Explaining MyHouse.WAD - House Of Memories

Mods and additions to games, even old ones, are  posted to the internet in a constant stream. Some are helpful, some are fun, some are weird,  some add new content to the game. Occasionally, a mod or map of a game will come out that will  entirely change the purpose and experience of the game in a stunning and creative  way. Such is the case with MyHouse.WAD, a map made for Doom 2 that is not  only a gorgeous technical achievement, but also tells a unique and curious  story. Today on the Panopti

con Theatre, we'll be looking into the twisting labyrinth  of this map, and laying out it's story. Firstly, I want to say that this game is  best experienced first before watched. If you haven't yet, and you have the capability,  please go play through this map yourself first, before watching this video. When you go  to download it, you'll see other files in the folder – don't touch any of them, and  download myhouse.pk3, to play for yourself. To clarify for those that don't know – a Doom  WAD i

s essentially a pack of maps and data for Doom and Doom 2. Some add levels, some add whole  new elements, but they all use the Doom engine to build upon to develop their own vibe. We  will not be delving today into the technical parts of MyHouse, as many other YouTubers more  knowledgeable than me have already done so, but to put it simply, anyone playing MyHouse who  is familiar with Doom mapmaking would be impressed by the skill used to make this WAD. It utilises  techniques and technology to

build it's world in a fantastically creative and disorienting  way. Even those not familiar with the scene and tools may find it arresting, or they may not  even notice, considering how stealthily the game manages to pull off it's magic tricks. But it's  pretty safe to say that if you're at all familiar with the tools this game is made with, it may  have that little bit of extra magic for you. That all said, what is MyHouse? A user named Veddge released  this map on March 3rd, 2023. “Excited to

finally release this tribute  map. Last August I lost a good childhood friend of mine and took it pretty hard. When  I was visiting my hometown for his funeral, I connected with his parents who shared  with me some of his old belongings. Among them was a copy of an old map of his backed up  on a 3.5” floppy from high school. Thomas and I were into amateur Doom mapping in the early  00s but I had never seen this map of his prior to uncovering it on one of the old floppy  discs. As a way of paying

tribute to him and all the great memories we had together,  I took the plunge and installed Doom Builder in order to polish up his map and add a few  modern amenities just for convenience sake.” He describes the map as 'not  much of a challenge and roughly 10 minutes of play time'. He also  includes a link to this picture. Starting the game feels very much like your  standard Doom map created to reflect a real life building, made very well and full of  little Doomcute items. There's a kitchen w

ith various appliances and kitchen-y stuff,  a living room with a Playstation. There's a couple of bedrooms and a nice bathroom, which  has a yellow keycard in. There's also a utility room with a red key door, and a small toilet.  Downstairs, there's a rec room, an office, storage rooms, another bathroom, and a boiler  room connected to the garage. As stated earlier, you may notice if you're a Doom-mod aficionado  that this house in itself has been made with a surprising amount of technical skil

l, enough  that it might feel a little off-putting, considering the way it was advertised  making it sound like a pretty simple map. The downstairs bathroom was locked with the  yellow key card, so grabbing that first, we can head in. The red key card is  here. This opens the cupboard that gives us the blue key card, which could  let us out the front to exit the level. Before going there, looking around a little,  you may happen to glance outside and notice a soul sphere floating outside on  thi

s pillar. For those unfamiliar, this is essentially a big powerup item.  You might think you'd missed that earlier, if you looked around outside. However, if we  do head out here, we can see the soul sphere appears to... not be there on the pillar. Weird.  And even weirder, if we look back to the house, we can see new enemies and items in the rooms.  The weird part of this is not just the enemies, but the windows themselves. If you took a look  around outside when you arrived, these windows were

n't there at all. The bottom of the house  was just walls. Clearly something is different. Heading back inside, something shifts.  It's subtle, as this game often is, but there is a change. The music seems to  restart as you walk back in, but as you listen, you may notice that it's not quite the classic  Running From Evil song, but instead a slightly... different version, a little discordant and wrong  in places. Doors, instead of just sliding up, now open like proper doors. Mirrors reflect. The

