Video Game / My House

Due to the twist-heavy nature of this mod, this page is Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned!

Miss you, Tom.

My House (also known as MyHouse.wad) is a Game Mod for Doom created by "Veddge", an anonymous user on the DoomWorld forums^note the metafictional side of the mod provides a "real" name and identity for the mod's author, but it's unknown to what degree the in-story character is based on the actual author, released in March 2023.

Initially appearing to be little more than a recreation of a childhood friend's home in the style of countless amateur Doom maps, players quickly discovered it to be an extremely in-depth metafictional experience heavily inspired by House of Leaves. The map's eerie house hides a massive number of secrets and cryptic puzzles, many of which involve Alien Geometries that stretch the limits of what should be possible within Doom.

Accompanying the mod is a Google Docs file, ostensibly the developer's private journal, which details the alleged development of the mod, containing vital clues for the map's more cryptic puzzles and mysteries: after the death of his childhood friend, Thomas Allord, in August 2022, Steve Nelson finds among Tom's possessions a floppy disk containing their old Doom maps, with a new addition: an unfinished recreation of Tom's childhood home that he'd apparently been working on in secret.

Deciding to finish and release it as a tribute to his friend, he finds himself growing obsessed with perfecting it, and is plagued by strange nightmares. Soon, he begins blacking out and waking up to find he'd spent the entire period of unconsciousness developing the mod, which seems to be taking a horrifying life of its own. Despite his attempts to stop and simply release the original, unaltered .wad so he can be done with it, the seemingly-haunted .pk3 version of the map nonetheless makes its way into the upload as well...

The map can be downloaded here, and requires the latest GZDoom version in order to run.

While this is a game about a house made in Doom, it is not to be confused with Doom House.

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This mod contains examples of:

• Alien Geometries: The map makes liberal use of GZDoom lineportals, sometimes creating geometrically impossible spaces.
  • As you explore the house, a hidden niche appears in one of the walls, leading to rooms that seem to share space with the rooms behind nearby doors.
  • The Bathhouse includes a maze of locker rooms and shower stalls that loops on itself.
  • The Brutalist house is a pair of areas that connect in impossible ways, including several high drops leading to places on the same horizontal plane. Also, both areas are of noticeably different size yet share the same architecture, so it'll appear as if the space randomly grows or shrinks whilst you explore it.
  • The hidden closet maze combines lineportals with a web of twisted passages, creating illusion of even greater complexity. It also includes a great hall that is much larger than the entire area, yet is contained within it.
  • Your character's height is ever-so-slightly taller than in vanilla Doom. As the map is ostensibly a replica of a real location, the height increase makes the scale of the player within the world feel more naturalistic. The side effect of this is that Underhalls is now slightly shrunk around you. This is especially notable when compared to when you play through the 'normal' .wad version of My House included in the Google Drive, where you're disproportionally smaller in the house but correctly-sized in the rest of the vanilla Doom maps in that version of the mod.
• All There in the Manual: The journal that comes with the game's Google Drive download contains entries detailing dreams that the creator had, providing context for why many areas are in the mod.
• Ambiguously Gay: Steve and Tom. While Steve's journal and Doomworld posts refer to Tom as nothing more than a friend, their obituaries both contain conspicuously Gender-Concealing Writing regarding their partners, in both instances referred to as a "high school sweetheart" they reconnected with later in life, and both died on the same day and have a funeral at the same time in the same place, and are not said to be survived by their partner, which would all seem to point to them being together.
  • After the release of the mod, in their quest to solve every mystery they could find, users on the Doom forums wondered if the creator's identity was also intended to be found from the game's files. Speculation regarding this became so intense that Veddge, the creator, messaged another user in order to quell it before their identity was leaked. In this message, the matching information in the obituaries is confirmed as intentional through Word of God.
• Animation Bump: As soon as you enter the second version of the house, the vanilla Doom weapon animations are switched to more fluid animations from the Smooth Doom mod, staying as such for the rest of the map.
• Anti-Frustration Features: There are several hard-to-find secret items and weapons that will make the later parts of the map somewhat more manageable;
  • In the first house, the UAC box in the garage contains the Chainsaw. It disappears as soon as the player enters the house, leaving behind a chalk drawing.
  • Completing the map proper and looping back to it after completing Underhalls lets you come back with any additional resources from that map, especially the megaarmor and super shotgun. This also applies to Sllahrednu, where you loop back to the mirrored house, a later location of the mod.
  • Once you have the three skull keys, a wardrobe is revealed that contains a green shirt in the entrance area of the house where the garage and porch doors have become hidden. Interacting with the green shirt gives you 100 Armor.
