Skyrim Krein SE Review
An amazing mod with a few questionable choices.
Krein SE
- Digital Serpent Team/ebxoleras
I learned about Krein from Zero Period Productions, who showcases a nice array of mods that I would have overlooked otherwise. You should 100% watch his playthrough to get a feel for the mod if you want to see the mod in action.
No spoilers
Visual Design - 10/10
Krein presents stunning dungeons with a lot of unique assets that make this truly feel like an epic journey. The animation for certain characters however is rather wooden, along with a few textures that are too low-resolution. Still, some of the locations in this mod are the best-looking ones I’ve seen in a Skyrim mod. There are two main worldspaces in the mod, with a lot of variety, all the way from frigid fjords to ashen desert, from mining tracks to what seems like fortresses in space (that is the first location you visit in the mod). Outside of the Silvermourne Valley worldspace, nothing feels like it was from vanilla Skyrim.
Story and Characters - 8.5/10
The story is straightforward, and the Greek Odyssey feels like the best analogue to the story with the sheer variety of locations you visit. A lot of care is put into developing a living world, with living characters with their own motives that make sense. The two main characters of the mod are very fleshed out - especially if you read their backstory in some of the mod-added books found during the main quest. They are the highlights of the story for me: they aren’t one-dimensional, neither fully evil nor good, and they develop through the story in a very nuanced way. I really enjoyed their banter throughout the story. The antagonist has a decent backstory as well. I think this is one of the most enjoyable and amazing experiences I had in a mod-added story. However, because of its ambitions, many plot threads are left unresolved and we don’t get closure for many characters. The story also begets even more questions. One thing is for sure though - I do not believe this is lore-friendly as it introduces factions that are not well integrated into TES lore. The mod takes around 15-20 hours to fully play through, including all the sidequests.
The mod does not have any jumpscares, though some locations can be unsettling. There is also depiction of torture in the mod, though much milder than that of Beyond Reach and Vigilant.
Technical - 6.5/10
Krein is surprisingly compatible with huge modlists, and I’ve tested this on a modlist with 2700+ plugins full of gameplay-altering mods. There are a few incompatibilities*, but none impede quest progress. Certain scripts may require a save game reload for them to work correctly - I’ve encountered two or three such cases throughout the entire mod. However, the way certain scripts are constructed make the experience feel unpolished and sometimes compromise the story’s flow. For example, some scripted conversations get cut off by a scripted event happening immediately after without a wait. It can occasionally be hard to follow the story because of a dialogue being too quiet, such as when characters monologue while being unreachably far away.
In my testing, I’ve found that the Krein SE Fix mod does fix many issues with the mod and allows the SE version of Krein to be used with DynDoLod - which, by the way is highly recommended for this mod since the pop-ins without DynDoLod can get nasty. It would be remiss of me to not point out that the original mod does not follow many of the best practices of modern Skyrim modding, being built primarily for LE, containing many wild edits, and so on. That being said, with the fix, the mod is very playable and compatible with huge modlists. That being said, the mod is very ambitious and most of the bosses have somewhat complicated mechanics and the fact all of them worked well for me means I can't begrudge the team too much on this front. It's just a bit weird how such a mod gets released for LE, does not ESL ESL-able plugins, etc.
Audio - 9.5/10
The voice acting is excellent, and the new music added is also very good. However, the audio quality of the music does not match that of music mods like Yggdrasil, and can often feel too quiet. The mixing of certain tracks also feels a bit muddy. Still, the soundtracks capture the mood of the story very well.
Encounter Design - 9.5/10
I’ve played through most of the mod on Master with a bunch of difficulty-enhancing mods. The bosses are not always well-balanced, in that one boss may be too easy while the next becomes a challenge that requires a handful of retries. I like that the mod auto-saves right before a boss. The mod has some of the most well-designed bosses among Skyrim mods, however, with actual phases and unique mechanics. Not a single boss felt like something I’ve tackled a million times in vanilla Skyrim. I think it’s comparable to, if not superior to, the boss encounters in Vigilant. There are a few bosses where you should drop your difficulty, not because they might kill you too easily, but because it can make for very tedious HP-spongey combat otherwise.
Dungeon and Quest Design - 8/10
Dungeons in Krein consist of a lot of puzzles. I don’t think any of them were particularly hard but they were certainly a step up from vanilla Skyrim puzzles and slightly harder than puzzles in mods like The Grey Cowl of Nocturnal. I personally enjoyed them. Almost all puzzles in the mod are communicated very clearly to the player, outside of one or two that required meta reasoning. However, I did not enjoy jump puzzles, or platforming in the mod. This is single-handedly the worst aspect of this mod, and the tedium induced by the platforming in the mod is worse than the infamous Lava Room (Rkund’s Magma Silo) in Legacy of the Dragonborn. It doesn’t help that these appear again and again throughout the entire mod. I recommend using tcl to skip most of them. I do appreciate that these jump puzzles are extremely well designed, but Skyrim is not Celeste and the engine is not designed with platforming in mind. Worse still, mods that overhaul jumping, particularly those that add higher gravity, makes certain platforming segments outright impossible. If you want to give the platforming a shot though, make sure to disable any mod that changes the jump animation and momentum mods, and set your SkyClimb keybind to something different from your jump key.
