When Vigilance is a Choice

I've been playing through the Vigilant quest mod in Skyrim again. The first playthrough was such a terrific experience it's been on my mind ever since. Sometimes it can be a slightly frustrating grind, though. I'm in the section where I'm trapped in a mansion with some bloody ghosts. The mod author intended the player to run away from these nigh unkillable apparitions but I can't help it, I just have to kill them, no matter how many times I die in the attempt. This is why I couldn't finish Alien: Isolation, I'm a confrontational person at heart. "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary," as Milton said. I can't speak for everyone but I find it's essential for my peace of mind and personal growth to be able to directly confront issues. I've always felt that way, ever since I was a teenager. In recent years, though, I've learned with some frustration that the decision whether or not to confront things is not always left at my own discretion. It's one of the main reasons I wanted to leave Japan where the country's particular communal culture often involves shielding people from confronting hard truths. You can see it in Kurosawa's Ikiru in which the doctor decides not to inform the main character that he has cancer. This was normal in Japan.

I love the relentlessly grim quality of Vigilant, which, by the way, comes from a Japanese mod author. I've long suspected the reason Japanese horror is so good is because it comes from people who've lived in a culture where so much is unspeakable and hidden.

Anyway, I've discovered with this playthrough that there are more possible branches of quests than I realised the first time. This functions in a way I really don't like.

Vigilant begins when you join an order of demon killers called the Vigilants of Stendarr. Your quest giver is an officer named Altano and, as you progress, the quests evolve from simply killing demons to moral challenges, as when you come upon a man whose possessed eye kills people in contravention of his own desires. In Skyrim, your quest paths are marked with little white arrows that correspond with a quest description. Unbeknownst to me the first time, the mod author chose to make the moral choices allow for the player to ignore the white arrows and independently take alternate actions. If I'd known about this beforehand, I might have loved it, because I kind of hate how the quest arrows lead the player by the nose. But it doesn't seem clever to me when a mod author introduces complexity by deviating from the game's basic rules without informing the player. That's not giving the player more freedom, it's just tricking them. Anyway, now that I know, I can appreciate it, and it finally makes sense of the fact that Altano is clearly a disguised demon of some kind.

I'm playing with two mod followers this time, Celestine and Auri, chosen because they both have recorded dialogue for Vigilant. Yes, in Skyrim, even mods have mods.

I've discovered that Auri's creator and voice actress is also a talented musician who publishes under the handle Merrigan.