  • In the airport, interacting with one of the shirts in the gift shop gives you 200 armor; likewise, interacting with the Sludgie machines in either version of the gas station gives you 200 health, though it's only usable 5 times on the easiest difficulty and one fewer time on each subsequent difficulty (except Nightmare, which bumps it back to 5), and the one in the mirror world is only usable once regardless of difficulty.
  • If you interact with a cracked wall adjacent to the Berserk pack on the daycare's closet shelf, you can knock it down and pick it up. This will make the childhood nightmare easier to deal with.
  • In the airport, you can find a secret BFG9000 in the women's bathroom if you trigger the bloody mirror, then carefully move around so that the entire room except for the entrance gets covered in blood.
  • If you are able to hold onto the blue keycard from the house, then you can find a plasma rifle in the Brutalist house's larger area.
• Apartment Complex of Horrors: There is a parallel universe commonly called the "Brutalist House". It's a version of the titular House that is inexplicably made entirely out of bland concrete, barren of furniture and amenities and surrounded by a super structure with windows into apartment-like dwellings. There's also a giant version of this location where a giant Hell Hound of sorts can be fought or ignored.
• Art Evolution: Used to intentionally jarring effect. The second version of the house starts to rely heavily upon GZDoom's features to make the house much more realistic, such as the addition of slanted roofs and ceilings, the doors of the house swinging open as opposed to sliding vertically as in vanilla Doom, mirrors having proper reflections (except of the player), proper room-over-room effects instead of silent teleporter trickery, many of the walls getting unique paintings and textures, and the weapons' animations becoming more fluid. As if to poke fun at this, the classic PlayStation 1 hooked up to the living room TV is replaced by a contemporary Xbox Series X in this version.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The mod pretends to be a simple recreation of a childhood home of the creator's friend, but slowly shows its true colors throughout the first 15 minutes.
  • Averted with the unaltered .wad version, which does not take advantage of any GZDoom features, doesn't go beyond the first house in terms of content, and is otherwise a perfectly normal map. Although, given the Mind Screw progression of the core mod, the perfectly normal nature of the .wad can be considered playing this straight in the greater context of the experience.
• Bizarrchitecture: The first serious hint of this going on this somewhat subtle, but the fact that the house has two floors, which is likely to immediately strike any expired Doom player as strange, because such a thing is basically impossible to pull off in vanilla Doom. And it's not a feature of GZDoom either. Then there is more immediately noticeable stuff like the "impossible hallway", which has doors that opens to rooms that all are too spacious to exist side by side. And then, there is the discovery of the third floor, in the form of the attic, which there also shouldn't be enough space for. And things only continue to weirder from there...
• Blank White Void: Fake Beach ending puts you into a movie set simulating a beach, contained in a blank white space.
• Blatant Lies: The mod's description promises that the map lasts "roughly 10 minutes of playtime" and that it's "not much of a challenge". While that may be true if you're going for Ending 0, actually getting into the meat of the map will take you hours without a guide, and quite a few monster encounters (especially toward the end, like the bloodfiend ambush and the final fight at the gas station) are non-trivial.
• Collection Sidequest: There are 16 artifacts to collect, all of which are crucial for accessing Endings 2 and 3.
• Dark World:
  • The Burnt House is a fire-damaged variant of the main house with an ominous sky to match. There is also a future version where the house has wild foliage growing inside it and the sky is now drab and overcast.
  • The Brutalist House is a bland concrete version of the House devoid of furniture and belongings, yet is home to a friendly dog who wants to sit by your side. It is mysteriously inside an atrium of a drab apartment complex. There is also a version of this location that is scaled up in size and is home to a hostile Hell Hound.
• Dead All Along: Steve had apparently died alongside Thomas back in August 2022 according to the obituary page pulled up when you scan the QR code mentioned below. No attempt is made to explain how he was able to work on the map and post it on the Doomworld forums. Of course, it could be someone else absurdly dedicated to such long-term kayfabe.
• Dead-End Room: The sllahrednU Backrooms, where the player is sent if they try to access said level with console commands, have no means of escape, unlike the Backrooms of the main map.
• Disguised Horror Story: The mod is, on the surface, an innocuous house recreation mod. If one digs deeper you discover it is actually an incredibly surreal and disturbing rabbit hole.
