Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
Look, I'll be honest: the very fact that I happened to install Curseadelica was downstream of my desire to see if I could make big mods work on Linux.
The good news: yes, I can! The bad news: yes, I can! Curseadelica is a Skyrim modpack that markets itself as "Biblically accurate Skyrim" and is, in action, a safe way of experiencing visions you could only otherwise witness by swallowing an entire bottle of cough syrup and drowning. I'd call it a feast for the senses but it would be more accurate to call it force-feeding. I love it. It is terrible. It destroyed my Skyrim install.
(Image credit: JanuarySnow / Bethesda)
How hard can it be?
Regular readers of, uh, me will know that my Linux adventure is both ongoing and largely an excuse to constantly annoy my coworkers by talking about it. Having settled contentedly on openSUSE Tumbleweed after a period of distro-hopping, and with all my games pretty much just working, I needed a new height to summit. Why not modding? Why not a modpack? Why not 154 GB of modpack?
I wanted to test my system to breaking point. So, I downloaded Jackify—a Linux Wabbajack modlist installer—and pointed it at what seemed like the most computer-destroying mod compilation I could find. That was Curseadelica.
What is Curseadelica? Great question.
(Image credit: JanuarySnow / Bethesda)
Installation was actually pretty easy, all I had to do was leave Jackify unattended for a bit—oh, okay, fine. Curseadelica is… difficult to describe. On its main page, author JanuarySnow describes it as "A modlist that is based around my desire to prepare a feast for my eyes, to always give them something interesting to look at." This is—and I don't mean to criticise—underselling it slightly.
Curseadelica feels like a vision from the Book of Revelation. It is a mess: a hodgepodge of nearly 900 mods that turns all of Skyrim into an acid-trip sequence from a '90s cartoon, all with new races, new quests, new NPCs, new everything.
I first knew I had stumbled upon something special when one of my selectable races at character creation was a human body whose head was a small spider, piloting it with levers.
From there? An all-out assault on your eyes and ears, barely recognisable as Skyrim. Every NPC is an inflated caricature spouting nonsense—their heads bulbous, their torsos balloons, their legs withered stumps. Or they're giant. Or they're tiny. And all their lines have been fed through machine translation and into full indecipherability. No one is normal, is really the headline here.
(Image credit: JanuarySnow / Bethesda)
Which you will not notice, because you will be far too busy being distracted by the 8 billion baffling quest pop-ups, each one punctuated by that Jeremy Clarkson "How hard can it be?" soundclip. Or you'll be harangued by a courier who chases you in order to confess his love.
Or you'll interact with a guard—bedecked in Mandalorian armour—and choose the only possible conversation option, at which point he will begin rapping at you. Then you collapse, explode, and your clothes vanish. It's at this point you also realise that at least one of those nearly-900 mods is a nude mod. At one point, someone passed me by on a motorcycle.
I don't know. Look, here's a video of my first minute-or-so with the mod (content warning for, well, nudity of a sort).
Not long after this, my game crashed. I restarted. I picked some Nirnroot that was making wookiee sounds. The game crashed again. I began driving a Mazda. The game crashed again. I attempted to cast Wumbo on Master Chief. The game crashed again.
I began to suspect that Skyrim's foundation was not made for what Curseadelica had built atop it.
But I was chuffed to pieces: my actual mission to figure out if I could (relatively) painlessly get ridiculous modpacks working on Linux had succeeded. The crashes weren't a Linux issue—plenty of Windows users who have also tried the mod also encountered them. So fine, I was happy to crash the game because it was trying to render a chocobo and a Twi'lek simultaneously. The fact it ran at all, at any point, was enough.
That is, until I returned to it earlier today, having turned my PC off overnight. Now? It refuses to run at all—just a black screen for a couple of seconds and then nothing. Like the whole experience was some kind of beautiful dream.
What have we learnt?
The first thing? I might not be the world's biggest Skyrim fan, but god am I glad it's out there. As a sandbox for the world's most unhinged modders with far too much free time on their hands, it's still second-to-none.
The second thing? I have a new nemesis. You haven't heard the last of me, Curseadelica. I'm going to get you running again. And when I do, I'm going to have a proper adventure. Then I'm going to force you all to read about it.
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