same 3-5 voice actors and redid a lot of the faces so that you can’t be racist and say “All Orcs look and sound the same” because they quite literally did in the original.

Also, people have beards now, as opposed to the original where literally the only character with a beard was Sheogorath.

While it’s mostly just a fresh coat of paint over the original, they did make some small quality-of-life improvements that I should call out.


You now get experience from Minor Skills and can freely assign Attributes on level up.
In the original, only your 7 Major Skills gave experience, which caused some weird issues where your character might be torpedoed and feel underpowered if you leveled up non-combat-oriented skills like if you put Sneak/Security as a major skill (still bad to do that btw) and then you could only level up Agility/Speed.

You could not sprint in the original Oblivion. If you think you could originally, you’re misremembering. There was only a walk button to make you slower and undetectable. They added sprinting in Skyrim.

This has a weird side effect of making the game world feel smaller. Oblivion is pretty big, albeit with samey dungeons, all things considered. Sprinting and fast travel really shrink down the map considerably.

It made it a lot easier to kite Umbra to the Imperial City to have the guards kill her, lmao.

I didn’t use it that much, but they added the Clairvoyance spell that tells you which way to go to get to your quest marker if you’re turned around significantly in a dungeon. It’s useful situationally and a nice quality of life thing.

There are a lot of other tweaks and quality-of-life improvements that you might not immediately notice without comparing it side-by-side with the original that I won’t list. There was a lot of work put in to preserve, yet improve, the game.


One day, you will fall asleep and the world will change forever: wolves and mountain lions will be extinct in Cyrodiil, completely replaced in the wild by bears and minotaurs. Every Bandit will suddenly have ditched their old rusty iron swords and leather armor in favor of magical Daedric weapons and Mithril and Glass armor.

Loot is also leveled, which means that the legendary weapon you got as a quest reward at level 5 is a paperweight by level 10. There’s specific cutoffs for when an item “levels up” where it’s sometimes better to avoid doing specific quests until level 15 or 17, so that you don’t get the garbage leveled version.

The difficulty slider also exponentially increases enemy health/damage in a stupid way, and you have a really janky experience if you’re playing vanilla.

As I mentioned, a lot of bugs exist and NPCs will break randomly. This may necessitate loading an old save, so saving frequently along with the autosaves is super important.

There were times where I’d get frozen motionless in a cutscene repeatedly when doing certain quests or an NPC would bug out and never go to their proper place to trigger dialogues/quests properly. I had to use console commands to fix the game a few times.

You're going to be doing the same 5 dungeons over and over again when closing Oblivion gates, so max out your Acrobatics and Athletics, put on some 100% Chameleon gear and haul ass to the Sigillum Sanguis.


Overall, I recommend Oblivion Remastered if you’re nostalgic about the original and want to enjoy a fun RPG. It has a lot of quirks and bugs that range from funny to frustrating to gamebreaking, most of which can be fixed with mods and/or frequently saving (with multiple save files, don’t overwrite saves!).

Conversely, I would certainly NOT recommend playing the game in its default state without any mods, if you’re looking for a polished modern gaming experience out-of-the-box. This ain’t that, chief. This is a time capsule back to 2006/2007 and the halcyon days of my youth before the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, almost two decades of chaos, and my responsibilities as an adult in the current decade.

Look into various quality of life and rebalancing mods. There are a lot of fixes offered by the community on Nexus Mods for difficulty settings, level/loot scaling, quality-of-life improvements for magic, big titties for the Spider Daedra and Flame Atronach, enemy/wildlife diversity, and other super-critical mods that all make Oblivion Remastered a much more fun experience.

Check out Bacon_ on YouTube (just search “Bacon Oblivion”) to give you more of an idea of the silliness you’re missing out on with Oblivion and the Remastered version. The game isn’t entirely silly like that, but it’s part of the charm y’know?

Fun game, I 100%’ed it, I give it a solid 8/10. Consider waiting for a sale, since paying full price for a game from 2006 is a bit silly, but I can’t tell you what price point makes sense for the game. It was $50 back in 2006 and it’s $50 now, with inflation that ain't bad... maybe pick it up on sale for $20-40 or PC Game Pass.

This game is a true masterpiece of a video game. It’s truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be able to play this kind of game. Much like Secret of the Magic Crystal, another game I both reviewed and conquered, HuniePop is a transcendental work of art that has become manifest as a playable game on Steam for under $10. It’s like the Mona Lisa, but if you could buy the Mona Lisa drinks, receive lewd texts from the Mona Lisa of the Mona Lisa deepthroating a purple sex toy, and then lose your virginity to the Mona Lisa.

The story of HuniePop is a familiar tale. You’re a complete loser average Joe getting drinks by himself at the bar when you’re approached by an attractive brunette dressed in red (that’s important, you should take note of that for later) named Q Queue Kyu talking to you. After fumbling some basic human interactions with a girl, we learn that Kyu was actually drawn not to your looks or social skills but to the emanating aura of patheticness and other smells, looking to for a real fixer-upper. She later visits you in the night in her true form, a pink fairy clad in a bikini, explaining that she’s a love fairy, tasked with the job of getting pathetic idiots laid.

