Skyrim SE/AE mod review: Project AHO

I haven’t been serious about blogging in about thirt… no, fourteen years, give or take. Sure, I had the odd tentative here and there — a Hugo site in 2021, a New Year’s Resolution in 2023 that lasted about three weeks, as these things usually do — but I thought the days of chucking my thoughts over the metaphorical fence of the Internet and expecting anything other than manure to be flung back were long behind me.

And then, I played Project AHO: a Skyrim mod that… well, it does a lot of things well and a couple of things not so well. By which I mean terribly bad. Terribad. Bad enough to make me start a whole-ass blog just to talk about how pissed off I felt after I finished it.

Now, this warrants a disclaimer: I know mod authors spend years on these things and share them with the community for free (except when they get donations up the wazoo *cough*Kaidan*cough*). Given the time and effort it takes to make a quest mod this large, I have to give props where props are due: the fact that this mod happened at all is, hand on my heart, truly impressive.

Doesn’t excuse the writing, though.

What is Project AHO?

Project AHO (or Aetherial Hyperspace Observatory) is a mid-size quest mod for the ubiquitous video game Skyrim, a.k.a. Bethesda’s second-most-profitable cash cow. It was created by modding duo Haem Projects and released in 2019, which… let’s pretend that was, like, three years ago. Deal?

As of July 2025, Project AHO can (still) be downloaded for free from Nexus Mods, though with the latter being bought out by an alleged vulture venture capital group, there’s no telling how long that’s going to last.

From the mod’s Nexus description, Project AHO is…

…a large quest modification, in size, comparable to a medium sized DLC. In this expansion, you will get acquainted with the history and inhabitants of Sadrith Kegran – a hidden settlement of Great House Telvanni, built on the ruins of a great Dwarven city. Uncover the secrets of the most grand Dwemeri invention – Aetherium Hyperspace Observatory.

Now, setting aside the fact that hyperspace isn’t the kind of notion I’d typically associate with the Elder Scrolls universe, whether we’re dealing with the Dwemer or not, the word aho — or アホ (don’t make me dig up the kanji for it) — has the deeply unfortunate meaning of “moron” or “idiot” in Japanese. As a Japanese speaker, I can’t fault the devs for that one, but it does break immersion, just a little.

I went in completely blind, so if you want to do the same, stop reading now; the rest of the review contains unmarked spoilers for the entire story, right up to the ending. If you want my spoiler-free take on whether you should play this or not, skip to the TL;DR at the very bottom.

12 Days a Slave, give or take a few

You’re happily trotting along to Mixwater Mill — maybe you’re doing one of Vilja’s endless fetching quests — when an orc fella with no indoor voice ambushes you just outside the town. Next thing you know, you wake up underground in Sadrith Kegran, and you’re being sold off at a Dunmeri slave auction.

Now, slavery was pretty horrible IRL, and Elder Scrolls lore doesn’t shy away from making it equally clear that slaves have it awful in that universe, too (much to the chagrin of the usual suspects). This particular depiction of Dunmeri slavery doesn’t disappoint: when nobody wants to bid for an Argonian, a slaver promptly slits his throat. This is by far the darkest thing that happens in this mod, and it would be a pretty good way to establish just how brutal these slavers really are, except there’s no follow-through. Next thing you know, you’re Master Shanath Selthri’s slave, and you’re off on Project AHO’s first of many fetch quests.

Many of the NPCs you interact with watched the poor Argonian get butchered at the slave auction and didn’t even flinch, which makes it hard to see how a slave–especially a newly minted one, and especially the friggin’ Dragonborn–would have any interest whatsoever in helping them solve their own problems. Gameplay-wise, it makes sense; can’t have a quest hub without quests, after all.

Setting that aside for now, the side quests themselves range from fun to tedious, which is par for the course for Skyrim. Some of the rewards, like the Dwarven Jumper and the Aetherium Telvanni Bow, are worth the grind. And, of course, there’s the Aetherial Hyperspace Observatory itself, which we’ll get back to in a bit.

Once you get past the initial batch of quests and earn your freedom, you’ll sit down for a chat with the ruling council of Sadrith Kegran. This is your one and only chance to confront anyone in the city about their kidnapping, slave-trading ways. To which Marisa Verendas, one of the two Head Consuls, will cheerfully inform you that slavery is a part of Dunmer culture, so everything is a-OK. (Interestingly, House Telvanni was canonically wiped out by an Argonian slave uprising at the beginning of the fourth era, a couple hundred years before Skyrim takes place. A reclusive settlement founded by traditionalist Telvanni wizards does make sense in that context.)

As an aside, the Dragonborn is (allegedly) the only slave in Sadrith Kegran who doesn’t have their tongue cut off because Shanath Seltri needs them to run around on various errands that involve talking to people. None of the other slaves can be spoken with, presumably because they weren’t so lucky. There’s no way to free them, either. If you pick a “bad” ending, they die along with everyone else when the city gets obliterated, and in the “good” ending they stay enslaved, with no option to call anybody out on it.

