Sirenroot: Deluge of Deceit turns Skyrim into a Zelda Water Temple, and it's Fantastic

One of the strange pleasures of running a giant mod list like Nolvus is that you eventually stop knowing where Bethesda’s Skyrim ends and everyone else’s begins. You wander into a cave expecting a few draugr and a word wall, and instead you get a four hour dungeon with an original soundtrack.

That’s exactly how I met Sirenroot: Deluge of Deceit. I found it completely by accident, played the entire thing without realizing it was a mod, and came out the other side convinced it was the best piece of Skyrim content I’d touched in years.

This is the first in a series of posts about the standout mods I run into during my Nolvus playthrough, with a full review of Nolvus itself once I actually finish it (optimistic of me, I know).

What Sirenroot actually is

A mysterious operatic voice starts drifting up from the bottom of Lake Honrich outside Riften, apparently coming from an unusual glowing plant. The Black-Briars being the Black-Briars, they hire a team of divers to go down and salvage the alchemical ingredient before anyone else can.

You get attached to that team. The job looks routine for about fifteen minutes, and then the cavern collapses and you’re buried in an Ayleid ruin nobody knew was down there, with four other people and no way out.

Sirenroot is the work of a solo modder called Everglaid, who put roughly eight months into it, four of those working in the Creation Kit daily. She’s named Tomb Raider, Dragon Age, Resident Evil and the Souls games as influences, and you can feel every one of them in the finished product.

It’s built on the Ayleid tileset from Skyrim’s 1.6 update plus more than 100 custom meshes, so the place looks like nothing else in the game. The advertised length is two to five hours, and mine came in right around four.

A Zelda water temple hiding under Riften

Here’s the comparison I kept circling back to the entire time I was down there: this is a Zelda water temple, in Skyrim, and I mean that as the highest compliment available.

The dungeon, Honrich Atasel, is built around a central hall you return to again and again as new routes open up around it. Verticality is the organizing idea, with assisted climbing, long diving sections, and shortcuts that unlock behind you as you go.

Most of the major puzzles come down to raising and lowering water levels to reach somewhere you couldn’t reach ninety seconds earlier. It’s the exact loop that made the water temple in Ocarina of Time infamous, minus the iron boots menu.

You can usually tell when a quest mod was made by a talented world builder who isn’t a game designer. Sirenroot is the opposite, and the layout, pacing and sightlines all read as professional design work.

The puzzles are tuned just right

The difficulty curve here is close to perfect. Every puzzle made me stop, look around properly and actually read the room, and not one of them ever pushed me toward alt tabbing for a walkthrough.

A big chunk of the dungeon runs on color coded gem doors (sapphire, emerald, ruby, amethyst and topaz) wired to switches scattered across the ruins. Add the lever driven water levels and a few timed sequences on top and you have a genuinely well built puzzle box.

There are also five collectible Sirenroot flowers hidden around the place. I grabbed several without ever working out what they were for, so here’s what I’ve since learned: they upgrade a crown, and there’s a Soul Cairn easter egg tied to one character’s best outcome that I missed entirely.

Four divers you’ll actually care about

The four NPCs trapped down there with you are Cayrice, Peletius, Tilael and Yineel, and they carry the whole quest. There’s something like 1,000 sentences of voiced dialogue here, performed well enough that I never caught myself skipping a line.

They’re distinct people with their own histories, anxieties and opinions about you, and they respond to how you choose to talk to them. The leads are standalone visually too, with hand sculpted faces, custom hair and outfits, and unique animations.

There are also stretches where you stop playing as the Dragonborn and take direct control of one of them instead. It’s a small trick that no other Skyrim quest mod I’ve played bothers with, and it does an enormous amount of work in getting you attached to these people.

Who lives and who dies

Mild mechanical spoilers in this section. I’m keeping the story beats and the endings themselves out of it.

All four of those characters can die, and their survival hinges on dialogue choices you make hours earlier with no indication that anything is at stake. This is my one real complaint about the design.

The example that got me: one of the divers was panicking after the collapse, so I told them everything would be fine, because obviously it would be, I’m the Dragonborn. Choosing the reassuring option quietly armed a hidden timer on a puzzle much further into the dungeon, and failing that timer killed them.

The mod is upfront that it wants you to live with your choices and not reload. I respect the intent, and I reloaded anyway, because I’m not letting someone die over a line of dialogue I had no reason to read as a trap.

Two of my four still ended up dead and I never did figure out what I’d done wrong. There are three different endings depending on how things shake out, which is most of the reason I want to run it again on a future character.

Bring water breathing and leave your followers behind

Two practical things you’ll want to know going in. First, there are a lot of underwater segments, and while the dungeon is generous with water breathing potions, chugging one every ninety seconds gets old quickly.

I happened to be wearing a circlet of waterbreathing and it made those stretches enormously smoother. Sort out a permanent waterbreathing enchantment before you start (or bring an Argonian) and you’ll skip an entire category of frustration.

Second, the mod asks you not to bring followers, and it means it. I had three with me and they spent the whole quest vanishing and reappearing at random as I moved between areas, which is exactly the teleport weirdness the author warns about.

It also asks you to disable double jump and parkour mods, which Nolvus happens to ship with. I had SkyParkour and a glider active and accidentally skipped past a stage of a puzzle twice before I clocked what I was meant to be doing.

I hit exactly one real bug in four hours. One character asked me to deal with an assassin hunting him, and after I killed the assassin he refused to acknowledge it or move on, so I reloaded, redid the fight, and it worked perfectly the second time. It wouldn’t really be Skyrim without some bugs though am I right?

The music and the combat are better than they need to be

Sirenroot ships with a 14 track original soundtrack written by Everglaid and the Skyrim musician young scrolls, covering cutscenes, individual areas and a few hidden corners. Turn your in game music up before you start, because it’s carrying a huge amount of the atmosphere.

The combat caught me off guard too. There’s a fair amount of it, it scales to your level, and at level 41 I found it consistently challenging without anything ever actually killing me.

Put that together with the Ayleid architecture, the light pouring through the flooded halls and the cutscene direction, and the presentation holds up next to Bethesda’s own DLC. I don’t hand that comparison out lightly.

The verdict

Sirenroot: Deluge of Deceit is the rare quest mod that doesn’t need a “for a mod” qualifier attached to it. It’s a beautifully built four hour dungeon with real puzzles and characters worth remembering, and it stands on its own next to official content.

The unsignaled character deaths are the one thing holding it back for me, and depending on what kind of player you are that’s either a frustration or the entire point. If you’re the sort who needs everyone to make it out, know going in that you’ll be reloading.

Do the prep work first: dismiss your followers, disable your movement mods, get permanent waterbreathing sorted, and save constantly. Then go in as blind as you can manage, because stumbling into this thing by accident was one of my favorite gaming moments of the year.

It’s on Nexus Mods for PC and on Bethesda Creations if you’re on console. Either way, play it.

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Screenshots were captured by the author and used under Fair Use. I’m actually playing on an OLED TV with HDR which is why these look a bit dark.