• Drone of Dread: "memory=entryrrrr/////", the track that plays during most of the map, consists mostly of droning synth notes, occasionally interrupted by static and distorted fragments of the initial track. According to the song's Soundcloud description, the song was inspired by Everywhere at the End of Time by Leyland Kirby, whose final stage similarly consists of organ drones.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: Triggering the house fire after collecting all the items unlocks a secret passage leading to a gravestone with a QR code, leading to an obituary of the WAD's author.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The journal claims that "Happiness has to be fought for", and boy is it not kidding. For a detailed description of what the Golden Ending requires of you, see either that trope's entry or Ending 3 under Multiple Endings below.
• Eldritch Location: The titular house itself is this and a bag of chips. From mirrors that you can walk through, bathtubs that appear deeper than they are, and doorways appearing and disappearing at will, not to mention the design of it keeps showing up through the map, it'll certainly make you question reality more than once.
• Fiendish Fish: One of the bosses is a creepy fish in the swimming pool in the Bathhouse section. After you kill it, a pack of smaller fish bursts out from its body.
• Fission Mailed: If you die at any point and wait a short while, the screen fades to black and you will wake up in a hospital bed. Explore the hospital to find a defibrillator, which will revive you where you died and grant Berserk. This only works once, however, and you will stay dead if you die again.
• Foreshadowing: Several cases in the author's diary.
  • The entry on Valentine's Day 2023 randomly makes references to "the only person I ever loved", and the journal sneakily avoids any mention of Thomas by only ever referring to him as "my childhood friend" or similar. It's only after the Valentine's entry that the author actually refers to Thomas by name. If you happened to have acquired the eight artifacts shown in the living room of the normal house by the time you visit the Empty Lot, you can still access the hidden gas station passage that now merely leads to a gravestone with a QR code on it, which when scanned produces an image that all but states that Steve and Thomas were lovers.
  • Most entries reference the areas you may discover throughout the map, through the dreams the author describes.
  • Three entries describing dreams each have one number of the date (1, 2 and 3) highlighted in red. These numbers represent the most likely order you'll go through the related areas of the map while going for the Golden Ending^note Other sequences are possible, but non-trivial and involve backtracking at specific points. The entry about the house fire is crossed out entirely, hinting that you're not supposed to go through the Burnt House for the good ending.
  • The entry about the fake beach ends with the words "Happiness has to be fought for." In the game, the Golden Ending requires going through the biggest fight in the whole map after finding and avoiding the entrance to the fake beach.
  • On a different note, the fact that the House has rooms underneath other rooms, something that normally cannot be accomplished in the game’s engine, requires an oddly high amount of technical wizardry for what is seemingly a simple house recreation mod.
  • Trying to use cheats will instead display messages, all of them giving a hint to a later part of the map. Some of them hint on how to get secrets, but others directly reference the story.
    IDDQD (Off): "No good outcome can come from a house fire."
• Found Footage: A very unconventional example of the genre, with the 'footage' being a Doom wad that the author has rediscovered and tried to touch up.
• Gender-Concealing Writing: Both Steve and Tom's obituaries use this in reference to their partner, described as being a high school crush they reconnected with later in life. Steve's Valentine's Day journal entry also makes reference to "the only person I ever loved" with no further indications of their gender. This has led to the theory Steve and Tom were actually a couple rather than just friends.
• Golden Ending: It exists, or something resembling it anyway, but good luck getting it without a walkthrough. This ending requires you to find all the well-hidden artifacts throughout every iteration of the house, some of which are one-way trips, unlocking the hidden path to the gas station and then its mirror version. There you have to open the Sweetie Graffiti secret path... but then consciously choose not to take it, and instead turn back and leave, which spawns an invincible Shadow Archvile that will chase you all the way back to the mirror house, where you need to pass through the regular house (which is now swarming with deadly monsters) into the gas station (where you must now survive a difficult siege against another swarm of deadly monsters), where you can return to the graffiti and take the hidden path to the true ending.
• Guide Dang It!: Getting the Golden Ending of My House is left unintuitive and confusing, to feed the discovery and exploration aspects of the mod. It involves finding 16 key items scattered through the multiple parallel versions of the house, with no indication that the key items are even used for anything and the barest clue that there are a total of 16.^note The GZDoom house has blank picture frames that fill up with the key items as they are collected. This is a background detail that players are likely to not notice if they're not looking for it, especially since the GZDoom house only shows eight of the total key items — the mirror house shows the remaining eight. Additionally, both real endings become unobtainable that run if the player ever visits the Burnt House, which is easy to do thanks to the fusebox that causes the Burnt House warp emitting a noise. Finally, for existing Doom players, it's easy to assume the map ends after the transition to Underhalls and that it's not part of the experience. The only thing that indicates the existence of the Golden Ending is that singular secret tally, but the path to get there is left vague and up to the player to find.
