Silent Hill 2 players are modding away the fog and freeing the camera to discover hidden detail in the remake
Silent Hill's fog was famously inspired by a hardware limitation. The short draw-distance of the original PlayStation, combined with a fondness for Stephen King's The Mist, led to a town covered in clouds of fog that hid distant detail. This handily masked the limitation, but also meant that you heard monsters before you saw them—footsteps or wingbeats suggesting their presence before they appeared. The designers leant into this, adding a radio that buzzed with static when the reality-defying monsters were close, and cementing a formula for effective dread that carried over multiple sequels.
Now the Silent Hill 2 remake is out on PC, modders have begun their work. There are already more than 50 mods on Nexus Mods, with more being added all the time. Among them are two that remove the fog: Sunny Hills and Silent Hill 2 HD Collection, the latter a cheeky reference to the reduced fog effects in the disappointing HD re-release from 2012. While both are tongue-in-cheek—removing a defining feature of the series for the sake of some funny screenshots—it's fascinating to see what Bloober's version of the town looks like without limits.
Nebula480 posted a gallery of fogless screens to the Silent Hill subreddit, and those streets retain a lot of their mystique even when you can see for blocks. The rundown facades, the rain-slick bitumen, and the dead ends covered in surreal bedsheet frames—it's all still creepy as heck.
There's also a Simple FreeCam mod to really perk up your pics. With that installed Alt+F1 enables a flycam, and other commands lets you disable the UI, pause time, teleport James to the camera, and otherwise fill in for the absence of an official photo mode. Thanks to which, The Easter Egg Hunter found an out-of-bounds reference to a particular poor-quality asset from the HD Collection. FreeCam has also allowed players to confirm something that's a massive spoiler for the game, so if you haven't finished either the original or the remake stop reading now. Bye!
OK, now that they've gone, you probably asked the same question I did when you read about the FreeCam. Can you use it to clip through James's car and see Mary's body in the backseat? As Silent Hill art director and monster designer Masahiro Ito once said on the rage pit formerly known as Twitter, James brought his dead wife to Silent Hill with him, and not in the trunk as some fans assume. There's a reason the camera never gives you a clear look at the back seat. And yes, as multiple players have confirmed, shift the viewpoint and you can see a floral blanket on the back seat covering something that's clearly intended to be a corpse. Nice one, Bloober.
Other mods let you play as CJ from GTA: San Andreas, the original James from 2001, or wear a Robbie the Rabbit hat. There's also a first-person mod, though that's still a work-in-progress. Doubtless there's a race between Thomas the Tank Engine and nude mods as we speak.