(Image credit: Team Whisper/Bethesda/Konami)

Fallout 4 's overworld was always missing something that the other 3D wastelands in the series offered me: a sense of bleakness and danger. There are areas of the map, like the Glowing Sea, that managed to dial up the oppression. But the unforgiving horror mod Whispering Hills makes the whole region eerie and mysterious. And I honestly love that.

My playthrough started the same way as vanilla Fallout 4, with a tableau of mid-Century suburban domestic bliss interrupted by a tense run to Vault 111. But from there, I almost started to think my hard drive was haunted. The post-nuclear world has been reimagined with constant, dense fog and occasional torrential rain that limit your view distance to only a handful of yards.

It reminded me of how Morrowind used its limited view distance to make Vvardenfell feel much bigger than it was, even if at the time it was also a technical necessity.…