• Harder Than Hard: Hilariously inverted by the Nightmare! difficulty, which has been modified to be far easier than Ultra-Violence by removing the fast and respawning monsters aspect, keeping the doubled ammo pickups, and changing up the monster encounters to be even easier for good measure.
  Are you sure? This skill level isn't even remotely difficult.
• Heroic Second Wind: Dying for the first time in the map and waiting long enough without restarting will cause your character to pass out and wake up in the hospital without any of their equipment except a pistol and a chainsaw. After taking a key from the check-in desk and seeing the flatlined heart monitor of another room's occupant, attempting to use the resuscitation gear in the room will cause the player to jolt back to life where they first died with all of their items back and a Berserk effect that grants them full health and increased damage to their punches.
• Hint System: A bizarre one in the form of messages that appear when you attempt to input the cheat codes from the original Doom, either giving hints as to how to progress through the map to obtain the best ending or where and how to obtain certain weapons. The cheats themselves have no effect, except for IDDQD, IDCLIP, and IDCHOPPERS.
• Implacable Man:
  • Shadow Archvile from the mirror gas station has enough HP to be effectively unkillable, is hard to stagger^note It had high stagger chance in the initial release to make the players' life easier, but that was later patched out due to abuse potential, and will walk through walls to chase you.
  • The Skinstealer, the sole enemy of the Backrooms area, will chase the player relentlessly when spotted, will deal high damage if it catches you, and has enough HP to be hopelessly unkillable, far more health than even the Shadow Archvile.
• In-Joke: The mod riffs on amateur Doom mapping habits, an aspect that will probably be lost on people not familiar with Doom or its map-making community.
  • The map's entire concept is a riff on the many custom levels (for Doom and other games) that are just a recreation of the author's house, many of which are also named "MyHouse.wad".
  • The use of "D_RUNNIN" (a.k.a. "Running from Evil"), the music track for the first map of vanilla Doom II, is a reference to countless amateur maps that replace MAP01 without bothering to change the music. The map messes with players familiar with this by replacing "D_RUNNIN" with a modified 11-minute version as soon as you enter the second house. This version contains skipped beats, repeated choruses, instruments swapped out with other instruments, and at one point a guitar line from a completely different music track ("Sign of Evil" from the first Doom) fades in for several seconds, until it gets replaced with "memory=entryrrrr/////", which is much more honest about the fact that it is a modified version of Running from Evil.
  • Going to Underhalls (vanilla MAP02) after you exit the map is also a staple of amateur mapping. This mod turns it into part of the experience, and beating Underhalls is the only way to get the Super Shotgun in My House; this joke is taken even further by making the exit tile in the Mirror World House functional, which takes you instead to 20PAM - Sllahrednu, a Mirror World version of Underhalls. Completing the mirrored Underhalls sends you back to My House, except this time you spawn at the entrance of the Mirror World House. Underhalls as a map also features a building that represents the original level designer's house (specifically the brown building where the Mega Armor secret is concealed), making it an example of My House-ness in itself and furthering the in-joke.
  • Monsters in the Burnt House are all custom, hammering down the shift in tone if that's the first "hidden" area you encounter (which is likely to happen in a blind playthrough).
  • The community practically never plays Nightmare! difficulty because it's seen as unfair in many maps thanks to them not accounting for Nightmare!'s faster and relentlessly respawning monsters. This mod does account for this tendency away from Nightmare! — by making it an easy mode equivalent to I'm Too Young To Die, removing the monsters' new abilities from that mode but keeping its doubled ammo pickups.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: The exit teleporter in the house's yard is blocked by a tiny fence. Jumping is disabled in the map's definition, which prevents you from just hopping over it.
• Interface Spoiler: Quite a few good indications that there's way more to the map than just a simple recreation of a two-story house.
  • The long loading time it takes to get into the map in GZDoom is your first reminder.
  • If you look at the kill count on the automap, you'll see that there are more than a few monsters in the house.
  • The fact that the automap has been essentially disabled by coloring all of it black.
• In the Style of: According to its Soundcloud description, "memory=entryrrrr/////" is a remix of "D_RUNNIN" based on Leyland Kirby's Everywhere at the end of time, a series of remixes of 1920s and 30s ballroom jazz songs that progressively devolve into static, then organ drones to mimic the effects of dementia. In this case, the organ drones are replaced with a more conventional ambient synth part, itself noticeably influenced by the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack.
• Jump Scare: The game employs a few:
  • Interacting with the house's fuse box will abruptly blacken the screen and replace the audio with the sounds of screaming, which while not intense is still a jarring and sudden shift that can scare.
  • Getting trapped in the airport bathroom will cause monsters to appear out of nowhere once the entire room is covered in blood.
