It’s a dungeon – or series of them – that is vastly different to the ones we’d previously encountered, with stone walkways, steep stone steps, an iconic glowing tree in the middle of one of its cylindrical chambers, huge steel doors and vampires blocking your progress. Here, anything went and that included fighting Skeevers and watching a dead vampire get resurrected by a nearby powerful mage. It’s such a diverse game world, filled with many iconic moments and situations, and this just goes to prove that… and this was just in one hour!

After reaching the other side, our demo was coming to a close and where better to end it than under the orange moon of Skyrim on a clear night dominated by the powerful stars that left such an impact on the opening moments of Oblivion. So many years on, they’re still as enigmatic as ever and seeing them twinkle in the night sky with the crickets chirping certainly made up for the initial wow moment that Skyrim’s opening lacked – like you had when you reached the plains of Cyrodiil in Oblivion or when you broke free of the Vault in Fallout 3. Incidentally though, it took us an hour and 20 minutes to get about a tenth of the way to Solitude and Markarth which sit at the far north of the map, so get ready to lose hours upon hours this November.

For me personally though, Skyrim oozes the same draw that Oblivion did all those years ago, and that’s the compulsion just to explore the heck out of it. With no real purpose we darted from point-of-interest to point-of-interest and before we knew it, our hour was up – in fact, we went over by a good 20 minutes, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone! It’s very rare that you can immerse yourself in a game and saunter around with no real purpose, but like Oblivion, Skyrim does just that… and it does it in style.
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1. Explore Embershard Mine

On the winding path that leads from the Mystical Cave of Character Selection to the peaceful town of Riverwood, comes your first and earliest opportunity to step off the path and have a little explore. Off to the right is Embershard Mine, one of the hundreds* of dungeons scattered across Skyrim. For a basic, common-or-garden dungeon, it seems pretty nicely designed, with a lever-operated bridge, the corpse of a man who kept a really wordy diary, a chest containing a random enchanted weapon, and a number of easily subdued bandits. The dungeon's said to be easy, which should be a relief - my enduring memory of Morrowind is getting my arse lopped off and handed to me by a skeleton, in the very first cave I wandered into.

*There are at least 150 dungeons, Bethesda's Pete Hines has revealed. He hasn't given the actual number, but seems to imply that if we knew it, we would weep with gratitude.
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