As Halloween looms on the horizon of October, gamers are understandably searching for the creepiest interactive experiences out there. Thankfully, a lot of gamers won’t have to go looking too far to find spooks and scares, as there are plenty of mods forSkyrimavailable that can transform the game into something far more eerie. Some of these are quite simple, almost cute mods for a taste of Halloween hijinks, whereas others transform the game entirely into something far more sinister.
That is not to say thatSkyrimitself doesn’t boast a fair share of creepy content. After all, retrieving the Mace of Molag Bal requires trawling the dark and murky depths of the House of Horrors storyline (a moral quandary that was so controversial that the “good guy” alternate ending mod for the quest has over 128,000 downloads). There are plenty ofSkyrimhorror mods for fans of fear to sink their teeth into (including a few involving the game’s vampires, too).
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The Horror Over Skyrim — Shadow of Oblivion
A mod that takes not one, but twoH.P. Lovecraft titlesin its name, is obviously not one to be trifled with. As an incredibly comprehensive overhaul mod, it affects everything from race, to perks, weather, spells, NPCs, and items. Underlining all these horror credentials and content changes is a new set of music and sound effects to really drive home the horror that hangs overSkyrimin this mod.
Like theambitiousSkyblivionmod, this is basically a full overhaul of the original game. It makes combat difficulty an awful lot harder at a base level, and then takes that even further by adding over 200 unique NPCs, each boasting a full suite of magic items, spells, and equipment. These NPCs can be friendly or hostile, and it’s largely up to the player to decide if they should engage with the new cast of characters. Spells can now be used to manipulate the weather itself, which adds to the overall atmosphere of the mod.
According to the mod creator, Aria7, the aim of this content pack is to be unlike any of the otherhorror mods forSkyrim. Apparently, it is meant to make players feel like they’re in real danger, with threats coming from anywhere. One of the key complaints about Bethesda’s game balance in general is that NPCs and monsters often scale towards player level. While this does mean that the game could feel like an appropriate challenge at any level, what it normally ends up doing is making a world that feels less dynamic and lived in. The Horror Over Skyrim, like a few of the mods on this list, does its best to alter that balance to make the world feel much more textured.
Dark Dungeons for ENB
This mod does exactly what it says on the tin: it makes dungeons darker. With over 500,000 downloads, this stands as one of themost popularSkyrimmodsthat create a sinister atmosphere — and arguably make the game look how it should’ve originally. Finally, the early game explorations of Draugr-infested tunnels like Bleak Falls Barrow will be scary again. Seeing a desiccated skeleton-wraith fling itself from the darkness makes for much more potent frights than the unusually bright affair thatSkyrimdungeons were before.
Into The Depths
Mods like Dark Dungeons for ENB pair perfectly with story-driven horror mods like Into The Depths. Into The Depths, the work of Nexus Mods user GLArtMods, is an absolutely terrifying little jaunt into the darkness of the Silverfall Mine, a new location added near the town of Riverwood. It is a translation of the original German mod “In Der Tiefe,” and boasts over 125,000 downloads, which is relatively impressive for a smaller scalestory-driven mod. The mod creator’s other works include horror titles “The Virus” and “The Fifth Gate” — which also useSkyrimas a base game.
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Darkend
There are an awful lot ofmods that makeSkyrimlikeDark Souls. That’s not wholly unusual, asDark Souls' harder combat mechanics often feels like a more realistic and punishing version ofThe Elder Scrollsfranchise. One of the reasons why there are so many of theseDark Soulscombat mods out there forSkyrimis because by the endgame,Skyrimplayers can pretty much dominate any encounter they come across. This is, in part, due toSkyrim’s combat balancing, where enemies tend to scale to player level.
To combat this,Darkendmakes the original game much more likeDark Soulsand theDemon’s Soulsremakeby transporting the player to an entirely new land. This new island is roughly the size of a smaller DLC for the game, and does not useSkyrim’s traditional quest system. Players navigate the adventure with their own intuition, and also piece together the story themselves. Enemies and encounters also do not scale with the player, to give the mod a much more challenging and natural sense of difficulty.
28 Days and A Bit 5
During the COVID-19 pandemic, an awful lot of people gained a new appreciation of the 2011plague-horror classicContagion. The film soared to the top of Netflix’s trending page, sitting as the platform’s top movie for many months. “28 Days and A Bit 5” captures the more anthropological element of this film (and of course the mod’s namesake28 Days Later) by giving players complete control of a horrific disease outbreak within the worldSkyrim.
While other horror overhaul mods remakeSkyrimin a way that shows the game in a totally new light, 28 Days and A Bit provides a fascinating new mechanic that allows players to control what a spookierSkyrimmight look like. As the name might imply, this plague is undead in nature, and players get a unique opportunity to control where that plague starts, and see how that first carrier of the contagion impacts theopen world ofSkyrimoverall. It’s a really unique method of seeing how the systems underpinningSkyrim’s world design interact and strain under an unstoppable zombie apocalypse, and is perfect for the more cerebral scare-seeker this Halloween.
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