This review contains spoilers
SPOILER ALERT!! THIS SHIT GETS PERSONAL!!! I'M WORKING THROUGH SOME STUFF!!
so now that i have spent many hours with My House I feel really comfortable digging into it. i found this to be a very emotional experience, and that is mostly due to it coming out at a very specific time for me.
my friend passed away earlier this month, and this game really does capture the sorrow of losing someone so close to you in such a tangible way. the place where they were is now empty, it feels haunted, when i found him that night i spent a few days wishing our apartment would burn down and take every last memory with it, i wished it would stand where it was forever as an untouched monument to him. i would find myself mentally there again, opening his bedroom door. The collection of artifacts that relate to him, there is a burning truth to how My House presents grief and how it really is its own non-euclidean nightmare.
Places that once brought you joy now feel flooded, burnt out, grey and lifeless, your ability to keep track of time and place dissolves as you end up somewhere again and again without knowing why you got there. Things that used to not mean much to you like their favorite drink now carry a significance to them. It captures the things that you can't describe to someone else about it, it really felt therapeutic to feel understood by the game.
The fact that this is done in Doom is a testament to how expertly crafted it is, how the blown-up JPEG of a house really sells the narrative that this is just another house map made in Doom. The tragedy, to me, is that my friend would have loved this mod, this was exactly the kind of shit he went crazy for. Now it's a very personal thing to me as I try to understand why he left me.
My House is not going to be for everyone, we are basically counting down until Markiplier is shrieking over it and there are a dozen of Doom wads about scary houses, but until then this is a powerful piece of grieving that makes you walk through its halls and observe the damage it does.
Perhaps there is also something to be said for how damaging it is the deeper we dig into the meanings, the what's and why's. The distortion becomes unbearable the deeper down the rabbit hole we go. Maybe it was best to leave it as it was while we had the chance? But they left us with so few answers we feel we have to dig deeper.
If I have to complain about something that is free that I felt like I should have paid money for, parts do require you be better at Doom than you might expect. So if you aren't used to circle-strafing and dodging, this mod is actually pretty tough in spots. Other than that, I hope to God no more Doom mods illicit this kind of emotion out of me again.
so now that i have spent many hours with My House I feel really comfortable digging into it. i found this to be a very emotional experience, and that is mostly due to it coming out at a very specific time for me.
my friend passed away earlier this month, and this game really does capture the sorrow of losing someone so close to you in such a tangible way. the place where they were is now empty, it feels haunted, when i found him that night i spent a few days wishing our apartment would burn down and take every last memory with it, i wished it would stand where it was forever as an untouched monument to him. i would find myself mentally there again, opening his bedroom door. The collection of artifacts that relate to him, there is a burning truth to how My House presents grief and how it really is its own non-euclidean nightmare.
Places that once brought you joy now feel flooded, burnt out, grey and lifeless, your ability to keep track of time and place dissolves as you end up somewhere again and again without knowing why you got there. Things that used to not mean much to you like their favorite drink now carry a significance to them. It captures the things that you can't describe to someone else about it, it really felt therapeutic to feel understood by the game.
The fact that this is done in Doom is a testament to how expertly crafted it is, how the blown-up JPEG of a house really sells the narrative that this is just another house map made in Doom. The tragedy, to me, is that my friend would have loved this mod, this was exactly the kind of shit he went crazy for. Now it's a very personal thing to me as I try to understand why he left me.
My House is not going to be for everyone, we are basically counting down until Markiplier is shrieking over it and there are a dozen of Doom wads about scary houses, but until then this is a powerful piece of grieving that makes you walk through its halls and observe the damage it does.
Perhaps there is also something to be said for how damaging it is the deeper we dig into the meanings, the what's and why's. The distortion becomes unbearable the deeper down the rabbit hole we go. Maybe it was best to leave it as it was while we had the chance? But they left us with so few answers we feel we have to dig deeper.
If I have to complain about something that is free that I felt like I should have paid money for, parts do require you be better at Doom than you might expect. So if you aren't used to circle-strafing and dodging, this mod is actually pretty tough in spots. Other than that, I hope to God no more Doom mods illicit this kind of emotion out of me again.