Skyrim is a game with a thousand stories. Actually, it’s probably way more than that. We didn’t count all of them. But every player soon finds out that is a massive la𝓀nd with a story around every corner, often too many t🧜o even try in one playthrough (especially if you don’t like quest markers on your screen).
Most of these quests are the tame fantasy tropes we know and love. Go find the lost sword, go find the enchanted ghost, go find the other lost sword, go find this mace, it’s slightly different from a sword. You know the drill. But Skyrim goes way beyond these normal quests and serves up all sorts of other stories. Some are amazing, others are re✨warding, and quite a few are…too much. They crossꦗ a bitter line, either when it comes to morals (even if you are playing a bad guy) or when it comes to how the player feels.
This time, we want to celebrate those “too much” moments, the times in Skyrim when you say “Yikes,” and very often, “I’m not sure I wanted to do that.” We all know the feeling, and in Skyrim, you get to feel it, well, quite a lot. So here are the nasty moments, the controller-breaking moments, the times where Skyrim crossed a line and you needed to 𒉰take a b✨reak, physical or emotionally. Sometimes it’s an assassin mission, sometimes it’s a side quest that really didn’t go as planned, and sometimes it’s a horrible, soul-wrecking choice that you just had to make.
25 The Sacrifice Of Boethiah ౠ
Boethiah is a Daedric Prince, so you know she/he wants you to do some ugly stuff straight away. Well, Boethiah sort of specializes in making you do extra borderline stuff.🀅 For example, her first task is giving you a dagger and saying, “Hey sacrifice one of your good friends on this magic altar.” Because you are a heartless fiend, you immediately go find a friend and lead them to the altar, where they get strapped in and you use the dagger as you know best. Boethiah then possesses the body and gives you the next task, which also isn’t great. It’s a worrying thing when you have to decide just which of your followers around the world is expendable enough for this ritual, and all you get is some…really amazing armor. Oh. Okay. Time to go find Faendal, we guess. No one misses him.
24 ✅ The Final Deal of Hermaeus Mora
Mora is the Prince of hidden knowledge and other tentacly things, so it’s no surprising he wants you to do some creepy things. In Dragonborn, he asks you for the knowledge of the Skaal, which is hidden in the mind of their wise man, Storn. If you want to complete the s🍃tory, you have no real choice but to offer Storn up to Mora as a sacrifice. Unfortunately, this progress as gross as you may imagine:
Mora rips out his mind with an attack of evil tentacles and leaves him an empty vessel on the ground.
The sadness lasts for about two seconds, until you are ready to go confront your nemesis and end the story. Poor Storn’s fate is almost entirely ignored,🐓 except for the nightmares you may experience at a later time.
23 Betraying Rieklins And Just…ꦅE꧃veryone
There’s a place in Dragonborn called Thirsk Hall, and if you find it, you discover that it has been taken over by Rieklings, little imps who usually fight you but this time, ask you for some help in getting the Hall back inಞ shape. At first, the quests are cute and innocent, but then they take a darker turn when the Rieklings ask you to destroy the human band that used to occupy the Hall.
You have a choice to help the humans or the Rieklings, but either way, it ends poorly.
You have to wipe out one of them, and in the end, you fight the Riekli♍ngs to be chief anyway,💞 so it all ends in slaughter. There’s not much reward, so you sort of feel bad starting the quest in the first place when there’s no happy ending.
22 Te💦lling The Old Alchemist Abo🌊ut Her Daughter’s Fate
This one is a short quest but it hits so hard you don’t really want it to exist. In Solitude, there is an old woman alchemist who asks you to find out abou𝓰t the fate of her daughter, a soldier in the civil war. If you agree, you can go ask a captain about her, and find out that she recently perished in a battle.
There is no reward for this quest. It is nothing more than a gut punch right in the feels, and leaves everyone feeling bad.
Then go back to the alchemist and tell her the news. She totally collapses at the news, and tells you that she cannot thank you for the news, but understands what you have ♈done. This quest totally crosses the line.