  PlayStation is an Xbox. And it's so delicate of a change you may not even have registered it, but  the animations for the weapons is now updated, slightly smoother and cleaner. The map also  plays the Discord notification sound every now and again, which is just weird to hear.  It's all so minute, you might only notice a couple of the changes at first, and it's just  that little bit unsettling and destabilising. And now if we do want to leave, returning to the  gate reveals we now need a blue

skull to leave. Speaking of, we are now collecting skull  keys instead of cards. And the red door that was once a cupboard now leads to  a dark staircase leading to the attic, which conveniently happens to have the blue skull  key. There's also a covered mirror we can reveal. We head back down to leave and... we can't.  The doors aren't locked, they're just... gone. You may be familiar with the house enough  at this point to realise this corridor has changed too. This is wrong. This section of 

the corridor not only wasn't there before, but it also can't spatially exist. It leads  to what appears to be another living room, if a little differently decorated, and we can  pick up this Pepsi can here. I want pop. OK. There's nothing else to do here, so we leave,  and... there's another, new, impossible door. It's the house, structurally, but  different. A different palette. The only thing to be found is this milkshake. The  kid needs a milkshake. Back through the door, what now? If we walk

back near the front door  area, there's a sound to be heard. Downstairs, we find a bookcase has shifted,  revealing a breaker. Let's press it. Darkness and screams. The house has been  ravaged, seemingly by a fire. Everything is in ruin. We can find three objects here:  A photo frame (ruined memories), a notebook (tarnished history) and a teddy (innocence  lost). If we look up, we see the fire-red sky – but no sign of the attic we were in only  a short while ago. We also can't go through the cu

pboard we used to access it before – who puts  an attic stairway in a cupboard like this anyway? If we head back downstairs, it's changed. It's all  a bit... flat. Heading through the boiler room, the door that once led to the garage now leads  here. Rows and rows of concrete apartments. You may find this slightly familiar, if you are  familiar with the backrooms concept – this visual of many apartments or rooms in a wall like this  is often present within that. And as unsettling as this already

is at first glance, it becomes  even more eerie as you realise wandering around that we are still in the house, or at least in the  same layout... mostly. The scale is off, and it's also a maze of dead ends and empty concrete rooms  in designs that don't really make sense spatially. There's dogs here! Two of them. One  sweet good dog who follows you around, and one... bad dog. These two are linked  together – if one dies, so does the other. Navigating this concrete maze eventually leads  us to.

.. what appears to be a parking garage. Of an airport. Let's check  the departures board first, I suppose – there's a flight 'home', but it's  cancelled. The only one on time is to Dallas. The airport has some general amenities,  such as bathrooms. The men's is uneventful, but there's an empty pill bottle in front  of the women's (refill needed). And if we circle around the sinks, we start to see blood  reflected in the mirror, then it covers the room, and monsters show up. When we leave, we see

it's  now the men's bathroom. Also, there's now a full pill bottle (feelin' fine). Also, did you  notice? The airport is... also the house. There's nothing left to do here, so  let's go take our flight. In the cockpit, we can press to start an alarm and more  monsters show up. In the back of the plane, we leap out an open door into the air and  land... back in the house. Not as it was, though – it seems older. Abandoned.  It's been cleared out, and it's got a pervasive sense of emptiness. But 

the doors are back, so we can leave. Navidson realty. Perhaps it's time to  mention this game's deep association with a certain book – House Of Leaves. This  is the most overt reference to it – Navidson is a direct name from the book – but MyHouse  is filled with references and connections to it. We'll talk more about what House  Of Leaves is and it's connection with MyHouse in the review section, where  we can evaluate it in more depth. Either way, our house has been sold as land, it seems, and

now we can finish the level –  and play through Underhalls, the Doom level! As you may have gathered, this  is an ending – not the ending, but an ending nonetheless. Playing through  Underhalls is a good idea, since once we finish, we can go back to the start of MyHouse  with all the stuff we picked up there. From here, what's next? Well, something you may  notice after a point is these images on the wall. These seem to display the little collectibles  we've been finding. This is what we want t

o aim for – getting more of these artifacts. How do  we find more, though? We have to move on without triggering the house fire. This is hinted at in  a few places – in the message if you turn on and off god mode (there's no good outcome from a house  fire) and also in the journal in the Google drive, which we'll examine in depth later. The  other hint, when you turn on god mode, hints at something to do with the mirrors. The  attic mirror shows something we can't reach, a bauble, but there's no

