Skyrim – Beyond Reach: A Mod Review

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In this video I review the mod Beyond Reach for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The video features heavy spoilers for the story. If you are concerned with such things, please play the mod for yourself before watching.

This is the first real video essay I’ve made, and it was a learning experience for me. I very much enjoyed the process, and hopefully I will be able to make more essays & reviews in the future. If you enjoyed it, please let me know.

You can find Beyond Reach on the Nexus:
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/3008

Modpocalypse NPCs for Beyond Reach:
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/56797

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11 thoughts on “Skyrim – Beyond Reach: A Mod Review”

  1. I would also add that the second part of the storyline is really buggy. Granted i play with the Nolvus pack, i had to use console commands often to progress in the story.

    It's too bad the plot is incomprehensible, because they are some really good bits here and there.

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  3. I was mentally drained after playing through beyond reach. I recommend you play though it at least once, but i don't think most ppl can handle the mental drain of it more then once. It is a pretty awesome made mod in general but the grimdark will eat you and ptsd scar you.

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  5. This mod is insanely impressive from a technical standpoint, and it's obvious that a lot of work went into it. That being said, I had issues with it.
    Firstly, I hated the "you can't fight this thing, so you have to run" quests. If I'm the Dragonborn and have beaten Alduin, don't tell me that there's anything I have no chance of fighting.
    Second, the Oblivion realms were often so dark that I had a very hard time navigating them.
    Thirdly, some graphics mods in the game affected Skyrim itself. Many of Skyrim's children were wearing the child slave outfits when i went back, and the overland map had this "aurora borealis" effect overlaying it, which made it hard to see. Both of these things ended when I delete the Reach mod.
    Fourth, as you mentioned, the dialogue can be interminable. I could go out and get lunch in the time it took for some NPCs to finish talking.

    Although I knew that the mod was grimdark, I did feel it went some places that it didn't need to go, and was being dark for emo's sake, rather than truly being for the story arc. And there are some twists that I felt were not just out of left field, but just done for shock value. I also didn't care for the difficulty boost. If difficulty setting are part of the game, then it should be so across the board.

    The groups second region mod, Bruma, is a masterpiece. It doesn't have a lot of what I didn't care for in Reach, barring one railroading scene, and I've made a point to play through it in all my new Skyrim runs. It's less a cohesive single storyline, but I found it extremely enjoyable.

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  11. Nice review and very good criticism. You are right about the second act being somewhat rushed, the quests you see after The Last King fight were initially drafts that just got fused into the final project. Had an entire investigation quest planned where you have the option to accuse someone of the murders and then some more quests exploring Damian and the escaping serfs. There was just a lot of issues with returning voice actors (a lot of them went silent after they sent their first batch of lines), so I wasn't keen on changing out entire VA just for one unvoiced quest. I think many people's main criticism comes down to the main storyline, but I always wonder why a lot of people never engaged in the side content or just explored in general. It really does seem people just rush through the main quest without doing much else, if you're not that interested in playing a mod and only "getting it out the way", then you shouldn't play it. I do regret a lot of writing choices and that ending scene at the quarry is particuarly weird, fortunately it's still not voiced so I can rewrite a lot of it.

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