My House / YMMV - TV Tropes

Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Discord message notification sound that is scripted to play 10:00 minutes into the map. Its sole purpose is to distract the player and it has nothing to do with the story of the mod.
Common Knowledge: There seems to be a widespread misconception that the player must die in the Airport in order to access the hidden Hospital area. In reality, the player can go there by dying in any part of the level, even in the very first iteration of the house. Since the Airport bathroom features a relatively tough and sudden enemy ambush as the last major combat encounter in a casual playthrough of the map, it is sensible that it is the most common place for a player to die, hence the misconception.
Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: A wide array of blatant and subtle details regarding item placements, map details and even line definitions and actor names in the editor can point to an array of different theories about what the map represents.
Fridge Brilliance:
- The novel House of Leaves talks about Johnny Truant discovering a critical dissertation written by Zampanò, in which he describes the film The Navidson Record made by Will Navidson. The wad's three main endings each reflect the endings of these three narrators' stories:
  - At the end of the film, Navidson and his family leave the house and go to Vermont. In Ending 1, the house disappears, and the lot is sold by a firm named Navidson Realty.
  - Zampanò's manuscript ends describing the film's final shot: a street light flickering out and plunging everything in darkness. If you reach Ending 2, your playthrough ends when you interact with a clapperboard, turning the screen black and effectively ending the "film" (game).
  - Johnny's writings end very ambiguously, but according to some readers, he dies or otherwise ceases to exist; but finally finds peace. Many players have a similar theory about Ending 3 and Steve, the wad's author.
- The path to Ending 3 has you fighting against hordes of demons, classic Doom style. Which is weird, considering all of the mind bending nonsense that went on preceding the hordes, but you remember that even if it is a psychological mind bender, it's still Doom at heart.
  - Power Pak's essay also highlights a line from the journal relating to the beach endings that straight up foreshadow the hordes of demons that appear in your way if you pursue Ending 3 - "happiness must be fought for". In this case, quite literally.
  - If Ending 3 results in Steve finding peace, he does so because you helped him conquer his demons.
Gateway Series: The unusually wide amount of attention this wad received introduced a lot of players to the world of classic Doom modding and custom maps.
Genius Programming: The map's intricate structure uses extensive amounts of silent teleportation, carefully set up triggers, custom inventory items, self-revealing/hiding doorways, and careful positioning of transition points to disguise the massive amount of seemingly-non-Euclidean map geometry being simulated. To further conceal the secrets of how the map works, the noclip cheat is rendered less helpful by punishing anyone trying to sneak out-of-bounds by transporting them into the Backrooms labyrinth. The automap is rendered in black-on-black to conceal the true shape of the world from the player's eyes. Various cheat codes and the jump function are also disabled to prevent most attempts at Sequence Breaking. There is a four part video on youtube by DavidXNewton that shows all the clever uses of the Doom, Boom and UDMF features with detailed explanations (the videos include heavy spoilers).
Memetic Mutation:
- 10 Minute Playthrough.^Explanation
- Lawnmower speedrun^Explanation
Nightmare Retardant: The boss you face in the Daycare is based on Shrek, and due to being slow and melee-only, is rather easy to defeat, potentially making the combat encounter unintentionally goofy. On the other hand, the buildup to the fight (an uncanny-looking wall picture that disappears while you're not looking and later emerges from the mist in an abandoned playground) can still make it rather creepy.
Player Punch: Killing the large two-headed dog in the larger Brutalist House will kill the friendly dog in the regular-sized one, which is bound to make the player feel bad for doing so, with many often going out of their way to avoid fighting either dog in subsequent runs.
Special Effect Failure:
- Since Doom cannot handle Variable Mixes of music tracks, the transition between the normal version of "Running From Evil" and the version that gradually becomes off-kilter is very sudden, sounding to a casual listener like the song just restarted for no reason. In a game that otherwise got a lot of its acclaim from how well it hides its technical tricks, this one remains extremely obvious even to someone unaware of the wad's nature.
- A closer inspection of the plane in the airport reveals that it's a flat texture, not unlike a giant cardboard cutout.
Spiritual Successor:
- The mod can feel similar to B.P.R.D.'s beloved Grove.wad, a Doom mod highly regarded as one of the best mods of the early 2000s for its dreamy atmosphere and clever mapping tricks and music. Grove is actually a more pleasant ride compared to the nightmarish scenery of Myhouse.
- The 2014 megawad Going Down has a similar premise (an ordinary office building that gets more hellish with each level, only to disappear after the final level) and is also notable for its level design, Doomcute, and clever mapping tricks.^note It's worth noting that Going Down was created by the notorious animator known for his nightmarish animations, Cyriak Harris.
- The Thing You Can't Defeat from a year earlier is an episode replacement with a similar concept to Myhouse.pk3, in this case being the first episode of the original Doom that slowly deteriorates as you play it, representing the memory loss of a dementia patient in a fashion similar to the album Everywhere at the end of time.
- The game's premise of a dreamy setting that becomes more and more bizarre is similar to LSD: Dream Emulator. Both games feature the idea of areas that transform and become more and more troubling if you dig deep enough, and are related to logged dreams. A major difference here is that the concept is built around Doom gameplay and the transition to new areas is much more subtle.
- Overall, the mod itself feels like the closest thing to a proper adaptation that is possible of House of Leaves in video game form with its themes and Mind Screw nature, and given all of the intentional nods and references to the book, it's hardly a coincidence that was somewhat the intent.
Spoiled by the Format: A simple Doom level that relies on stock Doom assets will not have a file size greater than 1 megabyte, unless it's filled with chunks that greatly inflate the file size. However, while downloading Myhouse.pk3 ^note you may notice that it has a larger file size for a simple Doom map (in fact, at 66.5 MB, it takes up more data than vanilla Doom and Doom II combined), giving away that the mod might have more than a few map chunks inside. And if you didn't notice the file size, the unusually long loading time will be your last reminder.
Tear Jerker: The simple, sobering message you get if you pick up the baby bottle from the crib in the mirrored attic.
"It wasn't meant to be."
They Copied It, So It Sucks!: The wad has received some criticism for leaning heavily on the visual and narrative motifs of House of Leaves and The Backrooms. While winning praise for translating 'liminal horror' into a video game format, there are some that wish the game didn't wear its influences on its sleeve quite as openly.
Trans Audience Interpretation: Since the game hints that Steve has been in both a heterosexual (the unused crib with the bottle in the attic) and homosexual (Steve and Thomas both having gender-shy high school sweethearts) relationship while being extremely ambiguous in the details of both, it has led to a theory by some fans that Thomas is a transgender man who Steve was in a relationship with both pre and post-transition, pointing to some other details within the map:
- The whole deal with the airport's bathrooms. The women's side will gradually turn into a bloodbath preceding a demon ambush if you try to enter it, and once you escape it you can discover that the signs for the men's and women's bathrooms have been swapped. Given that you play as Doomguy as usual and the story's two named characters are both male, is this meant to be symbolic of gender dysphoria and the fear of retaliation that many trans people face in trying to use public bathrooms that match their gender identity? The way that the home's bathrooms also seems to represent a portal into another world could also fit into this theory.
- The "S+A" Sweetie Graffiti. At a glance, it seems to be referencing Steve Nelson and Thomas Allord... but that certainly seems like a weird way for a pair of young sweethearts to write their own names. One theory, assuming that the graffiti is indeed about Steve and Thomas, is that the 'A' actually refers to Thomas' deadname and was written before his transition.

YMMV / My House

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