When I want to escape from the world, I boot up Sims 4 and play until my laptop turns the room into a sauna and the blood vessels in my eyes dilate until they look like saffron sprinkled on hard boiled eggs. Now, I don't do this often - but when I do - I go all in. God, sometimes I’ve had dreams in Simlish after these sessions.

A week ago I had a rough night. Somehow I got demoted at work, even though I clock in a bunch of overtime every week. When I went to take my lunch break, the tupperware I’d topped with curry and rice that morning had developed a crack, through which most of my food had slowly dripped to the bottom of the fridge. I spent lunch cleaning it up, not having enough time to get anything else to eat. When I finally arrived at home, my cat had left me not one, not two, but three puddles of slimy, slightly digested kibble on my living room carpet. And yes - she’s fine. On rare occasions she just eats her kibble too fast and then has a puke-a-thon, this day of course being one of them. Sucky things always seem to stack up, don’t they?

Feeling sorry for myself, I decided to go full potato-mode; sit on the couch and do all the things that comfort me, not moving a muscle. I ordered some food online and started to scour the web for new Sims mods as I waited for the courier’s knock on my door. It was a Tuesday evening, so the courier was faster than usual. In the 25 minutes it took him to arrive, I’d downloaded and installed about a dozen mods I found at the top of the search results. They were all named stuff like “Cooking Mod Extra 1.2” or “Careers Plus” - I didn’t take a deeper look at them on account of the extra-fast food delivery, just wanting some new and fun content before my food went cold.

The courier dropped by, and with a bucket of chicken leaning against me on the couch and the laptop warming my thighs, I began the session. It felt great. I got really into building this minimal, modern house with a large garden that flowed throughout the property, meandering around the sides and opening up in the backyard. I placed flowers and bushes and trees meticulously to accentuate the house, while still leaving a lot of open space around.

The new mods were super fun - I got to choose between hundreds of more careers and activities, along with new cooking mechanics, and funny things like conflicts between sims being resolved through dance battles. My laptop wasn’t having such a fun time, the fans screaming bloody murder with the stacks of mods running simultaneously. For a while, I forgot about all my stupid problems and got to exist in a vacuum of my own creation, consisting only of chicken wings and Sims.

I’d been playing for hours, well into the night, when suddenly all of the sims stopped moving. At first I thought it was a glitch, some hiccup with the framerate or something. Then they all slowly turned around and looked at me. Their heads were cocked up, and their mouths turned into mellow smiles. None of the controls worked on them, and they just kept smiling and staring up at me.

I was creeped out, but at the same time I didn’t want to restart the game yet, since the autosave can be a bit shoddy. I put the game on windowed mode and glanced at the clock on the top-right of my screen - it was exactly 3:00 at night. Shit, I thought, It’s getting a bit late. Better save soon and go to sleep.

Then, right as the clock switched to 3:01, the sims started moving again. They went about what they had been doing before, except this time their character models were suddenly upside down. They were still smiling, but instead of walking they floated through the house and garden with their heads slightly above ground. The controls worked again, though, and I saved the game and decided to restart it, hoping that this was just some weird glitch that would resolve itself.

I quit the game and booted it up again, everything seeming normal. Once it loaded up my save, I panicked, as I couldn’t see any of my sims. Immediately thinking that the save had become corrupted, I zoomed out and frantically searched for the characters. Once I scrolled to the garden I realized why I hadn’t seen them.

All of my sims were dead, laying next to each other in the garden in a straight line. Some of them had blood spilling out of their necks, others had their guts opened and taken out, scattered across the garden. It was then that I realized that the game had been silent since I’d booted it up, but now the music started to swell back up. It was one of the main songs from the game, except slowed down, more discordant and harsh, its volume jumping up and down erratically.

Suddenly, a sim I'd never seen before walked into the house, through the living room and into the garden. It stood before the bodies, and I felt like there was something familiar about him. The sim slowly turned around and looked at me like the other ones had before. It waved at me, smiling gently as it did so. That weird feeling of familiarity got stronger, but I couldn’t put my finger on where it came from. I clicked on the sim, it instantly occurring to me why I’d thought it looked familiar.

The sim had my exact name, as well as my career, which is niche enough to not something that can be found on regular, unmodded Sims 4. I looked at the sim again and noticed that it had my exact hairstyle, and face shape, as well as my general body type. Then my heart sank and I almost let out a scream as I noticed it was wearing the same clothes I was wearing at the time: blue pajama pants and a gray hoodie. It kept waving and smiling as it stared at me. In an instant I force quit the game and deleted it and all the mods I had installed.

I’d never had problems with the game before, so I’m suspecting that the culprit was one of the new mods I had installed. At the time I was too freaked out to check and go through them, so I unfortunately have no idea what mod it could have been.

After that night, I haven’t reinstalled the game, and I’m not planning to do so. I’m posting this as a warning to please, check the mods you’re about to install before you do so - and also to see if anyone’s had a similar experience.