Skyrim mirror mode mod flips the entire game, dealing psychic damage to the RPG's biggest fans: "Weirding out most anyone that plays has just been an unforeseen bonus"

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 GamesRadar+ 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,"