thing to be done here.  While we're looking for other mirror's lets turn on all the sinks as we go, including this  one in the monochrome room. This will let us access stuff later, but for now, mainly this  rubber duck in the bath. It's an artifact. Back to mirrors, and here, as  also hinted in the journal, we can pass through a mirror into a mirrored  house. There's 3 more artifacts to be found here – the Christmas ornament we saw in the  attic mirror (Christmas makes me happy), a milk bottle i

n a crib (it wasn't  meant to be), and the wine bottle in the kitchen (drunk buddy). There's also a  different artifacts board here – 16 in total. We could leave this level via the front,  which leads to a mirrored Underhalls, but there's no reason to do this and  you do lose your weapons doing so. We can go back through the mirror though, and  there's now a trail of colourful balls on the ground, leading to a slide tunnel to...  a nursery! It's ominous and run down, but, hey, at least Shrek is

here. Once  again, the nursery is also the house, in layout. There's two artifacts in here – a  baseball (autographed by J.J. Hardy!) and a box of crayons (adult colouring books). After  we grab those, we can head through a new door, leading through to the playground outside,  and on the swings we can find a stuffed toy (snugs). Also, Shrek's here! He drops the  gate key, which leads us back to the house. Remember how I said turning on the sinks would  help us later? Now it's time to return to t

he bath and... enter it. We sink into a flooded  version of the house. Some exploring leads us to a looping corridor downstairs. Following  it round takes us to a swimming pool-type area, a bath house, if you will, and indeed  it is once again, the house. This scenery again may be familiar if you've seen this  concept within the idea of liminal spaces. In a pool with an unfriendly fish, we  can find another artifact: The D20, which for those unfamiliar, is a type of  die typically used in TTRPGs

. (roll for intercourse?). We can swim down a tunnel  here into a maze we have to swim through, which eventually leads to... this place. Crossing  this bridge is tricky, and halfway through, we need to make a turn to grab another artifact  – the wedding ring (I do). Getting to the end leads us to the concrete maze – last time we had  to trigger the fire to get here, so it's been a while. We can find three artifacts here: A pumpkin  (pumpkin rick), a frisbee (good doggies are good doggies), and a

can of tuna (kitties love tunas).  Again, the dogs are here, but let's not kill them. We can now get back to the airport, and  make sure to grab the pills from the women's room again. Time to fly home! If  you miss any artifacts before this point, you get another ending, similar to the  first, but the house is just empty, as if everyone has moved out.  Leaving gets us the sold sign again. But we grabbed them all, so we can keep going. Back in the house, the painting of flowers  on the wall has

transformed and now shows a secret gap in the fence. Going through  it, we find a dark road late at night, which we can follow to a crashed car with music  playing. Incidentally, this song is known as the most mysterious song on the internet, because  nobody knows where it came from exactly or who sang it. Following the headlights leads to a  Shell - or uh, Hell station. In the storage room, we can find a game controller (it's my  turn). The bathroom takes us back home. The mirror reality's vers

ion of this painting is  now different too – the gas station, it seems. So let's head there in the mirror reality. There's  no car this time, just a torch. The station is blocked off by police tape, though, and bloody.  We can navigate to a small campsite. On a tree, there's a carved heart – S + A. We can open  the tree here, which leads to a beach area. It's just a set, though, and if we go around, we  can touch this clapperboard, which ends the map. This is another ending, but not the true one

. It's  reminiscent of this paragraph from the journal: February 26, 2023 I can no longer tell what elements of this map are my friend’s, which are mine… and what  the map has created. I am no longer afraid that the map is creating itself. It needs me as much as  I need it. Which reminds me of a dream I had the other night. I’m not sleeping much, but I recall this one with surprising clarity. I was standing on a beach staring out at the placid water, the  ocean stretching out as far as the eye c

ould see. Seagulls cawed overhead and the gentle caress of  water lapped the sand in front of me. I dipped my toes into the water. At least I tried. There was  no water. No ocean. It was an illusion. I realized everything around me was fake. The trees, the  birds, the sand… it was all a one-act play, and I was Willie Loman. A damned fool who  believed in something greater. But there was no happiness to be found. I wandered the set  only to find myself staring into oblivion… it was the end of tim