This is one of the weakest points of the Project AHO story, which was otherwise interesting enough to keep me playing past the first act. Let’s talk about the rest of it.

Sadrith Kegran is gorgeous, and Bkhalzarf is fun

There are two new zones added by Project AHO: Sadrith Kegran and Bkhalzarf (which, in the true tradition of Dwarven names, is unpronounceable).

Sadrith Kegran is a mid-sized underground cell with the kind of glowing, exotic flora and fauna that wouldn’t look out of place in pre-Red Year Vvardenfell. The soundtrack, too, includes a nod to the Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind expansion; if you listen carefully, you’ll catch the Telvanni Tower track playing in the outdoor area around Tel And. It’s clear that a lot of care and attention went into designing the settlement. Even the potions you find lying around have their own models, which definitely look better than the vanilla ones.

Bkhalzarf, meanwhile, is the Dwarven settlement that Sadrith Kegran was founded on top of, and it is massive. As far as dungeons go, it’s fun to play through it — once. Unless you’re a hoarder like me, you might find yourself running through Bkhalzarf multiple times to gather things you need for the main quest (let’s not talk about side quests, that’s a whole ‘nother can of tuna). You might also find yourself tiptoeing on a floor littered with trap switches, so your choices are to either A) spam Become Ethereal, B) save-scum your way through every trap gauntlet, or C) be very careful and pray to Talos you won’t find any collision bugs (they exist).

I’d be lying if I said my jaw didn’t drop a little when I hit the Great Hexagon Library in Bkhalzarf. Not just because I’m a book hoarder, but the idea of it was hauntingly beautiful: a Dwemer library where the automatons still work, pilfering tomes and knowledge from the surface world, even though their masters are long gone.

Also, bring lockpicks.

No, really.

The writing’s on the wall (no, not that wall)

I’ve already touched on my biggest gripe with the story, so I won’t belabor the point. Aside from NPCs hardly acknowledging the Dragonborn is a slave at first, the story is pretty straightforward: the Dwemer have left behind a hyperdimensional ship, and your former master, Shanath Selthri, wants to launch it. The problem is, launching AHO would doom Sadrith Kegran, along with everyone in it.

Enter Yen-Ylu, a Dwarven scholar who is looking for a way to safely launch AHO while preserving Sadrith Kegran. The rivalry between Selthri and Yen-Ylu is somewhat fleshed out, but never fully resolved. If you kill Selthri, Yen-Ylu won’t be terribly torn up about it, and if you don’t, it’s a misery conga all around.

Speaking of Yen-Ylu, he’s the only Dunmer in the whole settlement who unequivocally tells you he’s fed up with slavery. Too bad he walks away from Sadrith Kegran at the end of it (if he lives), rather than stay behind and try to change any hearts and minds. “I was only interested in launching AHO,” he says (paraphrasing), “and now that it’s done, I’ll walk away.” It’s an anticlimactic end to a long quest chain that really starts to drag towards the end.

The side quests, meanwhile, are standard Skyrim fare: go here, fetch this, talk to so-and-so. Of note is the “I want to be a girly girl” quest that sees you talking to a girl’s father because she wants pretty gifts rather than the daggers her da — who’s the town hunter — keeps giving her (this quest made me roll my eyes so far back I saw the patriarchy).

Also, remember what I said about hoarding? Do that, else you might find yourself running back and forth between multiple POIs very, very far apart. Or just use a guide, especially for Chapter 3.

At least the rewards are nice

If you play your cards right, you’ll wind up with a nice player home you can summon in various locations across Skyrim and Solstheim. That’s right — I’m talking about AHO itself.

Nothing I write could do it justice, so here’s a video that tours AHO and showcases some of its neat features.

Then, there’s the other player home you can buy, Hla Fang. I had no plans to go back to Sadrith Kegran once I finished all the quests there, so I didn’t bother spending the gold, but if the other interior cells in that zone are any indication, Hla Fang is probably well-designed and packed full of goodies, too.

You also get a perma-summoned Dwarven mount that looks like an odd cross between a dog and a four-legged spider, though I found it too buggy to use most of the time.

TL;DR

• Quests: 👍
• Gameplay: 👍
• Rewards: 👍👍
• Music: 👍
• Voice acting: 👍
• Story: 👎👎

So, should you play Project AHO?

Yes, if weak writing and loose story ends don’t bother you. It’s still a solid mod, Bkhalzarf is a fun dungeon, and the rewards are worth it. Remember to use a guide for Chapter 3 unless you like running around like a headless skeever. You may also want to turn off survival mode as there’s nowhere to sleep without console commands. Either that, or my inn bugged when the game flat-out told me I couldn’t sleep there.