Mod review: Carved Brink (with spoilers)

Now that my Tuxborn playthrough is underway, I’ve started hitting some of the mods that that modlist contains. And even though I’m fairly early on in the playthrough, I’ve now completed the run through Carved Brink. So here’s a review post about that.

Picoreview: Very, very mixed bag. This mod’s by the same creators that did Project AHO, and it suffers from some of the same objections I had to that mod: gorgeous visuals and good loot, but wow, the story fell down hard.

Details behind the fold. And this post does contain spoilers, so be mindful of that. If you don’t want spoilers, just go by the above picoreview, and come back later to read this after you play it yourself.

The core concept

Carved Brink introduces the player to a pocket realm of Oblivion where an Altmer adventurer has relocated a couple of tribes of goblins. When you venture into this realm, aided by a whimsical talking shell called Imp, you encounter a mysterious Stranger from whom you learn of some troubling history involving the Snow Elves–and who tasks you to make certain judgment calls that impact the goblins that inhabit the place. Choose wisely!

Stuff I liked

Visuals

One of the biggest things I liked about Project AHO was its visual design, and Carved Brink is likewise visually stunning. The Abandoned Grotto that contains Sinmiaran’s home is lovely. And the Faceted Stones plane of Oblivion is hands-down great, at least from a visual standpoint. (More on this below.)

Music

The music was also very nicely done.

Travel mechanic

It took me a bit to get the hang of it, but once I did, I liked the mechanic of needing to cast the True Path spell to get from place to place in Faceted Stones.

The goblins

Visiting the goblins was generally fun, and I did quite like the idea of having to acquire a Memory Stone to be able to actually understand their language. Having magical aid to communicate with a tribe of goblins whose language you do not speak seemed reasonable for the overall Elder Scrolls setting.

And once I could actually understand them, it was entertaining to hear the random lines they spouted off as they went about their daily goblin business. That did a nice job of making the little villages come across as just as lively as any town of men or mer in Tamriel.

Stuff I’m ambivalent about

Imp

There were aspects of Imp that I liked, such as how easygoing he was. And it was rather fun to have him riding around on my shoulder.

But his vaguely Jamaican-like accent really, really didn’t work for me. Just on the grounds that he sounded like absolutely nothing else in Skyrim, and there was no narrative reason whatsoever given for this.

And Imp was one of the sources of the mod deliberately going out of its way to not make any particular narrative sense. For example, he blew off the entire question of why he managed to spawn legs at the end. And that whole theme of the mod had gotten really old for me already even before that happened.

At this point of my playthrough, Imp is supposed to be available to me as a follower. I will not be picking him up again.

Altmer Adventurer armor set

I mostly liked the design of the Altmer Adventurer gear you find lying around in Sinmiaran’s house. Overall, it looks really sleek and stylish.

But I wish it had included a helmet of some kind. This kept me from using the set myself; I handed it off to a follower instead. (Lucien, as it happened. And the armor set looked quite good on him.)

And I was a trifle baffled as to the design of the gloves–which left some of the fingers on each hand uncovered. The third and fourth fingers, specifically. I admit that was odd enough to be a little interesting, but I couldn’t come up with a rationale for it. Gloves that leave all your fingertips exposed generally are intended to let you maintain manual dexterity while at least giving you a little protection on the hands.

But this was fully covering some fingers while leaving the others fully exposed, and this made no sense to me. The only explanation I could hand-wave for this is if Sinmiaran had some sort of magical reason to keep the outer two fingers exposed, but that’s flimsy at best. Because the dude was a mage! If he needed to maintain magical access to something while wearing those gloves, why not just enchant them to let them connect to whatever magical thing he needed to handle?

So even though I was mostly pleased with the design, the gloves in particular looked weird on Lucien. From a distance, it made him look like he had only two fingers on each hand.

Statuettes that bump random skills for no apparent reason

I realize this is category “the mod is giving you free skill bumps, woman, WTF are you bitching about”… but still. Carved Brink had a thing going on that I also saw in Project AHO, i.e., statuettes that gave me a bump to a random skill every time I picked them up. In Carved Brink’s case, it only updated one random skill, whereas in AHO, the statuettes bumped every single one. So Carved Brink was slightly less OP about it.

Don’t get me wrong: I did appreciate the skill bumps!

But it would have been nice to have had some reason why those statuettes increased your skills. Even if that reason was just some random journal lying around saying something like, oh, I dunno, Sinmiaran experimenting with knowledge-enhancing enchantments and making pretty statuettes to put test enchantments on. But maybe bailing on the idea because he couldn’t get the enchantment to focus on areas of knowledge he was interested in! And the enchantment being unstable and only working once.

Coming up with a headcanon for this wasn’t hard. And I just wish the mod had done something like this, some little worldbuilding detail to give those statuettes some context.

Some of the goblin side plots

I liked most of the goblin side plots. But not the one that required me to port onto a ship and steal stuff for the goblins. I’d have had less of a problem with that in a character I explicitly intend to play as a thief, and that’s still up in the air for this playthrough. At the time, though, I was not trying to be a thief. So it felt weird to steal anything at all. Especially with my followers hanging around witnessing my every action.

