Identity Crisis Is the Shivering Isles Reunion Skyrim Never Got

The Shivering Isles came out in 2007, which means it has been close to twenty years since I last set foot in it. What I remember is patchy at best, more a set of impressions than actual quests.

Mushroom towers. A god who kept changing the subject.

The feeling that the whole place had been built by someone who found the rest of Cyrodiil unbearably boring.

So when I say that Identity Crisis feels like the Shivering Isles, take that with the appropriate grain of salt, because I might be misremembering the original. What I am sure of is that this mod scratched an itch nothing else in my Nolvus playthrough has come close to touching.

This is post six in the series, after Sirenroot, Moonpath to Elsweyr, Carved Brink, The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal and The Wheels of Lull.

It wears its Oblivion influences on its sleeve

You do not have to guess at what Identity Crisis is referencing. The location list gives it away immediately.

There is a New Sheoth Ruins, an Old Sheo Ruins, and an artifact called Arden-Sul’s Heart. Those are all lifted directly out of Oblivion’s expansion, where New Sheoth was the capital and Arden-Sul was the prophet everyone in the Isles argued about.

The framing is that a fragment of Sheogorath’s realm has taken root on Nirn, which is a tidy way to bring Isles architecture into Skyrim without pretending you walked through a portal to another game.

I found the asylum by accident, again

The first mod in this series, Sirenroot, I stumbled into without realizing it was a mod at all. The same thing happened here.

I was poking around the far northern edge of the map, doing the thing where you walk toward the boundary just to see what the game does about it, and I spotted an interesting looking building off in the distance. That building was the Northern Asylum of Julianos, which sits in its own worldspace up in the fog and ice.

This is one of the quiet pleasures of a pack like Nolvus. You are not working from a mod list you built yourself, so content ambushes you the way official content does.

The mod is by SlimeSire, first uploaded in August 2020 and still getting updates, with version 1.5 landing this past April. It needs all three DLC, and it has been featured by Bethesda themselves, which is not nothing for a solo project.

These are the most professional looking areas in any mod I have played

I want to be specific about this because it is the strongest thing the mod has going for it. The environments here look like Bethesda made them.

Not “good for a mod.” Not “impressive given the constraints.” They look designed, lit and dressed by people who do this for a living.

Carved Brink held the previous title in this series for best looking spaces, and it is still gorgeous, but it always felt like a place built by modders with enormous ambition. Identity Crisis does not have that seam showing anywhere.

What impressed me more is the balancing act. The asylum, the Asylum Depths and the ruins all feel genuinely alien, in the way Sheogorath content is supposed to.

And yet none of it feels imported from a different game. It reads as somewhere that could exist in Skyrim, which is a much harder trick than just going weird.

Sheogorath is the whole show

The Madgod is the easiest Daedric Prince to get wrong. Play him too broad and he is a cartoon, play him too straight and he is just another quest giver with a gimmick.

The performance here is excellent. Voice work is by Daniel Hodge, who is a real Wes Johnson devotee and has done Sheogorath and Hermaeus Mora across a number of mods, and he lands the specific rhythm of the character rather than just doing an impression of it.

It helps that SlimeSire has been doing this for years. Their catalogue is almost entirely Daedric Prince themed homes and quests, including Waking Nightmare for Vaermina, Providence and Pestilence for Peryite and Zulfardin for Namira.

The Prince as landlord is the house style, not a one-off idea. It shows in how comfortable the writing is with the material.

The Mindcleaver, the Discordant Greatsword and a spell worth keeping

Mild spoilers for rewards and mechanics from here on.

The loot is more interesting than it is powerful, which is fine by me. The Mindcleaver severs an enemy’s mind and turns it into a temporary ally, and the Discordant Greatsword sets off effects when whatever you hit finally dies.

Both are fun to mess around with. Both were also weaker than what I was already carrying, so they went into the museum instead of my hands.

The keeper is Enthrall, a spell that binds a foe’s mind, and that one I will actually keep casting. There are also armor sets, a Thorn Hook, new harvestable ingredients called Rot Scale and Screaming Maw, and enemies like the Cloven Minds that are real new models rather than recolored draugr.

If you run Legacy of the Dragonborn, there is an unofficial patch that adds displays in the Daedric Exhibit Hall, tucked under a staircase that is normally sealed off.

The Seed of Unreason is a great house I will probably never live in

The player home you earn is the Seed of Unreason, described as a germinating piece of Sheogorath’s realm growing on Nirn. It is a genuinely strange space and I like it a lot.

It also comes with a mechanic I did not expect. You can feed minds to the Seed to spread its influence outward, and I opened all three portals to three different Holds.

That is more thought than most mod homes get. A house that does something is always going to beat a house that just holds your stuff.

I am still not moving in. The museum safehouse in Legacy of the Dragonborn has been my base for this entire playthrough and nothing is dislodging it.

You will miss things, and they are sitting right on the tables

Here is the honest complaint. The main quest through the asylum is clear and easy enough to follow, but almost everything around it is not signposted at all.

There are extra areas, items you need to forge, and things to find that I walked straight past. Several of the items required to finish everything are small objects sitting on tables in the asylum, surrounded by so much environmental clutter that I did not notice them at first until I started looting everything.

I finished the mod, then watched a walkthrough on YouTube to check what I had seen. The answer was: not much.

So I went back. My advice is to do what I did in the other order, and keep a walkthrough handy from the start, because the difference between a rushed run and a complete one here is substantial.

Combat, for what it is worth, is not the point. There is not a lot of it, it scales reasonably to your level, and I never felt threatened or bored by it.

Verdict

I finished everything in around an hour and a half. That is by far the shortest thing I have covered in this series, and it is the only real caveat I have.

Quality wise, this sits right alongside Sirenroot. The difference is that Sirenroot gave me four hours and this gave me ninety minutes, so it lands at number two on my running list, ahead of Carved Brink, The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal and The Wheels of Lull.

It is also the first mod in the series where nothing broke. No dead scripts, no console commands, and no clipping through a door that refused to open.

Some of that is probably just because there is less of it to go wrong though.

If you want a campaign to sink a weekend into, this is not that. If you want one evening of the best looking, best voiced Daedric content in the modding scene, and you have any affection at all for the Shivering Isles, install it tonight.

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Screenshots in this article were captured by the author and used under Fair Use.