Oblivion occupies a strange, beloved corner of RPG history: the game that gave us radiant AI companions who bake bread at midnight, Sheogorath quests that feel written by someone with a fever dream, and a main quest that asks you to close interdimensional gates to Hell roughly forty times in a row. The remaster, developed by Virtuos and published by Bethesda, does not pretend Oblivion is a perfect game. It is not. But it is a genuinely great one, rebuilt with updated visuals, reworked lighting, and technical improvements that make it feel less like a museum piece and more like something you'd actually recommend to a friend without a long list of caveats about mods and INI tweaks. What kind of game is this? It is a first- and third-person open-world RPG set in the Imperial Province of Cyrodiil, during a succession crisis that coincides with Daedric portals tearing open across the countryside. You play a prisoner who gets handed a destiny by a dying Emperor, and then you are immediately free to ignore that destiny for two hundred hours while joining the Thieves Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, the Mages Guild, or any other faction that will have you. The faction questlines, particularly the Dark Brotherhood and Shivering Isles expansion included in this edition, remain some of the best writing Bethesda has ever produced. The Shivering Isles alone is worth the price of admission: a fully realized realm of madness with two distinct regions, a pantheon of interesting NPCs, and an ending that actually sticks the landing. The leveling system has been adjusted here, and this matters more than it sounds. The original Oblivion had a notoriously punishing major-minor skill split that punished players for playing naturally and rewarded spreadsheet optimization. The remaster smooths this out, making it feel less like a trap and more like an RPG. Combat is still the weakest link in the chain: melee swinging feels floaty, spell-crafting is satisfying but demands patience to unlock, and archery remains the quiet overachiever of the build options. The build variety is real but the payoff is front-loaded. By hour 40 you will feel powerful, and the scaling that once made late-game Oblivion a sponge-fest has been addressed, though not entirely eliminated. Who is this for? Players coming from Skyrim will find the world smaller but denser with personality. Players coming from modern CRPGs like BG3 or Pathfinder will notice the absence of branching dialogue trees and reactivity, because Oblivion's NPCs talk at you more than with you. The voice acting is famously monolithic: a handful of actors voiced thousands of characters, and once you hear the same tired merchant voice for the fifteenth time you cannot un-hear it. But the world has texture. The lore is rich. The side quests range from tedious dungeon crawls to genuinely surprising little stories that reward exploration rather than checklist-ticking. This GOTY Deluxe Edition includes the original Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles DLC, giving you the full package. If you played Oblivion in 2006 or 2007 and want to know if it holds up, the honest answer is: the good parts hold up more than you remember, and the bad parts are slightly less bad than they were. If you have never played it at all, you are getting one of the most characterful open worlds Bethesda has ever made, now running without requiring you to manually fix broken textures before you can enjoy it. Monika, Scout Team