I also side-eyed the plot involving the black-skinned goblins wanting to go off and form their own tribe, for two reasons.

One: the black-skinned goblins were apparently victims of the same plague that had wiped out the Snow Elves in Faceted Stones, but that was not at all consistent with the symptoms the Snow Elves had shown. This plague basically turned a bunch of the goblins black-skinned, and, well… what? I do at least cut this a bit of slack though on the grounds that goblins and elves are different species, so it’s not unreasonable from a biological perspective to have the same disease impact them differently. But for story purposes, it does feel like a stretch.

And two: while I was down with the idea that the black-skinned goblins wanted to go off and found themselves a new tribe, the mod wanted me to find them a space to live in at Red Mountain. The same Red Mountain that blew up 200 years prior to the timeframe of Skyrim and pretty much rendered Vvardenfell uninhabitable.

So why the hell would it be habitable to goblins?

Stuff I didn’t like

The overall story was a mess

When I reviewed Project AHO, I noted at the time that I found that mod’s storyline its weakest aspect–but I could see the bones of a good story there, and I was sad about the story I got instead.

I’m afraid Carved Brink does not even match that standard. The various pieces of this story did not mesh well together:

The three Khajiit you encounter at the start of the plot, and the idea of their being agents smuggling poisoned moon sugar for the Thalmor
Sinmiaran finding Faceted Stones and moving the goblins into it
The background of some Snow Elves making it into Faceted Stones, only to be wiped out by a plague
That same plague impacting the goblins
The plague-infected goblins not showing the same impact from the plague as the Snow Elves did
The motivations of the Stranger, and the resolution of the fight with him
The Imp wanting to find Geleada, why he mysteriously buggers off during one point of the plot, and why he suddenly grows legs at the end and leaves your shoulder

And look. I’m a writer, so I’m well aware I’m coming into this naturally more persnickety about this than the average player. I also totally get that writing a coherent story is an entirely different skillset than creating a mod for a game.

But I do want at least some minimum level of narrative cohesion in a mod’s story, if your mod is supposed to have a story at all, as opposed to being just an exploration mod, or a player house, or a set of cool armor, or whatever. And I don’t feel like I got narrative cohesion it with this one. People who are less picky about plot than me, your mileage may of course vary.

Too much giving the player shit for asking questions

Related to previous, I also feel like the mod was going out of its way to make fun of the player for asking questions that might contribute to, y’know, narrative cohesion.

The Imp, the Stranger, and Geleada all had dialogue along those lines, and it got old really fast. In Geleada’s case in particular, she even outright says to the player that she’s just “ribbiting nonsense” to avoid answering questions. You’re basically mocked for the core actions you need to take to find out what’s going on in Skyrim in general, or any game like it: i.e., asking questions of NPCs, reading journals, etc., so that you can actually learn what the hell is going on around you and respond accordingly.

For me, this basically came across as “we couldn’t be bothered to string together a coherent story for this mod, so let’s have all the characters mock the very concept of giving you a coherent story at all”.

And this in conjunction with the overall lack of narrative cohesion was just not fun for me to play. It made me not like any of the NPCs (with the possible exception of some of the goblins), and made me much less interested in helping any of them.

Geleada

One more thing I want to say about Geleada: she leaned way too hard into breaking the fourth wall, and being all clever about how she was aware that every other player that ever plays this mod would eventually come talk to her, and eventually go kill the Stranger.

And at the end of your conversation with her, you get… a bunch of gems? Really? That’s it?

Memo to Imp: I am not a fella

I really, really didn’t like how Imp periodically called me “fella”. I was not playing a male character. And “fella” is not gender-neutral.

Mod creators, I’m begging you: please stop assuming that the Dragonborn playing through your mod is a dude. Project AHO also did this, and it pissed me off there, too.

Inconsistent pronunciation of character names

Every time the Altmer character Sinmiaran got mentioned in dialogue, it seemed a gamble as to how his name would be pronounced. I kept hearing “Sin-merry-en” instead of what I was expecting, “Sin-me-are-en”. Once or twice I did actually hear it pronounced “Sin-me-are-en”, but that was rare.

Likewise, the Daedric Prince Peryite got mentioned a couple of times by the Stranger, and that pronunciation was also inconsistent. It’s maddening enough to have different characters pronouncing something different ways, but to have the same character do it at different points in their own dialogue was even more so.

Actual names from the lore, like Peryite, should absolutely have consistent pronunciations. And Peryite is mentioned in Skyrim’s core content, if you run the quest The Only Cure. There’s no reason not to adhere to the pronunciation Skyrim itself uses.

And if you’re going to put an original character into your mod, please don’t spell the character’s name a certain way and then have your other NPCs be random about how it’s actually pronounced. Pick a pronunciation and stay with it. And make sure your subtitles, and any objects in the mod like journals or notes which might mention the character’s name in text, agree with that pronounciation!