e itself. No joy, no misery, no  sadness… only emptiness. Men of faith tell us the afterlife is for eternity, but is it possible  to keep your sanity for eternity? A day passes in the void. A month. A year. Two. Five. Ten. Is  this an eternity? Twenty years. A hundred years. A thousand years. I’ve sat in this room for a  million years now entertaining the same thoughts, pondered the same questions, and ruminated  on every mistake in my life… anguishing over them for centuries. A billion years no

w. Double  that. Now double it again. I am still nowhere close to the end of eternity. I pray for  death but it never comes… just me, and my thoughts and my mistakes and my insecurities  and my regrets and my loneliness. Somewhere, in another dream, the version of myself that  winked back is sitting on the real beach, happy and content, knowing life is finite,  there is no afterlife, and happiness is found in the small things around us that we  can control. Happiness has to be fought for. This f

ake beach brings us no happiness, so when  we open it, we have to immediately turn away, and start fighting for it. This archvile is  practically unkillable, so it's better just to run – back to the house, and through the  mirror to the regular world. There's a lot of monsters here too, and it's a tricky navigation,  but we need to get back to the gas station again. The station is surrounded in monsters and  darkness, and it's a tough fight. But we fight our way through and down the road to  the

campfire spot, and through the tree. We have found the one secret of this map,  and the true end of the game. A beautiful, real beach, at sunset. And if you didn't kill the  dog, they're here too. It's peaceful, and lovely, and well earned after everything. So, there we have it. Already, this game clearly has an incredible story to it  hidden behind concrete walls and dark mazes, but we're not quite there yet – let's cover the last  couple things before we dive into the analysis. There are a co

uple spots in  the game that we don't need to see to finish it. Let's have a look at those. Noclipping out of bounds anywhere  leads you to the backrooms, where a monster will chase you in the  maze. There's not much of import to find here. An alternative backrooms can be  found in the mirrored Underhalls, weirdly. Dying and not re-spawning for a while will  cause you to appear in a hospital. We can find a room key that leads to a room with closed  curtains around a bed and a flatlining monitor.

A person looks to be sitting up in bed, despite  the flatline. Another empty pill bottle can be found here. An AED will spawn you back where  you died, with a berserk pickup, once per game. In the concrete maze, you can jump out at certain  points into the windows on the other side. One has a megasphere, and another has a TV, which  seems to show itself. You can unplug it, which turns your screen black, and if you re-plug  it, the TV, and every single other TV in the game, will now show static

snow with the  words 'CH03', or channel 3, displayed. Another maze can be found from a small chance  opening the cupboard in one of the bedrooms. This one is dark, silent and unnerving. There's  a couple of locations within this, but again, nothing of immediate import and nothing that  actually does anything. This one appears to be another direct House Of Leaves reference,  which we'll discuss later. Though there's really nothing in here, the oppressive  silence and darkness is beyond unnerving.

Finally, if you collect all the artifacts,  but then choose to go through the burned house to ending one, you can actually open the hidden  passage in the fence and find a QR code. This is where we find this image. We'll review it  properly in just a moment - but it tells us, importantly, that Steve Nelson actually died  on the same day as Thomas. But we haven't even discussed who they are yet, so let's get  into the Google drive and see what we learn. The map was posted with the account  Veddg

e, and the Google drive files are credited to a Steve Nelson. These are  also connected together in a txt file in the drive. So we can neatly assume Steve  and Veddge are the same person, at least. The files shared in the drive provide a little bit more context for certain points.  Let's look through bit by bit. The files folder includes the  game download files, of course, including the actual MyHouse.wad file with just  the regular house, and a txt information document. This document is pretty

straightforward,  but in the no redistribution warning, we're told that the author does not want us to  have the game. They don't want to distribute it, but it went online anyway, and the map  evolved without their input. They speak here with despair – the map wants you to feel sad.  Alone. Desperate. Don't let it win. Don't play it. And yet on the forum post they express  their excitement to post it. And of course, there's the fact that the post obviously and  conspicuously doesn't mention any

thing other than the standard house map.  Is this even Veddge posting? In the photos section, we have who we can assume  to be Tom and Steve, a polaroid of the gas station, likely the same one in the game, plus  Tom's obituary. We also have photos of an album full of more pictures. Some are of the familiar  house – the hallway, the living room and kitchen, the downstairs, which also has a dog in it.  There's also a photo of a cat – potentially Tom's cat Scrambles, who is mentioned in his  obit,

