Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Shivering Isles

As job interviews go, it’ll be short and relatively painless. It’s just you, a disinterested man named Haskill, a bare room, a desk and a chair. After such an imposing entranceway, surrounded by otherworldly vegetation that’s leeched through its tableau of linked screaming faces into the lands of Cyrodiil, you were perhaps expecting something a little more grandiose within. Then, as the interview concludes, the dull, featureless walls melt away into a cloud of butterflies. And then it happens: you’re somewhere slightly mad.

The setting is the torn realm of the daedric Prince of Madness, one Sheogorath, if you haven’t been keeping tabs on your Elder Scrolls lore. Bethesda’s stated aim is to create a new self-contained land where the characters are more tightly defined, where dialogue is richer and where their quest designers can stretch their imaginative powers to the full, under the broad canopy of the insane, the unstable and the downright psychotic.