Which brings me to…

Typos all over the subtitles

I play with subtitles on, and could not help but notice typos all over the dialogue. This didn’t actually break anything, but it was incredibly distracting to read. As a writer and someone who cares about strong command of the English language, each and every one of those typos was a little jab in the arm going “Hey, does this bug you? Hey, does this bug you? Hey, does this bug you?”

Yes. Yes, it bugs me.

The final fight with the Stranger

Overall, I really didn’t buy the whole plotline with the Stranger–which started as the guy seeming to want to just throw some philosophical debate questions at me, but escalated quickly to his getting pissed off that I refused to make decisions on some of these questions.

In particular, he didn’t like that I proclaimed the goblins would get to decide their own destiny. He seemed mortally offended that I refused to “take responsibility”. And, well, WTF? If he’s so hung up on somebody taking responsibility for the fate of the goblins, why the fuck doesn’t he do so himself? Why does he feel it necessary to browbeat a visitor to his realm into doing so?

Did he have this same fight with Sinmiaran? Did he kill Sinmiaran? I have no idea, because the mod didn’t go into that at all. And I really wish it would have done so.

Also, having very little practical result to killing the Stranger was unsatisfying. I didn’t get much loot off of that–and the only real practical result was that another dremora entirely showed up and basically booted me out of the Stranger’s palace, so he and other servants of Peryite could lock it up for investigation.

Which meant I was still in the mod’s play space, and had to figure out how the hell to get back to Skyrim.

And that leads me to…

The difficulty in getting back to Skyrim

After killing the Stranger, I was pretty much done with the plot and ready to return to the main Skyrim world.

However, I’d seen by looking up info about this mod that I had two options for this:

Going all the way back through Faceted Stones to get back to the portal I’d come through to begin with, or
Going through a maze to try to find a particular staff I could zap a few times, and which would land me at a random location back in Skyrim

I initially tried option 1. But by this point in the session, I’d gotten tired, and could not remember the correct sequence of hops to get back to the right area in Faceted Stones to get home.

So then I went for option 2. And I had a couple of major problems with that.

The first of these is that the staff is at the end of a maze that has absolutely no connection whatsoever to the rest of the plot. And it’s super-easy to completely miss that the maze is a place you can go to anyway. I only knew about it because I looked up info about the mod on the Internet.

It’s not clear to me if the mod expects you to find the staff to get home, or to slog all the way back to the original portal. Either way, it’s annoying, because it adds a lot of extra slog time for no good narrative reason. If you’ve killed the boss and just want to get back to main Skyrim, dammit, mod, don’t make that difficult. Give me a shortcut portal to get back to Sinmiaran’s house, at the very least. Or a spell I can use to open such a portal. Don’t make me hunt all over the mod’s play space trying to solve the problem of how to get home.

And two: the damn maze drove me absolutely spare. It was super dark on its own, and was filled with random floating, chiming clouds of darkness that were a hard drain on your health and could kill you in seconds unless you successfully evaded them.

I was not good at evading them. And I’m also not all that good with mazes anyway. So I frequently lost track of where the hell I was, just because I had to abruptly change directions to avoid the Chiming Black Fog of Death.

Finally I had to go fuck this noise and look up spoilers on how the hell to get through the maze, just so I could get the staff and get the hell out.

This is the video I used. Putting it behind a Details block, because major spoiler:

Video for how to get through the maze at the end of Carved Brink…

And I transcribed as best I could how to get through the maze based on that vid. These are the steps I followed. Providing these, too, for any players who dislike having to watch a video to solve a game problem and just want a textual explanation:

Steps to follow to get through the maze, based on the aforementioned video…

Down the stairs
East
Immediately south
Turn around a slight bend to the west but keep aiming south
Aim back around to the east very slightly
Then veer south again
Head towards a lantern to the southwest
Then veer south again towards another lantern on the left
Once you get to that lantern then veer west
Keep heading west past three lanterns, third is just to the north
Veer to the south should see two lanterns
Looking up should show a gap in the roof
Go south until you can’t south anymore then go west
West to a lantern then south
Get to another lantern then east
Very briefly east then turn south again two more lanerns in front of you
Turn east at the second lantern
Then turn south again to another lantern
Pass that one then turn west
Head south from that lantern, there is a wall split
Take the lantern on the left
That sends you east again
Veer north briefly then east
Then south towards another lantern
Keep southish, you should soon get to the final area

All in all

I liked the visuals, I mostly liked the mechanic of using the True Path spell to get around through Faceted Stones, and I mostly liked the Altmer Adventurer gear. And interacting with the goblins was mostly fun too.

But I didn’t like Imp much, or Geleada, or the Stranger. And the plot, already weak, was not helped in the slightest by the mod going out of its way to be disdainful to the very idea of narrative coherence.

It was not satisfying to have a mod mistake me again for a male character.

Last but not least, fuck that maze full of chiming clouds of insta-death.

I don’t think it was a waste of my playing time. But this is not a mod I’ll want to play again, and I cannot recommend it for any players for whom narrative cohesion is an important part of the gaming experience. For players for whom this is less of a priority, or players who have more patience than I do for exploring every last little nook and cranny of a mod’s play area, you may find Carved Brink a more enjoyable experience.