If you're here, you already know this isn't just a house.

Playing through this blind is undoubtedly the best way to experience My House. Don't watch one of the rapidly-emerging, multi-hour video essays on YouTube about it: just get the link to the forum, download the .zip, and get exploring. If you're not too experienced with this stuff (like I wasn't), you want to drag-n-drop myhouse.pk3 onto GZDoom (NOT myhouse.wad). Obviously, "the end" is not the end nor your real goal: look around a bit and you'll be rewarded for it. Is that space a bit bigger than it should be?

I recommend getting to a point where you can't explore any further, and I won't explain what I mean by that, before reading something like this guide/wiki. You'll likely reach the same ending point I did, as my biggest problem with this map/level/experiment/tribute is that some of the items required to "complete" it requires some pretty arcane knowledge and skills, and at a certain point, against-better-judgement decisions. You won't be reaching the "best" outcome on your own, you can bet on that, but I think that's worth pursuing after your blind run as it leads to a lot more 'game'.

My House is good fun. Very different, spooky, and wildly creative. It wears its seemingly-biggest inspiration, "House of Leaves", proudly on its sleeve. The "closet" is a pretty big hint, but seeing the name "Navidson" is a dead giveaway. I love the book and highly recommend it, and it was pretty cool to see it (somewhat) in a game. Try out My House, it's a great adventure I recommend!

The mapping detail and music are pretty great, but those are really the only positives I can give to this attempt at another "haunted video game" thing, because the lore included with the game overshadows these things and is the main point of this mod.
I don't understand why people unironically think this game is the greatest Doom 2 mod of the year just because it taps into the whole "scary haunted video game" genre that most indie games, game mods (including this one) or web series just can't seem to get right for the past few years. The thing I hate the most about this mod is the inclusion of the "liminal spaces" thing. It just feels really, really forced.
Please stop giving this the large amount of attention it doesn't deserve.

The advent of the Doom modding community, and especially with how the ZDOOM engine is handled, has made it so that a common joke is that you can get by on gaming with purely community-made mods and even releases to be sold on sites such as Itch.io and Steam. It speaks to the lengths of Doom's legacy that even today, notable iterations and offerings of ID Software's philosophy and principles are regularly shared in the Doomworld forum, be it for fun, artistic endeavors, or even good ol fashion trolling.

My House, in particular, mangles the item value, enemy positioning, and overall layout of the map and positional checkpoints in its multiple unraveling throughout the runtime is phenomenal to watch unfold. I'm not intimately familiar with map building within the system's quirk myself - I'm creative and persistent, but not that creative and persistent - but I know enough thanks to various sources that this is a bit of a boundary pusher. There's also some bonus activations from each 'special' spots, be it for Easter Egg purposes (more on this in a bit) or actual gameplay purposes, a tad of which hark more acutely to what the Build Engine titles would do, and it's all very good shit. Due to this, the most appropriate word to describe this with just one would be "wispy"; the feeling where you're familiar with the idea of the environment but know there's wrinkles and nuances to what can establish it that, if done improperly, can spell out the disillusioned mantra, unveiling its macabre being. There's the occasional room hunt befuddling and questionable design choices when it comes to how something activates or what you have to do to progress, but a majority of the time it's something you can quickly get a feel of. About the only other thing I can criticize is the final third's use of enemy encounter leaning towards Spam Central, but part of me, be it by intentional choice or through a personal read, views this as more of a point than a serious critique of a Doom map.

Now, I played through this thrice: once in a quick-and-dirty play, the other when curiosity got the better of me knowing there had to be more considering what my friends have said, and finally the one with the "good ending" as detailed within its page on the Doom wiki (not the awful Fandom one, the good one) as well as a speedrun video on the wad, surprisingly enough. There's something to be said about the experience becoming a victim of abjection due to the use of a walkthrough, how this robs you of initial reaction and well-defined thoughts, yadda yadda yadda listen I just said I played this two times before, and it's not like most of what I've laid to see within text-form didn't impact what I witness unfold from my own eyes and how that affects the thematic revelations, I think I'm allowed this one. I don't want to give a lot of the magic away, which is why I'm being mostly vague about the inner meat of the body, but the warps to anachronistic, dream-like villas of places I'm familiar with, of brutalization and corrupted foundations within these settings abounded by frustration and melancholy, propagated by illuminated spaces and lighting, all compounded by relics of various time periods and objects of importance, either in plain sight or dug from each burrowing of the moment-to-moment design and visual feedback... let's just say I get where the head space was before.

The most common read of emotion for My House is grief, and while true in the broadest sense, doubly so considering what the zip file is packed with and finer investigations others have found, there's an undercurrent of self-loathing and warped perception of the fallout of events that seem to trickle in during the more hectic routines of said enemy encounters, with or without the infighting tricks. I wish I could say more, but I'm already going too deep as it is, so I'm holding it off from here. I dunno about one of the best Doom mods around, but it's surely one of the more interesting experiments I've delved into, and as such I recommend it to anyone wanting to get a fix in and, to perpetuate a sentiment others have shared already, go into this as blind as you can. Already gonna eye-roll at potential videos clamoring and beholding this to be "a super terrifying and surreal Doom mod", but that's just the way the Internet works, so no use pouting about it.

I really should read Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves, various works of Inio Asano, and continue Hideo Yamamoto's Ichi The Killer at some point.

I went into this completely blind not even knowing this mod existed until a friend of mine basically forced me to play it, and I wanna apologize for all the mean things I said to them because my god this is probably one of the best Doom mods I’ve ever play.

The places this Mod takes you is just otherworldly and something I wish more pieces of media would try doing. I just recently played through the game Garten of Banban 3 and that game tries really hard to tap into the psychological horror of liminal spaces; but fails miserably since the devs are hacks and refuse to actually try with interesting level design. In compersion with this mod, made for a game that can run on a fucking pregnancy tester; has some of the most outstanding usage of liminal spaces since seen since the backrooms first came out. (before it was overrun with children and stupid lore) The way this mod just takes Dooms engine and just completely revamps it to do this the base game could ever achieve is so stupidly impressive I’m just blown away whenever I even think of the mod or the levels that take place in it. I don’t really wanna say anything about the mod since I feel like going in blind and unaware of the events in the game is the best way to play it, this is more or just me gushing about how much I’m blown away by the amount of work and passion is just seeping out of this mod. Like you really didn’t need to be cooking this hard for a Doom mod but they did and I respect the hell out of them.

Go play it or else I’ll break into your house and replace all the coke you have with Pepsi (unless you already have Pepsi, in which case I’ll just take a dump in your bathroom and not flush)