21 Unavoidable Fates For The College Of Winterhold’s Pro🥂fessors
One of the worst things in a video game is when characters you know fall in battle without you even knowing – and without you being able to do anything about it🌸. This exact thing happens toward the end of the College of Winterhold quest line, when you finally go to confront the evil Ancano in the College center. Here you find that the Archmage of the College, Savos Aren, has literally died off-screen.
It’s a cheap way to speed up the end of the story and annoying because there’s nothing you can do.
In fact, all the professors have been fighting off th🎃e screen while you were busy passing out and generally just being useless. After all, at this point, you may well be more powerful than all the professors combined𒁃.
20 🔯 A Deaf Woman In Her Cellar
During the main storyline, you eventually wind up in the endless cells under Riften. It’s a fun little miss🤡ion to find an old scholar locked in his prison, but it gets way too tragic when you find Hefid the Deaf, who is in her own little cell hidden away from everything. She endlessly goes on about all the objects near her, muttering, “Inkpot, stone, bucket,” and so on, never stopping. There’s nothing you can do to help her, and trying to interfere in any way doesn’t make a difference. She’s just a lost crazy woman in an old cell, and we really think that’s pushing the limit. It ignores all the good rules of gameplay. After all, you don’t even get a quest from her.
19 The Vic🐽tims In✱ Windhelm
There’s a famous quest in Windhelm that triggers when you visit a few times. A serial attacker is on the loose in the snowy streets, and you have to solve the mystery of who it is. To avoid spoilers, let’s just say it’s a madman who wants young female bodies to cut apart aꦬnd so that he can reconstruct the body of his lost love.
You find evidence of his secret experiments in detailed journals around the city, and a hidden room with an altar filled with grisly remnants.
You expect a lot in an Elder Scrolls game, but such a 🃏creepy serial slaughterer still managed to catch most players off guard. It feels particularly good if you managed to stop his last crime, but at the same time….gross.
18 Completing꧂ The Dark Brotherhood ജ
Okay, we talked about eliminating the famous chef, but this one goes way beyond that, and it’s very spoileryfor the Dark Brotherhood questline. 💎Ultimately, you decide to eliminate the emperor of Cyrodil (after being cheated out of it the first time). The big problem is that he’s actually a really good emperor. He’s an old𒁃 man doing the best he can in a tough situation, and you’re just an assassin who’s getting some sort of cosmic revenge on the world.
When you finally confront him, he calmly explains the situation and lets you know that he has accepted his fate…
Generally just making you feel like a little child as he sits at his desk and waits for the end. It’s not ✱your best performance, but by this time most players probably go through with it.
17 ෴ The Vampire Boss Immunity ꦗ
The Dawnguard expansion gets a lot of things right, including extra powerful vampires, surprisi⛎ngly cool vampire hunters, and a ton of crossbows, which automatically improve any game. But let’s fast forward to the end of the DLC, where you fight an ancient vampire with a magical sunbow. Classic, right? But the fight itself is incredibly annoying for players: The vampire himself zips around the room in a cloud of bats, making him really hard to hit, especially for melee characters. But he regularly goes back to his fountain of blood and becomes immune to all attacks, which is an absolute no-no. To prevent him from recovering health, you have to pull out the magic bow, equip the special arrows, and then manage to hit him. If you aren’t an archer, it’s pretty much the worst thing ever.
16 🅷 𓆉 Giving You A Room Filled With Gold…And Madness
Let’s talk about a different line to cross: Giving you carpal tunnel. This particular quest happens in the Dragonborn DLC, which is all around excellent and includes a ton of quests, some of which are pretty hard. One of them has you search for pieces of a map to find a buried pirates treasure and powerful cutlasses, because sometimes Skyrim is extra awesome. But here’s the thing:
You finally find the secret cave filled with loot, and it’s very literally filled with loot.
There are dozens and dozens of golden coil piles lying everywhere, and you have to pick every single one up at a time. It takes forever, but each pile is worth j🐻ust enough to make it worth it, and slowly drive you crazy.