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.