The quest design is a standout, and Cinderholm was particularly intricate and fun to play through. However, the mod often uses silent stages and objectives are very scarce to come by. While I enjoyed that the mod pushes you to figure out how to progress, I can see how it is frustrating for others. I thought that Cinderholm struck a nice balance in that it communicates what the player needs to do very clearly but does not reveal the branching paths and exact solution to the stages of the quest. Speaking of branching paths, the overall mod also has a lot of branching paths, with multiple endings. Because of the opacity of the mod, it can be hard to figure out how exactly you could trigger different routes of the mod, but in a way that makes it a bit more organic. I will just hint that there is an invisible favor system in the mod (which I surmised from the scripts) and key plot moments could change based on decisions you made elsewhere in the mod.
Another particular issue with the quest design is that the point of no return can be rather unclear and many side quests have a small window for you to actually start and complete during the main quest. One particular side quest had such a short window that you must complete it right between two stages of the main quest. I can see why Digital Serpent went with this approach - most of the side quests involve major characters or hint at major plot events. They flesh out the characters tremendously without making it feel like you are forced to do all of them if you just want to speed through the main quest.
You can always return to Skyrim from Silvermourne Valley, but be warned, the point of no return starts at a huge Nordic ruin (not the one that you visit for a sidequest with a Nord sitting outside). Players with needs mods should prepare at least 2 weeks of food, water, and especially cleaning resources, and complete any lingering sidequests in Silvermourne Valley. You can think of that as a start of a long expedition and prepare accordingly. I think this could be improved by adding a shortcut back to and from Silvermourne Valley near the end of the fifth main quest (MQ04X), and let the ship going back to Skyrim be a two-way trip. I personally enjoyed this feel of the mod but it can become tiring very quickly for some players. A small, friendly settlement in the second major worldspace might be a good solution to this as well.
Overall: 9/10
This is one of the best mods I’ve played in Skyrim, and I feel that it is criminally underrated, which is why I’m writing this review at all. I hope that it can succeed, especially once the mod author tackle some of the major issues with the mod. Krein feels like a brand new experience with Skyrim and genuinely felt like a different game to me. For that reason I wholeheartedly recommend it to most players. Just keep your console on and tcl if you don’t want to deal with platforming.
*The biggest offenders are Audio Overhaul Skyrim, which breaks an optional puzzle, and Simple Offence Suppression, which causes a specific enemy to not turn hostile for a sidequest.
Spoilers ahead…
Spoilers
In the spoiler section, I’ll go deeper into specifics of my opinion written above, and this will spoil the whole story. If you do not wish to be spoiled, please do not continue reading.
Story/Characters
I missed the quest: SQ03 Variations of Chimera and SQ11 Caged, but I don’t think they impact my assessment of the mod much.
The reason why the story feels like an Odyssey is precisely because it’s epic but you never linger with a location or a faction too long. Many of the factions feel unresolved, perhaps because they are, and many more also feel unintegrated with TES lore.
Cinderholm
This is the faction that feels most resolved by the story, perhaps because there isn’t much of a need to go further in explaining its significance. I liked that there is ample foreshadowing of Cinderholm, all the way at the very start of the mod in the mines, and then later around Nurdrassil. I also liked that we got a nice glimpse at the daily life of the alchemists there. However, Cinderholm itself feels weird and out of place in TES lore. How does it recruit alchemists? Why do they seem so much more advanced than the rest of the world? These don’t seem to be answered by the mod.
Emma’s faction
I still have no idea what Emma’s faction is and what they’re trying to do. Perhaps that’s because I screwed up favor somewhere and caused Emma and Julien to kill each other in MQ04X, and I saw that she doesn’t necessarily die there in a different playthrough and traps the player instead. As far as I can see in the mod scripts she also doesn’t seem to participate much beyond MQ04 (I think a bit in MQ08? But that’s it.) Why did Giles and Horace lead me to a trap? Did they know? (Seems like they only participate in MQ01) Emma mentions that they were good people, but then Emma died. The reason why this was so weird to me is because of set-up. The mod seems to set up this faction to be a major player, particularly with how Emma and Vazeer seemed to be, at least initially, the major characters, but then halfway through the mod, they become completely irrelevant. If they are supposed to become irrelevant, I’d like to see them go out with a bang to reveal their motives, even if just vaguely, and establish their relation to the Dragon Books more.
Miners, East Empire Trading Company
I don’t think there’s really a need to flesh this faction out even further, but I’d just like to say that it was a nice introduction for the player into the world. But…
Feyfrost
Feyfrost, on the other hand, does not feel fleshed out enough. Is it really just a coven of witches that we all wipe out with Emma’s wraith in just a few minutes? How did they use the Black Book? (Vazeer put it there, but what did they do with it) I think this partly has to do with the lack of dialogue and notes, while it was built up a bit by the story with Silvermourne’s villagers and miners commenting about how dangerous Feyfrost was.