and he seemed to care deeply for. The others mostly seem to be highschool photos, mostly  of large groups. There's both the girls and boys cross country teams, which we know Tom was a  part of, and this might also be the track team, which Steve was in. The others seem to be  general fun highschool memories – I'm not familiar enough with American highschool clubs  to know if any of these have further relevance. The Journal is by far the most in depth part  of the drive. I wont read it all out to

you, as it's too long for that, but I'd recommend  reading it yourself if you're curious. Basically, it re-establishes the basic  story, then walks us through Steve's experiences whilst fixing up the mod. One thing  you'll probably first note is that the word house is displayed in blue every time. This is  another HOL reference that we'll discuss later. The first thing he comments on is the sketchbook.  There are three sketchbook drawings in the drive: a drawing of either many dogs  or a dog wit

h many heads, a sketch of the house from outside,  and a drawing of a blue key card. The following entries, as he develops the game,  often cover his dreams. These dreams connect to parts of the map, and occasionally provide hints  of where to go in the game. Dreams of a baby crying in the attic then finding a stillborn in a  daycare, of drowning in a bath, of going through a mirror... and one of a house fire, but this one  is crossed out. There's one of a car crash, where he finds a gas station

and a taxi driver takes  him to hospital, and one of an aeroplane crash. There's also red-highlighted numbers in  the dates of these dreams, which I think represent the order you're supposed to see  the scenes in these entries in the game for the true ending. This is likely also why the  house fire entry is crossed out – because you're not actually supposed to go there.  There's no good outcome from a house fire. The journal also covers how his  excitement over fixing up the map changes to drea

d as he slowly spirals, feeling  like something wants him to work on the map, and how things appear in the map that he doesn't  remember adding. The map wont let him rest. On February 14th, he posts about someone  he calls the only person he ever loved, and how he misses them. Then, there's a  long, rambling account of a dream where the date text clips into the paragraphs –  the dream I read to you before, of standing on a beach – set slipping into insanity for  eternity. Happiness has to be fou

ght for. Finally, he tries to upload  the original MyHouse file, but the pk3 gets uploaded anyway. The  map wants to be out there, I guess. Now, let's talk about Steve and Tom, and  analyse what I think happened to them. Steve claims that him and  Tom were childhood friends. I think that claim is... not exactly  accurate. Not in every time, at least. We'll discuss the fact that it's weird Steve is  apparently dead at all in a moment, but for now, let's take it at face value. They both  died on t

he same day in the same town, and they're sharing a funeral service.  Their obits both say they reconnected with and married their childhood sweethearts,  who are referred to with neutral pronouns, but neither of their partners is mentioned in the  'survived by' section. The wedding ring artifact, the obits... I think it's pretty safe to say that  these two were more than friends, and it sounds like they were husbands. But Steve is insistent  in the journal to only call them friends. It could ve

ry well be that there's multiple  timelines in play, explaining the themes of mirroring in the game. In one life, he moves  away, and isn't killed alongside Thomas, who likely dies in the fire alone, considering that's  the only 'dream' Steve states is real. But Steve's life is bleaker and lonelier, represented by the  mirror world being generally darker. He avoids confronting anything and does not fight for his  happiness, as it were, leading to the fake beach ending. In the other timeline, Ste

ve ends up with  Thomas and they get married, and the house fire kills them. His life is shorter, but he can accept  to enjoy the things he experienced during it, as he says in the beach dream. Something I never  mentioned is the wording of this line: “Somewhere, in another dream, the version of myself that  winked back is sitting on the real beach, happy and content,”. The 'winked back'  perhaps suggests that the timeline splits based on whether or not he chooses to  be with Thomas. In the fake

beach end, the heart graffito is only half completed.  In the real beach, it is fully completed. Maybe we're seeing, in the journal, quote-unquote  bad timeline Steve, who never stayed with Thomas, and that's why they're only ever 'childhood  friends' and nothing more. The obits are from that other timeline, where they were together.  That would explain the inconsistencies. It also might explain why Tom's sketchbook was apparently  so dark – this timeline is not only bad for Steve, but him too.