• Left the Background Music On: In the Fake Beach ending, there is a radio on the table next to the clapperboard. Interacting with it will turn off the ambient beach sounds, leaving you in total silence. You can't turn them back on.
• Mind Screw: Both in the map itself and in circumstances of its release.
  • There are several identical-looking versions of the house (and some more areas loosely based on it), and the player is seamlessly teleported between them by non-obvious triggers. Its primary version changes behind your back, revealing and hiding doors and areas. A Soulsphere in the outer yard can be seen through the windows while you're indoors, but disappears as soon as you leave, only serving as bait for one of the transitions.
  • The author's journal describes how the map is modifying itself as if it's possessed, and seemingly affects his dreams. Then the hidden QR code in a secret area shows that the presumed author died together with his friend, raising questions about how much of the backstory is actually true and who is the real creator.
• Minus World: Using a noclip cheat to either break out of the area you are currently in or use an exit teleporter that cannot be legitimately accessed will send you to an area modelled after the classic Backrooms image, where you are chased by a Skinstealer. While it is difficult to navigate due to the Backrooms' size and repetition, it is possible to escape the area through a door that takes you to the endless staircase. It's also possible to access the Backrooms by performing a Rocket Jump in the Brutalist House to reach a normally inaccessible exit teleporter. Another Backrooms area also exists, and can be accessed by trying to load Sllahrednu with console commands; unlike the main Backrooms, this one cannot be escaped.
• Mirror World: The entire map involves exploring multiple locations that, to varying degrees of subtlety, all seem to be variations of the same basic house template. A very literal version of this trope is accessed via the bathroom mirror, and is a completely inverted version of the house. A mirrored version of both Underhalls and the Gas Station can also be accessed from this area.
• Missing Reflection: Once you visit the GZDoom House, you'll notice that this version of the house uses GZDoom's lineportal technology to create mirrors with accurate reflections — only deliberately invoking this by removing the player's sprite, since GZDoom actually does render the player's reflection by default. This trope is inverted with a Christmas tree ornament in the attic, which doesn't appear in the house but is visible through the reflection, is your best hint that at least one of the mirrors in the house is a portal to a mirror dimension.
• Motifs: As the player explores the mod and finds the other buildings, they are bound to notice that they are all constructed exactly like, or at the very least invokes the shape of the original house. Which just so happens to be shaped like a classic Doom keycard.
• Multiple Endings: There are four endings you can achieve:
  • Ending 0: Simply leave through the blue keycard door outside, without checking out the Soulsphere on top of the pedestal. The game then takes you to Underhalls, and if you complete that... it sends you right back to My House. This way you can obtain the Super Shotgun and take it back to the main map, as hinted at by the message that appears when you type the IDFA cheat.
  • Ending 1: If you jump out the airplane in the Airport area without having collected the 14 artifacts to reveal a hidden fence passage, you are teleported to either an empty version of the House (if you didn't burn it down before) or a decayed and overgrown version (if you did) that disappears as soon as you leave through the front or back door, replaced by a sign reading SOLD. You can then leave through the blue skull door as in Ending 0.
  • Ending 2: Collect all 8 items required to fill in the 8 blank pictures in the living room of the house. When you return to the house, you'll find that the doors leading outside have reappeared, and that the large picture in the living room has changed. It now depicts the fence outside the house with a secret passage in it. Head to the spot indicated on the picture and open the passage, which will take you to a dark highway at night where you will find a gas station. Inside the storage room of the gas station you will find (what should be) the final item you need to fill in the 8 blank pictures in the mirrored house, which will unlock the same fence passage in the mirror world. In the mirror version of the gas station area, look for some smoke above the trees and follow it to find a campsite with Sweetie Graffiti carved into a tree. Interact with it and the tree opens up. Walk through and you will find yourself on a beach... that turns out to be completely fake, made up of cardboard cutouts and fake water. The same Sweetie Graffiti that was on the tree has been drawn in the sand, but is only half-finished. Walk behind the cutouts to find a clapperboard on a table. Interact with it and it snaps shut, turning the screen completely black and effectively ending your playthrough.
  • Ending 3: Do everything required for Ending 2, but after opening the tree, don't enter it. Instead, turn around and leave. This will spawn a shadowy Archvile that has so much health as to be effectively unkillable and can noclip through walls. It will chase you all the way back to the mirrored house, where it will start reviving all the enemies you've killed there. After escaping through the mirror back into the regular house, you'll find that it has repopulated with new enemies (including several regular Archviles). Thankfully, the Shadow Archvile can't follow you here. However, the house is now under siege by a massive horde of demons outside. After clearing them all out, head back through the fence passage to the gas station... where there's an even bigger horde of demons waiting for you. After you clear out those, the tree in the campsite on this side of the mirror will open, and you can enter it to find a real beach, where the Sweetie Graffiti in the sand is fully complete and intact. If you didn't kill the dog(s) in the Brutalist house, the Good Dog will also be on the beach sleeping. To hammer home that this is in fact the Golden Ending, upon entering the beach you finally discover the map's one and only secret.
