Silent Hill f hasn’t even fully released yet on Steam but some bright spark has already taken advantage of pre-order early access to mod away the fog. In my youth, I’d have called this vandalism. “Why stop at the weather?” I’d have yelled at the screen, throwing my hands up. “Why not mod out the psychological trauma as well? Why not relocate it to Aarhus, Denmark – the fourth happiest city in the world according to the BBC – and rebrand it as Noisy Plateau?” I am older now and resigned to the mischief of modders. Besides, I kind of want to play a well-lit, upbeat Silent Hill game.
The mod in question is the work of FellowDemo – find it on Nexusmods, where all great games go for a glow-up. Aside from ruining the atmosphere, it offers a cleaner glimpse of the game’s 1960s Japanese architecture, which is desirable I guess if you hanker for something like the Discovery Tour editions of Assassin’s Creed. Feel free to play it in classrooms and host a quiz. Ummmmm maybe don’t do that, actually. There’s also a FreeCam mod from Kzekai for people who want to explore Silent Hill in a helicopter, the way Keiichiro Toyama secretly intended.
These contributions are but the first steps along the yellow-bricked road to the Wholesome Silent Hill of our dreams. It’s surely been attempted before – I should look over the mods for Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 Remake. Now that Silent Hill f’s fog has been banished, I would suggest oversaturating the colours and swapping all the monster audio for plaintive kitten noises. Maybe paste in the Sauntering animation from We Happy Few, together with a transistor radio that exclusively plays The Monkees. Quickly now, modders! There are but 17 hours till the full public launch, and I’d sure hate day-one buyers to get the impression that this is some kind of horror game.
“I still hold complicated feelings on Silent Hill f,” Oisin wrote in our review. “There’s a big part of me that wanted to resist it, simply because of the industry’s current overreliance on wringing out (and recycling) existing series. And yet here I am, constantly thinking about it, what it’s saying, dealing with how I’ve been confronted with messy emotions and upsetting realisations. It is, in fact, interesting, and games being interesting is more important to me than how they fall on a simple good/bad scale.”
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