I tried the Skyrim game for Amazon Echo that everyone thought was fake — here's how it went

Sean Wolfe / Business Insider

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• Jokingly shown off at Bethesda's E3 conference, most people didn't think that 'Skyrim Very Special Edition' on the Amazon Echo was real.
• In fact, it's a free app available for Amazon's Alexa and Echo devices.
• The game is a sort of stripped-down, text RPG version of Skyrim.

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When I first saw Bethesda director Todd Howard slyly showing off "Skyrim Very Special Edition" at E3, a voice-only version of the game with Amazon's Alexa, I thought Todd had got us again. I assumed it was another one of Bethesda's jokes where they show how self-aware they are — this time making fun of how many re-releases they gave to the nearly 10-year old game "Skyrim."

I was wrong. "Skyrim Very Special Edition" is very real, and I loaded it up on the Amazon Echo Dot to give the text-to-speech RPG game a try.

Having never used an Echo device before, I wasn't sure where to start. After setting it up and connecting my Amazon account, I thought I was ready to go.

"Alexa, play Skyrim," I sheepishly said.

"Ok — playing Skyrim Main Theme," Alexa replied, and immediately queued up the infamous Skyrim theme song. 

I quickly realized that I needed to add "Skyrim Very Special Edition" to Alexa's "skills" before I could use it. There are no actual visuals to this game, and all the information is relayed to you through Alexa, so I created some Skyrim-style graphics to help illustrate what the speech-based adventure was like:

The game itself is pretty simple: here's how it works

Sean Wolfe / Business Insider

You start off at a crossroads, Alexa asks you to decide which way to go after a few choices are presented, and you'll meet someone at the end of that road. That someone will always have some important quest for you that they can't be bothered to do themselves, and you can choose to accept or deny the quest. Then, you will inevitably get into some sort of combat. You can choose to use your weapon, cast a spell, use a shout, or flee the battle. You don't have many other choices to make, and answering is as simple as saying "weapon," or "spell" — you don't ever actually choose which weapon, spell, or shout to use. 

After getting the hang of the game (which took about 3 minutes), leaving it for a while and then coming back, Alexa greeted me and reminded me where I had left off. I was working on a quest where someone had asked me to retrieve a priceless work of art. 

I chose yes, and walked further into the cave (or at least Alexa told me I did).

Sean Wolfe / Business Insider

I didn't feel like fighting, so I chose to flee.

“The mighty dragonborn manages to scamper off successfully," Alexa said, mocking me. Inside the cave and past the Khajiit that I ran from, I fought a few spiders. After that, I was finished with the cave. 

Sean Wolfe / Business Insider

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

See Also:

• The winners and losers of E3 2018, the biggest video game event of the year
• The 13 biggest announcements from E3 2018
• Dozens of amazing-looking video games were announced this week — here's when you'll be able to play them