• New Game Plus: Completing "Underhalls" will send you back to the very start of "My House", but also allows you to keep everything you collected in both maps. This is potentially a way of making the map's early combat encounters a lot faster, as well as an easy way of trying new routes and secrets you may have missed. This method is also notably the only method of getting the Super Shotgun into "My House", as it is only found within "Underhalls".
• Nightmarish Nursery: The Daycare is empty, surrounded by thick grey fog outside, has specks of blood on the floor in some rooms, and a creepy drawing of Shrek on a wall.
• No Fair Cheating:
  • The majority of classic Doom cheats are disabled; the exceptions are god mode and noclip, which can't be disabled by modders whatsoever. If you do try to noclip to cheat out of the level progression, you're sent straight to The Backrooms for your trouble.
  • Likewise, using cheats or jumping (a toggleable feature in GZDoom; the map disables it by default) to reach normally inaccessible exit teleporters (such as the one in the Brutalist House, which is separated from the rest of the level by an impassable gap) will send you to the Backrooms instead of exiting.
  • Sllahrednu has its own version of the Backrooms that punishes you for trying to warp into the map with console commands. Unlike the regular Backrooms, the one in Sllahrednu is inescapable.
  • The mod alters automap display so that the background and lines are all colored black, rendering it useless and forcing you to navigate the convoluted areas on your own.
  • The secret gravestone QR code has its texture formatted in a way that renders each quarter of the code in the corners of an image that is much larger than the gravestone itself. This obscures the code to anyone trying to browse the map's datamined texture files for secrets. However, unlike other cases in the mod, this can be brute forced far easier with understanding of how image textures work, but is still not the ideal or intended method of discovering the gravestone code.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The closet labyrinth is vast, has no lighting, no monsters, and even shuts off the music until you leave. If you venture deep enough, you'll eventually come across a massive water pool that's too deep to reach the bottom before you drown, and then eventually a massive hall with a spiral staircase that infinitely descends down. While the staircase loops if you walk down, jumping down the abyss is the only fall in the level that will kill you outright.
• Notice This: There's a Discord notification sound played when the player spends 10 minutes in the map, as an attempt to trick them into thinking their chat program is acting up.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: One of the first bits of teleportation trickery involving going to the basement in the initial version of the house is done rather sloppily if one knows to look for, with the walls visibly shifting if you look up when going downstairs. Experienced Doom-mod users might be looking out for this sort of thing, and seeing such a blatant teleport may serve to lower their guard and expectations, resulting in the rest of the map's tricks hitting them even harder.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: A somewhat rare example of the trope being Played for Horror. The typical 'Copyright/Permissions' section in the game's readme instead gives this:
  DO NOT COPY AND REDISTRIBUTE THE MATERIAL IN ANY MEDIUM OR FORMAT!
  I tried to delete this map but it continues to change and evolve without any input from me. What began as a tribute to a lost friend has consumed my entire life. As this map grew beyond what I created, I suffered paranoia and insomnia. It consumed me. Don't let it consume you as well. Delete it. Do not credit me. Do not try and contact me. Do not attempt to use the material for commercial purposes. Do not remix, transform, or build upon the material. Above all, do not distribute this file, modified or otherwise. I tried to keep it from the internet, but it found its way online. It's still changing. It wants you to feel sad. Alone. Desperate. Don't let it win. Don't play it.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • If you move the bookcase in the second house's basement and use the fusebox in the room inside, the house is permanently replaced with the Burnt House, locking you into Ending 1 as you can't make any further progress with the artifact puzzle.
    Message that appears when you turn IDDQD off: There's no good outcome from a house fire.
  • There are only two ways to get to the Brutalist House without going through the Burnt House (Bathhouse and Escape portal in the boiler room) and each of them can only be used once. Should you fall from the Brutalist House twice, you'll have no choice but to use the fusebox and go through the Burnt House.
  • Once you leave the Bathhouse - either by falling off or reaching the exit leading to the Brutalist House - you can't enter it again so if you've missed any artifacts you'll be once again locked into Ending 1.
  • If you enter the house without checking the garage, the secret chainsaw in said garage becomes inaccessible, as it is replaced with a Chalk Outline.
