Mod review: The Wheels of Lull – Unwound Edition

I’ve finally finished running The Wheels of Lull – Unwound Edition in my Nona playthrough, with Tuxborn 0.5.2. So here’s a review post about that. I’ll be avoiding spoilers as much as possible.

Picoreview: Mostly liked it! But it also had some bits that drove me absolutely spare. So consider this tentatively a positive review, but with huge caveats for any players who aren’t good at platformer-type mechanics.

Details behind the fold.

What I liked

Tying in with the lore of Clockwork City

As I’ve written about on this blog before, I’m very partial to the lore of the Tribunal in Morrowind and ESO, and to Clockwork City in particular. So since Wheels of Lull explicitly follows up on the lore of Clockwork City, that was one of the big attractors to me for wanting to play it.

By and large, I feel it did a strong job with that.

Characters

All of the various fabricant NPCs are fun, quirky, and well-performed.

The main antagonist is also quite well-performed, and very much in the vein of “mad scientist”.

Unique gear with unique abilities

There are multiple unique weapons and pieces of armor that you need to use as part of carrying out this plot. Getting the hang of using these items was one of the most enjoyable bits of the mod for me. Particularly the shield, since I’m not normally a sword-and-board player. It was very satisfying to use that shield’s mechanics in battle, once I finally had it.

Visual design

The mod’s various areas looked great. In Tuxborn 0.5.2 I found a bunch of the areas darker than I liked, but that’s not Wheels of Lull’s fault. Tuxborn’s lighting tends to skew darker than Skyrim normal, and the 0.5.2 build in particular had issues with that. So it’ll be interesting to see what Wheels of Lull looks like in later Tuxborn builds.

Reliance on stealth as a tactic

One of this mod’s main selling points is how it encourages the player to rely more on sneaking and puzzle solving than outright combat. And I do loves me some stealth. The bits of Wheels of Lull where I explicitly needed to sneak were honestly the bits I liked best!

It did mean though that I had to dismiss my followers at those points. Because Tuxborn allows for running a sizable squad, if you want. And I’m here to tell you: five followers is five too many followers to bring into the stealth-based parts of Wheels of Lull.

Very strong compatibility with Legacy of the Dragonborn

Since I ran this mod as part of the Tuxborn modpack, we also have LOTD as a major feature of our list, and all necessary patches to make it play nicely with other content mods we include. In the case of Wheels of Lull, this worked splendidly. So if you’re running a well-curated modpack like Tuxborn or anything else that includes both Wheels of Lull and LOTD, if you have all relevant patches, then you’ll find this’ll get you a lot of tasty things to put into your museum in Solitude.

Thirty-six different items, in fact. Which was pretty awesome. Nice work, patch authors!

So any Tuxborn players who read this review, or any other players running a modpack or personal load order that includes LOTD, the simple fact that you get three dozen things to add to your museum is a very strong inducement to run Wheels.

A certain question was not answered and I do like that

The NPC you meet that launches this quest is more than he appears, that’s all I’ll say about that. And there are hints in dialogue at the end of the mod about who he might actually be. I have theories about that, which I will not expound upon here, because spoilers. But I liked how the final dialogue about that was written!

What I’m ambivalent about

The NPC that starts this quest force-greets you

I’ve complained about this kind of thing before with content in Tuxborn, where a mod starts by going out of its way to make you interact with a character, and launches its questline on you whether you like it or not.

As I’ve said before, this is a hard problem to solve. I still think it’s absolutely reasonable for all mod creators to assume that if you installed their mod in the first place, you do actually intend to play it. But in a curated modpack, where the content is not up to the individual player, there’s no guarantee that all players are going to want to play the same things.

So I do still wish that more mods took this into account. I don’t fault Wheels of Lull for doing this, and it’s not a thing I expect the creator to fix. But since I did run this mod as part of Tuxborn, still, it was a bit of a jolt in terms of player experience.

Projectile weapons in the mod

The projectile weapons available in this mod are guns, not bows or crossbows. The term used for them is harquebus, which I learned is a type of gun that actually existed in IRL, a precursor to the musket. And I’m ambivalent about this, even though the harquebuses are admittedly pretty cool. They even come in six varieties, all of which are displayable in the LOTD museum.

