At it's best, Daggerfall is a creative and bottomless feeling little RPG that holds up better than it has any right to and feels closer to a modern indie game than an archaic AAA. At it's worst, Daggerfall heartless, soulless slog of a game where the endless pit of vapid procedurally generated content wears down any sense of meaning to anything you do.

Despite being a theoretically enormous and endlessly vast game, you've seen everything Daggerfall has to offer in the first five minutes. Hand-crafted dungeons are few and far between and the procedurally generated ones are often nonsensical and an absolute slog to navigate with the game's difficult to read auto-map, the path to complete the main quest without failing it or missing a timer feels completely arcane and basically demands a strategy guide.

When I stick to the towns and live out my fantasy of being a fantasy handy-woman and jack-of-all-trades doing little errands, reading the semi-randomly generated dialogue and wandering village to village and slowly levelling up I can have tons of fun. The second I try to play the game 'as intended' and delve into the dungeons I have a miserable time.

Daggerfall is wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle. It's a very interesting old game but it doesn't live up to the reputation it has garnered in recent years as a long lost gem.

I will say having tried it after finishing the original DOS version that the fan-made Daggerfall Unity version of the game does significantly improve the experience, especially if you use the hidden INI settings to improve dungeon generation and reduce the size of the pointlessly large and often empty random dungeons, but given this is a fan modification of the game it's unfair to judge the game as it was released based on these improvements.