// PC GAMER — GAMING
This gorgeous and ambitious Grand Theft Auto 4 total conversion swaps Liberty City for a Fargo-style slice of rural Wisconsin, featuring backroads and a pizza delivery job gone wrong
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It's quiet, save for the faint pings of a street light shifting ever so slightly in the wind down the street. So quiet, in fact, you'd be forgiven for forgetting this is Grand Theft Auto 4.
What's before you better resembles Fargo. It flies closer to the likes of Twin Peaks, reimagined in video games over the years by the likes of Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition. Here in Heartland, an enchanting WIP total conversion mod from creators Kultur-Remix, less is more. Which is hardly how you'd describe Niko Bellic's over the top exploits under the bright lights of faux-NYC Liberty City. But that is sort of the point.
"Cities are nice and all," says Kultur-Remix, "but many of us have only seen Los Angeles or New York through a television screen. How many of us have been through boring suburbs or rolling plains and crop fields in flyover country? Sure, it sounds boring, and if you aren't familiar with suburbia or rural America, this may not be the game for you.
"But, if you grew up with them like our devs, or are at least willing to open your mind and explore a part of America that isn't frequently explored, you'll be in for a treat."
There's an omnipresent calm-before-the-storm vibe to Heartland. It doesn't quite stride into the realms of anxiety—that would do its placid, welcoming nature a disservice—but there is a distinct uneasiness that underpins its suburban purview. By design, it's hard to put your finger on it. It's perhaps body and mind-related, a point of muscle memory that extends to controlling the character models and animations of GTA 4 and simply expecting chaos.
The rise of liminal spaces horror in recent years, not least on social media feeds, treads a similar line in that the super-mundane can project more than meets the eye. In Heartland, this eerie minimalism is illustrated by Sharon's place in 2006 Midwestern America, where crop is king and opportunities are scarce. The mod's blurb describes the protagonist's life as "driven by video games and her job delivering food for the local pizza joint"—a situation that goes awry and is then untangled over the course of 30 missions as the hero finds herself exploring worlds "she never knew existed". In reality, all of the above was inspired by the creators' formative experiences while carving a path in rural suburbia two decades ago.
Kultur-Remix adds: "One of the lead writers has a job delivering pizzas and did it for a few years in a 1980s Buick Skylark. The setting in Heartland is based on many of our developers' lives in boring suburban and exurban hometowns; a boring teenage-young adult life screaming to be let out.
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"Despite trying to draw from real life parallels as opposed to doing what GTA normally does and drawing from movies, the closest piece of media we could allude to Heartland would be 1979's Over the Edge. That said, no direct parallels or references have been made to it in the development process of Heartland. Sharon being based on Mary Lynn Rajskub's role as the pizza delivery girl in Weezer's The Good Life music video is probably the only deliberate reference to an outside piece of media in the mod."