Do you know what the Numidium is? No? Read this.
Dac0da starts with a big-ass Dwemer colossus striding menacingly towards Solitude. …OK, more like, looming towards Solitude (also menacingly). A handful of new unnamed NPCs in Solitude react to its presence by running and cowering, which you learn to ignore after a while. In any case, the colossus won’t do anything before you decide to start the quest, so you can postpone the start for as long as you want.
Which, if you know is good for you, is at least until level 60-ish, because some of the bosses in the mod are hella tough and your followers won’t always be there to cheese you through these fights.
This review contains mild unmarked spoilers.
What is Dac0da?
Dac0da is a mod by Japanese author Vicn. From the mod page:
The destroyed Numidium suddenly appears off the coast of Solitude. The prisoner will work with the Psijic Order to help expel the Numidium from the timeline.
How you expel the Numidium is a fun romp (albeit tedious at times) through several biomes, swathes of enemies, and the kind of story that takes itself seriously just long enough to make sense.
The mod name seems to be a reference to C0DA, which is an interesting tidbit of Elder Scrolls meta-lore.
Rip, tear, repeat
Dac0da cycles through two types of stages: killing shit and solving shit. There are two “wings” in the worldspace outside the Numidium, and several stages inside the Numidium itself. Both wings consist of fighting waves of enemies and the occasional world boss, with a Big Bad at the end of each. I won’t spoil who the Big Bads are, but be prepared to see some familiar faces out there. Incidentally, this is also an excellent mod to farm combat skill points.
Things do get a little repetitive after a while, though. Enemies and biomes vary quite a bit — from humans to Falmer, sload, cultists and everything in between — but the gameplay is fairly linear otherwise.
On the upside, you get summon spells for most of the bosses and enemies you defeat, including some that are OP enough to carry you through the more challenging fights later on. A few too many, if I’m honest, but you don’t have to learn all the spells. You can just chuck them in a container somewhere.
Once you get inside the Numidium, thinks change a bit. Rather than slaughtering waves upon waves of enemies to advance, you now have to deal with two additional things: regular puzzles and, for whatever reason, jump puzzles.
Jump-starting the Numidium
Your job then becomes to get to the Numidium’s control center, which involves fighting and climbing your way through various body parts.
Your faithful companion throughout all this is Rolls-on-Road, a dry-witted Argonian and member of the Psijic Order who gives you hints on how to progress and grudgingly puts up with you otherwise. Road’s dialogue is hilarious, if a little stilted in places, which makes sense considering the mod was originally written in Japanese. No shade on the translators or anything; it’s just a thing that happens when translating between two languages that are so different.
Let’s change gears for a sec. I’m scratching my head here, wondering why Vicn, the mod creator, thought jump puzzles were a good idea. The puzzles themselves are remarkably designed, don’t get me wrong. But given Skyrim’s janky controls, jumping around is only fun as long as it works, and by the third time I faceplanted in lava I was kinda done with the whole thing. No spoilers, but the last jumping sequence took me days. There’s jank, and then there’s whatever that was. (No, I didn’t tcl my way through it. I have standards.)
Wait! I know you…
The story is fun as long as you don’t take it too seriously. Some beats are darker than others, but the overall tone is light and somewhat irreverent at times. It helps to think of the whole thing as a fever dream that brings together Skyrim’s past, present and future (if you squint). You’ll see some familiar faces, as well as some cool but definitely not canon additions, like a set of Jedi and Sith-inspired armaments that’ll make you feel like you’re in a different universe altogether.
One other thing that hurts immersion a little is the lack of voiced dialogue. I think I saw some AI voice packs for it on Nexus a while ago, but I’m not about to recommend Elevenlabs to anyone, so I won’t go digging.
TL;DR
Quests: 👍
Gameplay: 👍👍
Rewards: 👍👍
Music: –
Voice acting: –
Story: –
* 👍👍👍 = amazing, 👎👎👎 = terrible
So, should you play Dac0da?
Yes. It’s fun.