First reason I’m ambivalent about them, though, is that I’m not entirely comfortable with the notion of firearms in Skyrim at all. It feels tonally off to me, in a game where the dominant culture just does not have firearms yet, period. The fanciest Tamriel gets with projectile weapons is crossbows, sometimes with exploding crossbow bolts. Guns don’t appear in the lore, as far as I know. Nor do I remember seeing any gun-like weapons in Clockwork City, the couple of times I’ve played through that zone in ESO.

And the second reason is, aside from my comfort level about whether guns should appear in a Skyrim context, I have the same objection here that I do to any other fancy technology showing up in the Dragonborn’s possession. Specifically, that if the Dragonborn is suddenly going around with a harqebus, or any other gun-type weapon that can demonstrate itself to be superior to bows and crossbows in terms of the amount of damage it can do, both General Tullius and Ulfric Stormcloak should be dead set on getting their mitts on that technology the instant they find out about it. And of course, the game isn’t set up for that, so that can’t actually happen.

But it does make for narrative dissonance in my head. And as y’all know, since I’m a writer, narrative cohesion is important to me!

Now mind you, I feel like the level of tech we see in Skyrim does allow for the culture being on the cusp of developing firearms, maybe. If TES6 advances the timeline of Tamriel, perhaps even into the Fifth Era, I think it’d be reasonable to finally have one or more of the Tamrielic cultures start having them. You can even assume that this arises from assorted adventures and scholars finally getting enough understanding of prior Dwemer tech to either recreate firearms the Dwemer once had, or figure out how to build on prior Dwemer tech to invent new weapons.

Hell, I could even see the Dragonborn’s adventures contributing to that.

But the world as presented to us in Skyrim isn’t quite there yet.

Still, though, if you like the idea of guns in your Skyrim, this may be a selling point for you! I can say as of this writing that I’ve played with the Targetian Harqebus a bit in live combat, and it is very effective.

Motivations of the primary antagonist

I initially found the primary antagonist entertainingly over the top. As the mod’s main quest proceeded, though, I found his motivations and goals ultimately disappointing, narratively speaking. He was an entertaining villain, but not terribly interesting or nuanced.

Reveal for why exactly you have to save the world

At the height of the quest line, you’ll get a critical reveal for why, exactly, you need to work to stop the main bad guy. I can’t go into in-depth detail on this because spoilers. I’ll simply say that it involves introducing another NPC who has zero direct bearing on the plot, and you’re told “this person has to live because if they die now, the world will be destroyed later”.

Which didn’t work entirely for me, because by that point, I’d already gotten the stakes of “the main bad guy wants to destroy the world”. I didn’t feel like these two things jibed well together. Because if you fail to save the world now, whether or not the world is destroyed later is pretty much moot.

Both stages of boss fight were very old-school video-game-style

By the time I made it to the last boss fight in the mod, it had become clear to me that the final third or so of Wheels of Lull was paying homage to platformer-style games. This included not only the platformer mechanics, but also the presentation of the minions you had to take out on your way to the boss, the various traps you had to make it past, the various scramblings to get keys to unlock things, the taunt lines thrown off by the main bad guy, and even the background music.

And for me at least, I found this a bit jarring in tone compared to the Skyrim base game, as well as the rest of the mods in the Tuxborn modpack. I could see what Wheels of Lull was doing there, and it was well done. But for me as a player, personally, it didn’t quite work.

If you have a history with platformer-style games, especially old-school ones, this may work a lot better for you.

What I didn’t like

Platformer mechanics in later stages of the mod’s main quest

About halfway through the mod’s main quest, you start having to enter dungeons where the actions required of you to finish them are pretty much masterclasses in How to Design a Level to Piss Anna Off.

By which I mean: levels designed in such a way that you are required to do a lot of jumping, careful traversal of very narrow bridges, and evasion of regularly occurring obstacles, all while running the risk of falling to your death if you take one wrong step.

I described these mechanics to my wife, who went “Oh, that’s a platformer“. A term I hadn’t previously known, because I did not grow up playing that type of game, basically. I’ve seen several examples in my time, of course, I just didn’t know what they were called.

And since I do not have a track record of playing those types of games, boy howdy, am I not good at those mechanics. So several parts of Wheels of Lull were an exercise in fury and frustration for me. Not being good at those mechanics meant that I died dozens of times just trying to get through those levels. This is not an experience that makes me a happy player.

Eventually I got frustrated enough with failing at the mechanics over and over and over again that I finally resorted to using the tcl command in the console, just so I could finish the damn dungeon. Which also doesn’t really make me a happy player. I try not to use the console unless I absolutely have to, such as to unstick a quest that has a breaking bug.