  • The secret room containing the Plasma Rifle in the Brutalist House requires the blue keycard to open, meaning you could be locked out of getting it if you were a bit too eager to go outside and grab that oh-so-tempting Soulsphere, turning the house into the GZDoom House and making the keycard inaccessible. Even if you did get the keycard, you can leave the map through the mirror world exit before going to the Brutalist House. When you return from sllahrednU, you'll be in the mirror world, but all the keycards and skull keys you collected the first time will have reset. Since you can only access the GZDoom House from here, you can't get any keycards at all, so no Plasma Rifle for you.
• Point of No Return:
  • The first is entering the first house, where the player will not immediately notice the chainsaw secret being inaccessible. After seeing and heading to the soul sphere pedestal, the exit changes to requiring the blue skull key. When the player grabs the blue skull key, the doors outside disappear, trapping the player inside the house.
  • Counts as Nasty within the map: entering the Burnt House at all prevents the player from reaching either of My House's real endings, and it's very easy to visit the Burnt House after going to the GZDoom House because the fusebox that causes the transition makes a sound effect that draws the player in, and the player (if going in blind) won't even know there are multiple endings. However, it's still possible to eventually reach the level exit, go through Underhalls and try the level again.
• Recurring Element:
  • Keeping with the mod's themes of memories, repetition, and Eldritch Locations, most of the designs of areas that aren't variations of the house itself still match its original layout, such as the living room's archway appearing in the bathhouse and airport, the daycare matching the downstairs basement, the gas station matching the whole upper floor, to the hospital room resembling one of the bedrooms.
  • Although its significance is unknown, the same car appears in several sections of the map, such as outside the daycare, in the underground parking lot, and crashed in the woods next to the gas station.
• Schmuck Bait: There's a soul sphere sitting just outside the window inviting you to step out into the garden after it. Actually going after it will trigger the transformation of the House.
• Shout-Out:
  • Typing the IDCLIP cheat to activate noclip mode gives you a message reading "Be careful not to clip out of reality in the wrong areas...". Doing so and going outside the map's bounds anyway will send you to the actual Backrooms.
  • Almost every variation of the house after the second is a recreation of a famous "Liminal Space" showcased on the internet, such as the daycare (which features a creepy drawing of Shrek similar to its inspiration), the bathhouse (Poolrooms), and the Brutalist House (the Liminal Hotel/Heathrow Holiday Inn Express).
  • Several shout-outs to House of Leaves:
    • The realty firm that sells the lot the house used to be in from one of the endings is called Navidson Realty, the surname of one of the main characters' family.
    • A labyrinth similar to the one from the book may randomly replace the closet in the master bedroom.
    • The journal in the mod's Google Drive folder highlights every instance of the word "house" with blue, just like the novel.
  • The souvenir shop in the Airport has T-shirts with the Ghostbusters logo, the number 9 3/4, and BMO, among others.
  • When you first enter the Brutalist House, you can turn right and look out through what was originally the driveway to see a void of endless apartment windows; this parallels a similar scene from the first video of Kane Pixel's The Backrooms, featuring a character looking out into a similar void of parking garage entrances.
  • The crashed car next to the gas station has The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet playing on its radio.
  • One of the artifacts in the Brutalist House is "Pumpkin Rick", a reference to Pickle Rick from Rick and Morty.
  • The 'regular' entrance to the Bathhouse involves a non-euclidean passageway of consecutive left turns that loop in on themselves, designed in a similar fashion to a puzzle seen in Antichamber.
  • A wall you can walk through in the boiler room to the brutalist room has a curved square drawn on it that resembles the one from The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Little Girl Lost", where a girl finds herself trapped in another dimension through a wall in her house.
  • In the garage, there is a cardboard box that hides the chainsaw. However if the chainsaw doesn't appear when opened, it will instead reveal a chalk outline of a chainsaw.
  • One of the posters in the gas station advertises "Action Beer," a product and health item which comes from the 2008 .wad Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl.
  • While the Bloodfiend ambush in the airport womens' restroom is similar to a cutscene that was featured in the 2002 Prototype of Doom 3, (The scene in question can be viewed here) it bares an even stronger resemblance to the infamous Silent Hill 3 mirror room. (Which can be seen here) The use of mirrors as a visual portal into another world is also a cosmetic element in the final release of Doom 3.
  • Players who have previously played Blood will see that the cerberus and fish enemies use sprites directly lifted from Blood. Thankfully, the cerberus is not nearly as hard to fight as it was in Blood.
• Signs of Disrepair: The Shell gas station sign flickers out to read "HELL".