I'll call them the good  and bad timelines, for simplicity. The only part that contradicts any of this is  the heart graffito. We can assume S is Steve, but A? We haven't seen any mention of an A. There  is the possibility that it still refers to Tom, however, as his surname is Allord, and it could  be that he was referred to by that as a nickname. I've also seen the theory that A refers  to Tom's deadname and the graffito is from pre-transition - there are vague hints that one  of them might h

ave been transgender. For one, there's the whole bathroom thing in the  airport. Fighting a bloody battle through being a quote-unquote woman to emerge from  the other side a man, perhaps? The pills could also be connected, but they also seem  to be related to the whole hospital thing too, so who knows. The fact that we see photos of  both the men's and women's cross country teams in the album is maybe also related? They're very  small hints, but hints nonetheless. And honestly, every hint in th

is game is a very small hint, so  we'll take what we can get. This would line up with them being highschool crushes, if Steve  was still referring to Tom by his deadname at that time, and this type of graffiti is  more of a highschooler thing to do anyway. The artifacts, locations and particular  journal entries all seem to point to particular events within their  lives, both together and apart. As much as I can gather, it seems they were likely  very close friends in high school. It sounds a li

ttle bit to me that Steve might have had a  slightly rough childhood – his father is dead and his mother has several listed last names, meaning  he probably had several different stepfathers, and the wording of the milkshake pickup sounds  pretty harsh to me - but the two of them bonded, mostly over games, probably. They went to  different colleges and Tom moved to Wyoming, but in the good timeline, sometime later,  they met again, and married in 2020, moving back to Illinois. The house  is prob

ably their shared house there, as they moved into Tom's childhood home. In the  bad timeline, they didn't get back together and spent their lives apart, until Steve hears  of Tom's death, as he says in the journal. We could go through each item and location  and try and break down individual events, figure out which timeline they happened in  and what exactly happened, but honestly, they're all so up for interpretation and down  to guesswork. I think it's a little more fun to take guesses indivi

dually, but if you have any  unique takes on them, let me know in the comments! There are some interesting ones though.  Let's look at them. I want to remind you not to take the dreams in the journal too much  as direct retellings – dreams rarely make sense, and they are our brain's way of processing events.  That's why dreams are often nonsense or random, but seem to have themes or meanings to them. Steve  does reference a play in his beach dream – Death Of A Salesman by Arthur Miller. In it, m

any  events are told through memory, and recounted unreliably. I think this is a good comparison here  – not only are dreams already convoluted enough, we are seeing the memories from the mind of our  narrator, who we know to be at least reasonably unreliable, considering he's clearly not coping  that well. Also, I think if we do think of the multiple timelines idea, the dreams might only  be events from the timeline that didn't happen to our journal-writing Steve, so he wouldn't  necessarily un

derstand them himself anyway. Several things are related to babies, or maybe  more accurately the lack of babies. We have the crib in the attic with the bottle, and the  whole daycare situation, plus the dream from the journal. It could be because in the good  timeline they wanted to have a child but were unable to do so physically and for some reason  couldn't adopt, or more likely in my opinion, they never had time – they were only married  two-ish years, after all. I think the stillborn baby

symbolism more so suggests that they  could've had kids, if they'd had more time. The dog is an interesting one – the photo  with the dog in it maybe looks a little older, and when we see the dogs in the concrete maze,  which one is in an area is based off the size of that section. The bad dog is in the section where  the map is bigger, which makes you feel smaller. Maybe Tom had a dog as a kid and was afraid of it,  but as he got older realised it was a good dog? The aeroplane crash is one I ca

n't connect  to much – what do you guys make of it? The car crash also seems to have happened  at some point in one of the timelines, but exactly what happened there I don't know. Either way, more than just a map,  it's a shrine to the life he lived, and the one he could have lived. As he says: Somewhere, in another dream, the version of myself  that winked back is sitting on the real beach, happy and content, knowing life is finite,  there is no afterlife, and happiness is found in the small th

ings around us that we  can control. Happiness has to be fought for. If you've heard of House of Leaves prior  to now, or even have read it yourself, you may be familiar with it's reputation. Released  in 2000 by Mark Z. Danielewski, this book is famously convoluted and twisting. It's pages are  laid out in a complex format, and it really takes two or three reads to fully take in the story – or  rather, stories, as there are multiple narrators with multiple perspectives. It's honestly a  really

tricky book to read. I actually only fully managed it recently. It has been described as  'challenging the very concept of what a book is'. As I mentioned when we saw it in the  game, Navidson is a name from the book – the surname of Will Navidson, the  main character of what you could call the primary narrative. This tale follows him and  his family after they move into a new house, which slowly reveals itself to be more than that.  New doors appear, impossible spaces open up, and in particular