Ultimately, if I’m going to run this mod again (and I will, because it’s part of Tuxborn and I have two other Tuxborn playthroughs in progress, so I’ll need to run it at least twice more just to get the museum artifacts), the onus is on me to get better at the mechanics in question.

Again, this is not a thing that Wheels of Lull should fix. I’m only flagging this as a thing I found personally very frustrating as a player. And I’m sharing it to warn other players who may also not be experienced with platformer mechanics that this is a thing you should expect out of playing this mod.

Final third of the quest line is very repetitive

This ties in with my previous section re: platformer mechanics. A lot of the latter third or so of the mod expects you to run back and forth through various areas, just so you can acquire various keys. I found this immensely frustrating, because see previous commentary re: my not being good at platformer mechanics. I was already struggling to make it through these various areas. But to then discover I had to do the exact same area again, just so I could get another key, added even more frustration.

“Oh thank Divines I’m done with this part oh shit WHAT DO YOU MEAN I HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN, AUGH!”

Yeah, no. That was what drove me to start invoking the console.

Also, a long stretch of your route to the final boss fight involved fighting the main bad guy’s minions. He has only three types of minions, so encountering a few dozen of these guys, over and over, added to the overall repetitiveness.

Had to rely too much on walkthroughs

I’ve written before about differences of philosophy in how various mods handle quest markers. Several mods I’ve played at this point are very much fans of encouraging the player to figure out on their own what they have to do next, and Wheels of Lull appears to be of that school.

And I’ve written before about what my main problem with this is: i.e., that I have a limited amount of patience for how long I’m willing to explore around a mod in search of how to solve an objective. In the case of Wheels of Lull, since I was not good at the platformer mechanics it expected me to follow, I got heavily caught up in the frustration of just trying to make it through those parts of the quest line. Enough that my already limited patience for random exploring was whittled down even further, to the point of my invoking the console to move myself to where I needed to be.

As part of this, I wound up having to start following walkthroughs provided on the TES Mods wiki for this mod. (Which, I found out later, are the same walkthroughs provided on the Trainwiz wiki, since Trainwiz is the creator of the mod to begin with.) I also had to find a couple of YouTube videos for some of the trickier parts, because I could not figure out for the life of me how to get to certain places I needed to go.

The walkthroughs and videos did help. But I wish I hadn’t had to consult them. I’m in Skyrim for the story and immersion. And if a mod makes me work too hard to figure out how to solve a problem, to the point that I need to pause the game and go look stuff up, that breaks me out of the immersion.

This is, I grant, a me problem. Again, not something I expect Wheels of Lull to have to fix. If you’re a player who is good at platformer mechanics, and you’re good with a lot of random wandering through various mod areas, you won’t have this problem. But if you’re closer to me in terms of preference, just be aware of this.

Second stage on final boss fight

Once you take out the main bad guy, that is not actually the final stage of the fight. Because you then have to take out a big nasty thing he created–and that didn’t work for me. It was a very late reveal of SURPRISE! THE BAD GUY MADE A BIG SCARY THING YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT AT ALL UP UNTIL NOW!

And I feel like that kind of robbed the fight with the actual bad guy of its narrative weight.

All in all

My experience running this mod was very much a mixed bag, and I’ve spent somewhat more words here about the stuff I’m ambivalent about (or outright did not like) than I did on the stuff I actively enjoyed. But just for the record, let me say that despite this, I did ultimately enjoy running this mod.

I’m not sure yet if I’d want to run it in a load order I put together myself. But as noted above, I will definitely run it again in Tuxborn, just because I do have two other Tuxborn playthroughs in progress. And I’m enough of a completist that I absolutely want those thirty-six items for my LOTD museum in those playthroughs. 😉

Tuxborn players in particular may wish to have a look at the Frequently Asked Questions: Wheels of Lull page I’ve put up on the Tuxborn wiki, which includes recommendations on how to handle playing it in our specific load order. Everybody else, my recommendations for the Tuxborn player base may also apply to you if you’re running some of the same mods in your load order, including Legacy of the Dragonborn, Adamant, Apocalypse, and Mysticism.

Overall, I absolutely think this mod is worth running at least once. And I’m fairly sure that now that I know what to expect of the platform-y parts, I should get better at those with practice. Players like me who are not experienced with platformer games, though, just be aware that those parts may be hard going for you, and you’ll want to give yourself some grace going through those parts.