Dogmeat comforting Shaun in his crib. Dogmeat climbing into the cryo pod. Dogmeat on a challenging quest to find his lost son. Dogmeat romancing Hancock - oh, wow, this just got weird.

Fallout 4 mods have peaked, again.

Be The Dog - Playable Dogs by Abbalovesyou is amazing. It lets you play as a dog - either Dogmeat or one of the other kinds of dogs you meet as enemies in the Commonwealth.

As a dog you have two basic bites, and two power attacks - a jumping bite and a running jumping bite. You can equip any dog gear as long as it's not flagged as unavailable to the player. You still have a Pip-Boy on, and you can still recruit Dogmeat as a companion:

Here are some pictures of Dogmeat opening the door for the Vault-Tec representative in the game's intro:

There are no letters in English to describe the sounds I made on seeing these.

There are a few caveats to this mod: the Pip-Boy doesn't show up in first person, which is a right pain, and you'll need to either return to human briefly before the intro sequence ends or load a save outside Vault 111 to avoid crashes.

But still: amazing. If this is beyond your grasp at present (we're all waiting on Bethesda to switch on console mods for Fallout 4) please do hit the link above regardless; there are a ton of frankly adorable screenshots. It looks like you can mix and match with Dogmeat appearance mods for devastatingly cute results.

Oh, by the by: River, the dog who played Dogmeat in Fallout 4, recently took out Top Video Game Dog for her performance.