.ekawa yllanif er'uoy ,uoy yeH
Mirroring an image is one of life’s secret horrors. Ever flipped a photo of yourself to see how you look to everyone else, had an existential crisis, then done everything in your power to scrub the image from your brain bank? No, just me? Okay, what about flipping the entire world of Skyrim like it’s Mario Kart’s mirror mode? If that doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, I don’t know what will.
That’s exactly what NexusMods user MontyBellroy has done though, taking beloved locations I’ve come to know so well and fliperoo’d them on the x-axis. My beloved Breezehome now lies to my left, all the guards now sheathe their blade on the right, and everything simply looks very, very wrong.
It’s deeply unsettling in a way that I wasn’t quite anticipating—everything is correct but also not, everyone is normal except not really. It doesn’t help that MontyBellroy has gone to the effort to make sure that all the text and menus are the correct way around, further sinking this mod into the uncanny valley.
“I find this quite disturbing, good work,” one commenter on the mod page wrote, while another said “This is actually kind of great. I’ve played Skyrim so much over the years that I can essentially auto-pilot my way through most of the game, especially the more common areas. Now? I JUST GOT LOST WALKING THROUGH WHITERUN! Having to constantly pay attention to where I’m going with every step sorta makes the game feel new again.”
(Image credit: Bethesda)
There are a couple of issues with the mod, MontyBellroy points out. One is the fact that the positions of icons on the map don’t line up with where your mouse needs to be to click on them. Icons on the left need to be clicked on the right, and vice versa. It’s the same case for the console menu too, so both probably need a bit of mental mapping to figure out.
The game’s audio also isn’t mirrored, so noises coming from your left in-game will still play out from their unflipped side. “Equalizer APO or another third party application should be able to reverse your left and right audio channels,” MontyBellroy helpfully points out. “Or you could just wear your headset backwards like the cool kids are doing.”
I am going to admit a deep shame here: I play Skyrim on console, a total vanilla queen. For this reason I enlisted my partner to take a closer look at the mod, and his immediate feedback was “Yes it is reversed, it’s very cursed.” All you need to know, really.
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