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.
“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.”
From its top-down beginnings last millennium to GTA 5 and the lawless murder grounds of GTA Online, the Grand Theft Auto series has hardly taken a breath in 30 years, and so projects like Heartland, for me, deserve credit for what they don’t do as much as anything else. That’s not to say it’s without its moments of unbridled chaos, but at its core, it’s a game about a disenfranchised young adult, forged by its creators’ experiences and designed to be relatable to its players.
“First and foremost, we want to bring a unique experience to a great game,” Kultur-Remix says. “A story about post graduation young adult angst and a desire to fit in with a crowd, regardless of how bad that crowd may be. Sharon’s story will be one many of us can relate to, regardless of social class or country of origin.
“But we would also like to design a map for roleplaying potential. Mods like LCPDFR are quite popular and we would be remiss if we didn’t design it for mods or roleplay servers like that. For example, we have a town hall interior fully-modelled with a wing for the sheriff’s department. It has zero relevance in Sharon’s story but, if someone were to make a roleplay server with the map, they wouldn’t have to look too far to find a place to start their game as a cop. We are hoping to make it all open source upon release so it can be adapted to whatever people please.
“Ultimately, through all of this, we are creating a time capsule within a post-9/11 world, depicting pre-recession life in America. Most of our devs have lived through it and remember what it’s like, seeing all kinds of shitbox cars on the road before Cash for Clunkers got rid of them all; and turning on the radio and hearing nu metal and pop rock being referred to as ‘new’ music.”
Of course, the rise of the cozy genre and, going back a little further, walking simulators have a lot to answer for here. Games like Gone Home, Tacoma, Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch are standout examples of era-specific worlds defined by nostalgia, and Heartland in many ways feels like the Grand Theft Auto modding community’s answer to all of the above. There’s a story, characters with rich lore, missions that follow the familiar GTA framework—but there’s also wider themes of economic crises, the slow death of the middle class and the omnipresent threat of war on the world stage and how that impacts the daily lives of the blue collar workforce.
As a result, Heartland feels like one of the most authentic total conversions to surface from the GTA hobbyist scene in recent years, as a grittier, warts-and-all look beyond the action movie facade more closely associated with the series in 2026 and now on the cusp of its next blockbuster outing. It’s for this very reason that the team chose GTA 4 as opposed to its successor to build Heartland on in the first place.
Kultur-Remix adds: “The short answer as to why we’ve chosen GTA 4 for the mod is because it’s the underdog of the series, just like us.
“San Andreas, while a good game (and with all due respect to those who are doing story mods for 3D-era games), just isn’t the best for character-driven stories because it’s quite stiff. Heartland was originally a Vice City mod but switched for GTA 4 due to budgetary reasons.
“When we saw the HQ model of Sharon taking running and sliding to cover, we knew we’d made the right decision. Why we didn’t choose 5 is mostly because it doesn’t do driving, gunplay, etc. as well as the fourth main series entry did. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel to tell a good story, so the logical step is to make it for number four.
“From here, we’re focused on refining scripting, voice acting for the main characters, mixing radio stations, and working on interiors. And bug fixing too! We’ll be damned if this comes out broken, given how long we’ve spent working on it.”
Follow Heartland’s development here.
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