• Skippable Boss:
  • "Bad doggy", the large, two-headed version of the dog in the Brutalist house, can either be simply avoided or disposed of by killing "good doggy" in the regular Brutalist house. Managing to get through the Brutalist house without killing it will have "good doggy" sleeping on the beach in Ending 3.
  • In the same vein, you can very easily avoid the Hellfish in the Bathhouse's pool area, taking the associated artifact near the bottom of the pool and escaping into the nearby hole.
• Stylistic Suck: The initial version of the house is deliberately modelled to look like a beginner's user-map from around Doom II's release and features many of the hallmarks of amateur map design, such as leaving the level music unchanged from "D_RUNNIN" (the default Map 01 MIDI) and using a jarring Boom-style silent teleport trick on the basement stairway to create the impression of a room-over-room layout. All of this is done to lull the player into a false sense of security and over time many of these simpler elements are quietly altered or phased out and replaced with more sophisticated level design tricks.
• Surreal Horror: The mod's incredibly disturbing atmosphere comes from just how little sense it makes and the bizarre Alien Geometry.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: After you return to the house from the mirrored gas station, it generates new stashes of ammo to prepare you for the onslaught of monsters outside. Then as you re-approach the gas station, you find a massive cache of ammo and armor for The War Sequence that ensues right after it.
• Synchronization: The Brutalist house has two dogs: the "good doggy" (an adorable German Shepherd called "Best Buddy", which innocently follows you around and is completely harmless) in the small area, and the "bad doggy" (a nightmarish Cerberus that viciously chases you down and attempts to maul you) in the "child-sized" large area. Both dogs are linked by a pair of actor scripts that check if the other is still alive, so killing the monstrous "bad doggy" will also put down the friendly "good doggy", and vice versa.
• Toilet Horror: The women's bathroom in the airport. At first you see blood-splattered walls in the mirrors, walking further makes blood appear on real walls, and finally you're attacked by a group of blood fiends. After you leave, the blood disappears both in the real room and in the reflection.
• Unable to Retreat: The game requires getting the blue skull key to unlock the exit. Picking it up removes the doors leading out of the house.
• Uncanny Valley:
  • The mod invokes this as a part of its presentation — the way several of the level's elements transform and transition from almost-vanilla style to some truly wild custom-drawn scenery, the doors go from basic Doom doors to swinging polyobject doors, the music transforms from "D_RUNNIN" to an increasingly off-kilter version and then into a surreal and heavily distorted track that still has tiny shreds of "D_RUNNIN" still present in it, and the use of the UI elements and even the console messages, it all runs together to present what looks like a seemingly-normal amateur My House map that transforms into something more, as it seems to adhere to or exaggerate some of the traditional Doom map elements while breaking past a lot of common player expectations for the others.
  • The player is about 30% taller than usual when myhouse.pk3 is loaded. While it's difficult to notice when in the house due to it being made for that scale, it makes Underhalls feel smaller than it should, in spite of the map not actually being altered by the mod.
  • The drawing of Shrek in the Daycare is wrong in minor details, such as slightly different skin tone, too wide and toothy grin, and a murderous, glassy-eyed stare, which makes it unnerving even despite its cartoonish nature. The fact that the actor name of its monster version is "childhood nightmare" indicates that this is intentional.
• Unique Enemy: Some non-standard Doom enemies appear for only one segment:
  • Ghostly imps called Nightmares only appear in the Bathhouse's main area.
  • Pale red Cacodemon variants called Hemodemons only appear near the end of the Bathhouse, in the blue skybox area.
  • Bloodfiends, red Pinky demon variants, only appear in the women's bathroom segment in the Airport.
  • Floating gaseous orbs called Blots only appear in the Airplane itself, spawning in behind you after pressing use on the cockpit.
• Video Game Caring Potential: If you achieve the Golden Ending without killing either of the dogs in the Brutalist house (which means having to run away from the "bad doggy" while exploring it), the good dog will join you on the ending beach.
• The War Sequence: The route to the Golden Ending will become populated with a considerable group of monsters. This is the most intense action sequence of the level.
• Wham Shot: Looking through a window of the living room, you can rather clearly see a Soulsphere in the backyard. Heading around the back, the Soulsphere is nowhere to be found... and, going back into the house, not only have all the enemies you just killed respawned, but you may notice an uptick in quality, including GZDoom's smoother gun animations. This is where you realize that the mod might not be so simple.
• White Void Room: The fake beach in Ending 2 is set up in a room with a solid white skybox and an invisible floor past the "sand" and "sea", giving the illusion of a white void. The real beach, for comparison, has a proper skybox depicting a sunset.

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A SECRET IS REVEALED!