The most ambitious mods may try to convert games into something else entirely or make old games feel fresh again through seismic changes, and as one of the most-modded titles of all time, Skyrim has seen its fair share of overhauls. But I've never seen anything quite like the Mirror Mode mod recently cooked up by modder MontyBellroy. Through some shader and UI trickery, it flips all of Skyrim horizontally. Towns, dungeons, caves, cutscenes. Left is right; west is east. The world is technically the same underneath, but Mirror Skyrim can look and feel like a whole new, downright uncanny RPG, and that RPG's name is Miryks.
Reddit user Tempest2903 highlighted this mod earlier this week, in a post that's since become a gallery of Skyrim veterans clutching their heads in confusion, and I immediately reached out to Bellroy to ask the age-old modding question: why?
"I’d always spend a ton of time modding the game to try and make the experience different, then get in-game and only play a character for a few hours," Bellroy tells 12DOVE over email. "I’d be exploring the same dungeons and running around in the same world, and just get a little bored. Mirroring the whole game seemed like a fun way to freshen up the game! And let me tell you, getting lost in the wilderness in a game you know like the back of your hand is something special."
"I wanted to make the game different, make it so that you could get lost again," he adds. "Then I was watching a friend play and it was extremely funny whenever he would turn left instead of right and groan, so weirding out most anyone that plays has just been an unforeseen bonus."
Bellroy had the idea for the mirror mod a few years ago, but "only recently thought of using post-processing for the mirror, which was the hardest part of the whole thing." It took about 20 hours to get it up and running; Bellroy tried a few technical solutions and found Reshade to be the best path forward. "There was a lot of trial and error with the UI," he says. "Did you know that Bethesda games use Actionscript, AKA Flash, for their menus? Well, now you know."
"I once froze Skyrim by adding an infinite loop to the UI by accident, but that’s about it for crashes. The strangest thing I ran into was the floating quest markers. When mirrored, the further you are from them, the further offset to the left they are. It’s very weird and I had no clue why it was happening, so I just moved them slightly to the right! Now when you’re far away from one, it’s slightly too far to one side, and when you’re close it’s slightly too far to the other."
On his Nexus Mods listing, Bellroy concedes that Mirror Skyrim is "a little scuffed," but even so "it's 100% playable and I think it's pretty neat." I, too, think it's pretty neat. You can see it in action in this video – just be sure you "turn your ears around before you start watching," and maybe keep a brown bag handy in case you start hyperventilating.
As he throws his hat into the ring, Bellroy remains confident in the future of Skyrim modding, even as Bethesda eyes a long tail of support for its latest mega-RPG, Starfield. "Fallout 4 didn’t put a dent in the modding scene for Skyrim, and it looks like Starfield won’t either," he says. "Despite being 15 years old, we still have powerful frameworks coming out to do insane things in Skyrim, and people are still making very high quality mods even aside from that. The Bethesda modding scene is so entrenched in Skyrim, I don’t see it going away any time soon (and that’s a good thing).
"There are so many genius modders out there that have made Bethesda modding what it is today. PowerOfThree, JohnSkyrim, Meh321, wSkeever, JaySerpa, Felisky384, Crosire, Boris and so many other crazy people who’ve made everything you’re seeing with Skyrim mods possible."
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