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Doom At 30: MyHouse.wad is an extraordinary mod that asks, “What if Doom was an ultra creepy horror game?“MyHouseOfLeaves.wad
MyHouseOfLeaves.wad
Image credit:Veddge
Image credit:Veddge
MyHouse.wad dropped on March 3rd, 2023. Its creator, Veddge, had never put anything up in the community and had barely been active for the past 15 years. According to Veddge,their friend had recently passed away, and at their house he discovered a series of floppy disks that the pair had worked on together when they were kids. They were early levels for Doom, and to honor his friend’s memory, Veddge decided to rebuild these levels and post them.
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Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Veddge
Outside of an occasional monster popping up behind you, Doom was never really a horror game. Of course it wasn’t! It was ashooterwith post-grunge, pre-nu metal intensity. The excellent Doom reboots, with their renewed focus on violent mayhem, demonstrate this very clearly. Doom was scary in the same way a Megadeth poster was scary, but MyHouse reimagines Doom’s legacy as a horror game. The pervasive atmosphere of dread in this MyHouse will not allow you a moment’s rest, and the language of shooters will not help you. There are creatures in this WAD that are far more scary than anything the original Doom ever threw at you, and, no matter how deep you travel into the house, a single uncollected secret mocks you from the pause screen.
In the original Doom, secrets were little hidden areas. In the 2016 reboot, these areas usually hold cute little bobbleheads of the demons you were killing, and how many are left to find on each area are tallied on the pause menu. MyHouse presents you with dozens of collectibles that would seem like secrets in any other game: a burnt teddy bear; a milkshake; a can of tuna. But none of these seem to be the secret that MyHouse wants you to find. You can ollect and collect, but the secrets stat on MyHouse’s pause menu never goes up. So what secret does MyHouse want you to discover?
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Veddge
A more talented friend of mine told me that the journal in the game’s folder would give me clues. There was a point in video game history when it was almost impossible to proceed without reading the game’s manual or the readme in the installation folder. In the original Legend Of Zelda, for example, it’s the manual that gives you the only clues you will get from the game to defeat Ganon. Similarly, without MyHouse’s journal, you will miss clues, and the story context for how this WAD was made.
The journal details a programmer falling into madness. The creator takes on this project in memory of a friend. Six months later, they’ve completed it, but essentially lost their mind, chronicling intense nightmares (which serve as a guide for how the gamer can proceed). Something is haunting this game’s creator, forcing them to finish MyHouse, and you won’t know why until you complete the game yourself. In House Of Leaves the protagonist is similarly haunted, forced to translate a work that is documenting a movie about a haunted house that does not exist. MyHouse was so affecting, that I went out and read House Of Leaves to better come to grips with what I had played.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Veddge
Veddge has vanished, and although there have been some social media inklings as to their background andspurious rumors on message boards(the name listed as the creator in the download folder is “Steve Nelson”) there is nothing concrete. MyHouse’s creator has allowed the game’s design to speak for itself. The way this game has been presented calls back to the early days of the internet - when strange,outsider artwould appear in forums, creators either unnamed or under pseudonyms.
