Tallest Reed is an Elder Scrolls sidestory with a rather sparse game page - which would have been more than enough to make me backpage away from it on any other day.

But the sky outside was dark, the air was cold, and I had a couple of hours and blankets and nothing much else to do so I fired it up.

I'm usually prepared for a lot of things from a fangame. I expect gigantic infodumps of lore that I never would have cared about in the original work. I expect fiddly little side characters promoted to starring roles or privately shipped romances resulting in hundreds of children.

I do not expect fun.

I am even less prepared for beauty.

Tallest Reed takes place in the world of TES, and it borrows creatures, historical events, cultures, and magics from the source material. But it requires no knowledge of the lore to appreciate. Its plot is entirely self-contained, set in a microcosm castaway community of amphibious orphans, and the arc of its story feels so normal and personal in places that I forgot the scales. I forgot the gills. I forgot the grand magics and the ancient barrows full of murdergophers.

I found myself genuinely feeling for the characters, and not wanting them to be hurt, or disappointed, or sad.

That alone wins four stars from me, but on top of that the game is a blast to play.

From art to sound to system, most of Tallest Reed seems to be custom built. There is a wide variety of monsters in the first chapter, all with unique portraits (and, in one particular case, animations). Character portraits are likewise varied and detail-rich, and can be scavenged from hidden spots in the environment. Reed sports a resource harvesting system, an alchemy system, a skill points system, swimming, diving, underwater exploration, multiple layers of content to individual maps, and an exceptional array of Easter eggs.

The actual meat of the game is more bread-and-butter fare (to thoroughly confuse the metaphor), with combat consisting of a fairly straight-forward stab-or-spell back and forth between player and enemy parties. Enemies have varied behavior, in some cases going as far as mutating between several distinct phases during a fight. There are several complex swarm-style bosses with optional gimmick solutions, but none of them feel more than just the right amount of overwhelming.

Preparing characters for combat is largely an exercise in resource scarcity, with all restorative items being craftable, not purchasable, and all equipment being hidden in chests. At no time during my play did I ever feel like I was swimming in heals, nor did I ever feel like I was going to have to scrap my save and start over.

In between combats was a surprising amount of story, with detailed character personalities, humor, unpredictability, and a single scaled toe on the line between drama and melodrama. For the sake of spoilers, I will not get into the plot here, but it was more slice-of-life than I usually look for and it kept me rapt all the same. Sometimes storytelling is so tightly done that I can't find a way to critique it, and that was the case here.

Despite being a broadly positive experience, Reed does have a few places in which it falls a little flat. It still has one or two lurking bugs (as of 11/21/15), and its skill system becomes less interesting as you play. When each level awards a skill point, but the cost in skill points for a new ability increases each level, the player ends up with a lot of dead levels in which they're just hoarding points, saving up for Butt-Breaker 5, or whatever new ability they have their eyes on. By that same token, characters can sometimes feel like they're never getting any more powerful - and in revisiting old areas I found that the fights there were not any shorter than they had been when I first crossed them.

Overall, I would recommend this to anyone on the fence about it. Chapter one is meaty (my playthrough clocked several hours), and also largely self-contained. Its story has a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying end with a lot of opportunities for player input along the way, and if all the Elder-Scrolls-specific references were cut out of it, it would stand just fine on its own.

I don't know how this game ended up happening, or why it's as good as it is, but I'm glad it exists, and I heartily (and very subjectively) give it my endorsement.