Under the guidance of Kyu, you undergo a great quest to have sex with as many girls as possible. The writing is… interesting. The storytelling is mostly contained with the initial meetings of each of the girls. Beyond each of those initial meetings, you’re essentially just learning more backstory behind each of the girls that you’re seducing and cheating on. You learn the interesting lore through asking questions of the girls (though don’t ask the same question twice, that’s rude) like how much they weigh and how big their rack is. Their answers to these introductory dating questions make this game not only a masterpiece of art and literature, but also truly a self-help training simulator for people looking for dates. You begin to see the archetypes that each of these girls is meant to portray, gaining a better sense of who they are, whether it’s the single mother who goes to the gym but will indulge in sweets, the blonde college cheerleader, the pornstar mom of the college cheerleader, or the cat.

The two major aspects of gameplay are the dialogues and the dates.

Each day, you go out in the morning, afternoon, evening, and night to talk to several different girls. After the first initial meeting of a girl, you can interact with her, gaining “Hunie,” which is essentially experience points for upgrading traits to succeed in the dates portion, by asking and answering her questions. You might ask her about herself, like her occupation, weight, cup size, or birth date, which she will later ask you as a pop quiz to see if you remember. If you don’t like talking to girls and remembering information, then good news! This part is completely optional and unnecessary, there’s even achievements for never talking to the girls beyond your first meetings! Like real life, you can just throw expensive gifts, purchased with “Munie” (more on that later), and alcohol at a girl to succeed. Indeed, later on in the game, it’s almost mandatory to get a girl drunk before a date, since it increases your base Passion meter. This is truly a positive message for the children.

The date aspect with the girl is the infamous match-three puzzles. You ever play Candy Crush? It’s basically like that one version where you only have a limited amount of moves to score points. As another layer of complexity, each girl has different likes and dislikes depending on their personality. Getting a four match of tokens may not be that big of a deal if that girl doesn’t care for that particular token. There’s additional layers of strategy and complexity with “Passion” and “Sentiment” tokens, which act to increase your score multiplier for matches and earn points to use items on the date, respectively. Depending how you do on the date determines how much Munie you earn (I’m not sure how you make money off of a date, I’ve never been on a date, can someone explain in the comments? Thanks), which can be used to buy gifts for the girls to get experience and upgrade your traits.

After four dates with the girls, if you’re taking a girl out at night, she’ll ask to come back to your place, where you play the match-three minigame except with a decaying score meter instead of a limited amount of moves and also the girl makes moaning sounds so your parents yell at you and kick you out of the house for not getting a real job and just playing your “cartoon pedophile games” but it’s okay they just don’t understand the complex layers and nuance to a game like this.

Nice.

The artstyle, as you can tell, is reminiscent of anime. The settings and backdrops are pretty interesting. One thing to note, though it may be fixed unbeknownst to me in one of the official/unofficial patches, is that the game does not support a widescreen resolution. You can adjust the aspect ratio, but that just stretches the game out and looks weird. You should probably play this in a small window anyways, you need to be able to quickly hide your shame if someone walks in.

You should probably play with headphones on. The voice acting is legitimately worth hearing (though there is a “boops” in lieu of voice overs option if you need to hide your shame), and the cheerful music is pretty good at making me angry for not being able to solve a hentai match-three puzzle game.

There’s someone for everyone, I’m sure, though stay away from Kyanna. I’m serious, back off. You can have Beli, her yoga instructor, she’s uhhh… “awesome,” as Kyanna says. Go for whoever you want man, I’m not here to judge. You can go for Momo, if you want. I won’t tell your parents. Just not Kyanna.

It’s a great purchase. Whether you’re purchasing it for yourself for the artistic value or for a friend so they can also appreciate the artistic value, it’s a great game to buy. It’s a game for everyone of all ages. This game will probably be playable at booths in the Louvre in a few years, once the Mona Lisa has faded enough to be too boring. Do you know how much it costs to enter the Louvre? €9, that’s a lot. Unless you’re visiting after 6pm on a Wednesday or Friday, then it’s only €6. In freedom units, that’s basically a Hot-N-Ready® Smokehouse pizza from Little Caesars, including tax, or a footlong sandwich from Subway before tax, when HuniePop is as cheap as a McPick 2 for $2.50. Plus you don’t have to fly to France to enjoy this work of art. You can enjoy this masterpiece in the comfort of your own home, in a dark room, with the blinds closed and the door locked! Truly inspirational.

To close out the review, I'll echo the sentiment from the beginning by backing it up with a voice of authority. I’ll leave it to the man himself, Stanley Hudson from the Office with his words of wisdom:

"It’s called hentai, and it’s art."