, a great, dark, plain  maze. They too find an endless staircase, and hear an occasional low growling. The  house eventually turns on it's inhabitants, killing Will's brother and forcing the  family to flee. Will returned alone, and became lost in the maze. He's seen reading  a book, called House of Leaves, on his cameras, which he burns for warmth. Eventually his partner  returns and finds him, and they appear outside. This isn't the extent of it, of course – this is  actually a narrative writt

en up by a guy called Zámpano, who's death leads another man named  Johnny Truant to find and complete the work, leaving his own notes alongside. Their  notes and comments are contradictory, disputing the truth of the story of the Navidsons. MyHouse is clearly directly influenced by House Of Leaves. Beyond just the obvious  parallels – the dark corridor, the endless stairway, the impossible doors  – there's also direct thematic references. The story of the Navidsons is a tale within  another sto

ry, that serves as a vessel for communicating it's themes, just as the story of  Steve and Thomas is contained within the vessel of MyHouse. The House in HOL is often interpreted  to be a representation of grief, of obsession, of living within the past traumas of your life.  Just as Will Navidson falls into obsessive exploration of the corridors and slowly loses his  grip before coming out the other end able to lay it to rest and live his life, Steve obsessed over  MyHouse and got lost in it's d

igital corridors until he could lay to rest the story behind it.  But whereas Will was eventually saved by love, Steve was permanently locked out from the  reality in which he could truly experience that. There's also the use of blue and red text. In  HOL, blue text is used whenever the word 'house' appears, and red text whenever the word Minotaur  appears. This is never explained, and has been deeply theorised about. I'm not here to go into  HOL (though I of course could in another video, if yo

u'd be interested), but the Minotaur  is an interesting one. In HOL, in summary, the Minotaur is struck out of the text and never  truly appears, but it's existence remains hinted at, a darkness behind the narrative, a  story that nobody committed to telling. The use of these colours repeats in MyHouse in  the journal – 'house' in blue, but this time, numbers in red. As I mentioned, I think this  is to indicate the order of the dreams as an in game hint, but also, I think it can tie  the idea of

the dreams to the Minotaur. The dreams are Steve's Minotaur, something that isn't  real to him but another version of his reality, that stalks him and remains a dark,  growling presence he can't fully escape. Something that could have been real,  but instead, haunts him with it's unreality. There's a lot that we could say in regards to  the use of formats here – the real life book of HOL is to the narrative of the internal books and  stories what Doom is to MyHouse. Both play with the formattin

g in a creative and stylistically  unique way. It's very interesting how they both present their narratives in a similar way, but  via different means. Like HOL challenges what a book is supposed to be, MyHouse challenges  what a video game mod is supposed to be. Another reference within the game  is maybe more obvious – that is to liminal spaces. Obviously the backrooms  and poolrooms trends are rather blatant, plus the imagery of the brutalist apartments,  and I think this Shrek in the school

is meant to reference this image that went around a while  ago, which is also tied to liminal spaces. Liminal spaces are in-between spaces, by  definition. I wonder if the use of these here is meant to communicate to us the map's position  in this world – a limbo between the two timelines, the two versions of Steve and Tom. It really  fits with MyHouse's general sense of distant, darkened nostalgia, of half remembered  places that may or may not mean anything to you. In a way, the game turns the

  house itself into a liminal space. I think MyHouse is fantastic. It's a  really cleverly made, densely thematic, format-defying story, told within a Doom mod  of all things. I love when creators do... well, exactly what this game does. My theory  is only one of many possible options, but I don't think it's import to know exactly  what the story being told is here – it's thematic narrative is incredibly solid and  really well presented. Props to the creators, and anyone who worked on this. I'm

so glad  this mod didn't get drowned in the forums. Thanks for watching today’s  Panopticon Theatre performance. What do you think? Did I miss anything?  What do you want me to talk about next? Make sure to sub and join the  audience if you want to see more.