You’d struggle to make me sit down to watch a two-hour film at short notice, but throw on an obtuse video essay about a Doom mod I’ve never heard of and I’ll eat that sucker up without delay. This is precisely what happened over the past weekend. A new video from Power Pak delves deep into an unsettling experience known simply as MyHouse.WAD. Uploaded by an unknown user several months ago, what many assumed was nothing more than a recreation of a player’s house turned out to be a horrifying foray into liminal spaces, repressed trauma, and a surprisingly touching exploration of grief. It’s a triumph expressed through the eyes of a shooter that came out over three decades ago, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
I’ve only scratched the surface of this mod myself, and most of my exposure comes from the video essay mentioned previously. But even that is enough to admire the technical brilliance of MyHouse, and how it subverts the mechanical and visual expectations of Doom to create not just an impressive game to play, but a poignant example of horror that perfectly utilises its origins to make us feel perpetually unsettled. We are nostalgically linked to how Doom looks, plays, and operates - so to have a mod like this question ingrained behaviours gets under our skin, almost as if parts of our mind are being rewritten in service of tension.
Prior to playing through the mod himself with a deliberately misleading narration which leans into the emergent horror, Power Pak asks us to explore a Google Drive folder populated with random images, a journal, and the mod itself - asking us to go in unaware as it will serve to make the coming mystery that much more compelling. MyHouse begins innocently, with the player spawning in front of a fully-featured recreation of an unremarkable suburban home. It has furniture spread across multiple rooms and electronics that cement it in a certain time in history. There’s a loving familiarity to each new discovery, alongside miscellaneous objects you can pick up which don’t appear to serve any real purpose. Defeat a few monsters before collecting all the keys and you’ll eventually be able to leave the level and progress through the rest of Doom like nothing ever happened. It’s harmless. Until you take a closer look.
The house builds floors on top of one another, which in Doom’s original design tools is an impossibility. Id Software’s engine isn’t built to handle this, and never was, so what sort of technical mastery was employed to make this possible? Doors also swing open like in reality instead of sliding upwards, turning each new room into a strangely uneasy foray across the unknown as you anxiously try and figure out what awaits. There’s normally nothing to worry about, but background music that drones constantly like a melodically buzzing insect and an environment that seems to constantly break the rules of time and space begs you to keep a close eye on things. At any moment, it feels like things are about to go very, very wrong.
You’ll soon step outside to seek valuable objects which taunt the player with their majesty, only to suddenly find they never existed or the windows you peered out from have vanished entirely. Certain rooms in the house overlap through one another in ways that shouldn’t be possible, giving way to hidden passageways that lead into new areas that feel unique in visual expression, but subtly mimic the layout of a house you unknowingly escaped from.
Airports, daycare centres, apartment buildings, and mirrored versions of places you’ve explored previously soon appear, begging you to ask questions and run from dangers that seldom bother to reveal themselves.
There is a method to this madness, but you’ll need to delve into the Google Drive I mentioned earlier to line up journal entries with select objects or events witnessed throughout the mod, like you’re struggling to connect the lingering threads within a bizarre dream that constantly shifts its very nature around you. Underwater labyrinths or gas stations long abandoned are discovered later on, yet again mirroring the house in their design like a constant trauma is attached to this home with a meaning never meant to be properly understood. You’re asked to feel scared and confused, but can’t help being constantly fascinated and drawn to whatever tragedy underpins this bizarre creation.
There’s artistic merit here. A beautifully rendered piece of psychological horror that begs us to come to our own conclusions. Reading through the journals myself and trying to attach meaning to them ended in vain multiple times, either because of my fear, or a hesitance to uncover what awaited me at the finish line. It is both warm and unwelcoming, like whatever is being worked through here is drenched in grief so palpable that it wants us to turn away and never look back. If you keep going, what awaits is a declaration of sincere queer love on a sandy beach devoid of terrors.
MyHouse has a single secret, almost jokingly given how obtuse the full package manages to be, but it’s also the only moment in this whole mod that feels peaceful. No memories bitterly attached to a troubled past, nor environments that fester in the mind and twist into spectres of relentless anxiety. Only silence, love, and some form of resolution. In its original blog post, the mod is pitched as a map which was polished off after the passing of the creator’s close friend. ‘Miss You, Tom’ is the only sign-off, but once you dig deeper it becomes clear that to Andrew - the man who completed this thing - it was something far more valuable. A loved one or a partner taken from him far too soon, and this mod was a way of processing everything they went through together. What we have here is a horror game with a worthwhile message that manages to bend the rules of this medium in order to immerse, terrify, and do everything in its power to make us feel something.