MOD SPOTLIGHT
MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED
This Doom II mod is the game of the year.
I was just young and naïve enough when The Blair Witch Project came out to be suckered in by the premise that it was real – that someone had found this real-life footage after the fact, or that it was just a movie but one based on real events. Even now when you Google it, the first ‘people also ask’ result is: was Blair Witch based on a true story?
After 20 years of horror movies aping that gimmick, the Google doc that accompanies Doom II mod MyHouse. wad doesn’t really have a chance of tricking anyone into thinking it’s a true story about a modder trying to finish their dead friend’s project and slowly descending into madness. But it doesn’t have to.
Myhouse is freaky enough all on its own that it kept me on edge for hours, shifting under my feet so seamlessly that I still ended up questioning what was real by the time I ‘finished’ it – at which point I’d actually only seen a fraction of what this endlessly messed up mod was waiting to spring on me.
DOOM’S ROOMS
The journal that accompanies Myhouse is one of many meta layers to its story, hiding several seemingly innocent details that tie into the artefacts you’ll find scattered throughout the house as reality starts to fracture around you. “I continue having these vivid, cryptic dreams, and they keep feeling more personal and unsettling,” the journal reads. “I was dreaming about taking a nice hot bath. I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into the warm water until I couldn’t breathe. I tried to scream, but no sound escaped my lips. I was drowning in my own bathtub.”
My favourite bit of it is how it plays with the form of modern Doom modding, hinting at the difference between the 3.5MB Myhouse.wad and 65MB Myhouse. pk3, “I tried to delete myhouse.pk3 but I keep getting a ‘file in use’ error. I don’t think the map will let me. I’m going to post it on Doomworld tonight, but I don’t want anyone playing anything other than the original vanilla release – whatever this map is doing to me, I can’t let it do the same to