The Unworld
There are many issues with the Unworld, and it’s not because it’s supposed to be mysterious or unknowable. The problem is that the Unworld feels like something Vosik/Siivhah just created somehow? It doesn’t feel like the Unworld has a history beyond Vosik/Siivhah, despite the mod hinting, multiple times, that it does. First, the Imperials were trying to seal beings from the Unworld off in Iotunheim. Then, apparently, Silvermourne City had dealings with the Unworld at some point too, though it seems that it took place ages ago. It feels that the Unworld is related to Sithis in some capacity, though this is never clarified. Perhaps I missed something in Silvermourne, but the mod does not seem to make the Unworld feel like a persistent threat to Nirn.
Vazeer and Szolus
Vazeer and Szolus are standouts of the mod for me. They are incredibly fleshed-out and they have a very grey morality and complicated motivations. Initially, Vazeer desires freedom and Szolus desires purpose. But we see through the backstory and the ending of the mod that Szolus feels differently about his bargain with Hermaeus Mora now. We see why Szolus initially sought out purpose, but through his journey he starts to understand why freedom can be attractive too. On the other hand, Vazeer feels trapped by his obligations and haunted by his past. He wants to smith but the trauma does not let him go past it. Beneath his declarations of apathy and a cynical view of morality, there is a reason he saved Szolus three times and felt angry when Szolus then sold his soul to Hermaeus Mora. He wants Szolus to feel the freedom of living that he felt he could not achieve. These two characters are not strictly good nor evil and were not immediately likeable. But throughout the mod they grew on me and made me really care about their story and the journey. This is top-tier writing. If I had one critique, it would be that their backstory was too concentrated towards the late parts of the mod, and in book form too.
Khajiit mercenaries
I really liked their story and it feels like it was developed enough, with one caveat: I’m not sure if there was a follow-up to Nurdrasiil - I did find the chieftain trapped in the cage going from the northern entrance, but I’m unable to gain access to Nurdrasiil to resolve the fate of Sarazir. There might be a quest that I missed, but it seemed like it ended quite abruptly.
Bosses
I’m not going to comment on all bosses. The ones I’m not commenting on largely feels a bit on the “easy” side.
Asher
Asher does not have many mechanics, and relies a bit too much on swarm, but this was one of the best fights I’ve played through. It’s pretty balanced on Master, and his one-shot mechanic required me to switch up my strategy to incorporate Whirlwind Sprint, which I don’t often use, especially since I also use mods that cause stagger due to magic projectiles, which sometimes causes a stunlock into a OHKO. A lot of Skyrim players probably don’t enjoy one-shot mechanics, but as someone who raids a lot in MMOs I liked it, as it forces you to adjust how you play - a.k.a. strategizing.
Vosik
The trigger for the reflect/HP heal aura on Vosik does not seem to have a wind-up while he’s in air (I did notice that on ground he inconsistently gets a short 2s-ish white aura wind-up), meaning that a stray hit while he does not have the aura can end up healing him for tremendous amounts of HP. None of his mechanics are particularly hard, but this makes him a huge chore to fight. It also seems that he can get healed from some interaction with the dropping pillars, which makes the situation worse. I feel that if I pause all attacks on Vosik he should not be randomly getting healed, and I’m still not sure what exactly the trigger is, or if this is due to a mod incompatibility.
The Void Dragon feels like a pointless add. More Void Dragon adds might make the fight more interesting, while making the Void Dragons interact with the rest of the fight in some meaningful capacity other than just being there and dealing more damage to the player.
I did enjoy the fight while I was learning it over a few restarts on Master, but I just dropped to Novice the moment I figured out neither of us were getting anywhere nor in danger of ever being killed.
Dragonrest Golem
I liked the idea of this fight but the Storm Atronachs feel largely pointless as you can just ignore them and jump onto the pillars. The small jump puzzle is impossible with lower jump height and made this a required tcl for me.
Faed and Entroper
Their story was a nice touch. I understood immediately that their mechanic was to bring them both to prone at the same time, but this was a chore for me to play through because of their very high HP on Master, which makes balancing their HP an annoying affair. I do not recommend playing this on higher difficulties. Making them prone for longer might be a good solution to this.
Water Atronach
I just want to say how beautiful the boss arena is. However the boss is far, far too easy. I feel that the problem with Water Atronach is the same as a lot of the other gimmick bosses of the mod. You only need to do the gimmick (and dodge some pretty easy to dodge projectiles) to win the fight. I think the player should be required to juggle between attacking the boss/adds, dodging boss moves, and doing the gimmick.
Yrzunn Golem
This was an enjoyable fight with a very polished and nice looking model but one problem with bosses that aren’t technically NPCs is that the player does not know whether hitting it does anything. I think in the second phase of the fight, you are supposed to hit it, but I couldn’t tell whether I needed to.
Qolaasvul
I thought that this was a great introduction to the story’s design philosophy, with a boss with a single gimmick that was important to execute. It sets the tone for the rest of the bosses in the mod going forward.