The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion The Shivering Isles PROPER (2007)

Oblivion is perhaps the most sumptuous rendering of a traditional swords-and-sorcery world that gaming has ever seen, but Bethesda did something different with Morrowind. Mushroom forests, 30-foot ticks to ride around on, cities built inside long-dead crabs - it was a weird, dreamlike and unforgettable world. And that is why everyone, Morrowind fan or no, should be excited about the Shivering Isles. It's weird.

It's the first proper expansion to Oblivion, and Bethesda are quoting "30 hours" of game. Even after converting from Bethesda Time to Actual Time that's still a succulent 18 hours or thereabouts. Even more succulent given the chosen subject matter: madness.

The Shivering Isles are not a geographical location in Tamriel, they're the plane of Sheogorath, the god - no less - of madness. He does feature in Oblivion - his one quest for you is to make the apocalyptic prophecies of some backward villagers come true, in order to convince them of the end times and destroy their sanity. You and he team up to bring them a plague of rats, kill all their livestock, and then Sheogorath makes it rain burning dogs. Madness is what he does, all day long, and now you're in his jungle.

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Happily, though, you're not tasked with fighting the craziness in SI; in fact, you'll partake of it. Sheogorath's gatekeeper, Kiliban, presides over a dungeon which he tells adventurers they must navigate before they're allowed access to the Shivering Isles. In reality this dungeon goes nowhere, and Kiliban lets you join in with the various ways to screw with people's heads before you kill them. Our favourite, when the adventurers come to a cell full of unimaginable treasure, is to drop the key to the cell in with them - followed immediately by a heaping great pile of fake ones.

Above ground, The Shivering Isles is also refreshingly offbeat. The night sky glows pink, garish oddities dot the landscape, and yes, there are even forests of giant mushrooms. The creatures you encounter are also suitably nuts: Frankensteinian Mangled Flesh Atronachs, skimpily armoured Dark Seducers, gurning Painbringers, faceless Stone Knights and lurid, scuttling bugs the size of small cars.

But we can already tell that the highlight of this expansion isn't going to be the hacking and the slashing. It's going to be the stories. One city in the Shivering Isles has a split personality disorder, with two copies of every citizen, and it's up to you to diagnose and cure it. Most (if not all) the NPCs here are certifiable, so your 18 hours are going to be filled with some of the oddest and funniest things you'll do in an RPG this year.