The House of Leaves-inspired game MyHouse.wad is just as trippy as you'd think.

This demon shooting video game mod might be your new favorite book.

MyHouse.wad is a 2023 mod—short for modification, in this case a series of custom levels—for 1994’s Doom II, the second in a franchise of wildly influential games that started with 1993’s Doom, that turns the game into a surreal and lo-res horror about loss and home. The Doom games involve running around and blasting monsters, but they’ve also inspired a lot of fun experiments, including running the original game on a pregnancy test. MyHouse.wad is part of this long, experimental tradition and has a particular literary origin: it is inspired by the genre-bending novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, which also uses an unexpected form as a Trojan Horse for telling a deeper, stranger story.

If the term “installing a Doom II .wad file” is making you break out in hives, don’t worry, I also didn’t get this set up on my computer. Thankfully there is an excellent, nearly two hour video by YouTuber Power Pak that walks through MyHouse.wad and unpacks the various references and connections to House of Leaves. It’s a trip.

The mod appeared a few years ago on a forum by a user named Veddge, who wrote that MyHouse.wad was started by their childhood friend who had recently passed away. Veddge found the abandoned project on a floppy disc among the friend’s belongings, and finished the map as “a way of paying tribute to him and all the great memories we had together.”

It’s worth going to the Power Pak video at this point if you’re curious, but things start getting weird almost immediately upon booting up. The player starts outside a house, fairly suburban and plain. Turns out it’s filled with demons to slay, and the goal is to find a key to unlock an exit in the backyard. So far, so Doom.

But soon the house starts changing and expanding in small ways that, as Power Pak explains, should be impossible for the game’s engine to render. As the player continues to explore, the house morphs in more surprising ways: monsters reappear, objects change, and rooms open up where they shouldn’t be able to. It’s creepy and strange.

From the videos I’ve watched, MyHouse.wad is an impressive bit of surreal storytelling, using recursive imagery and scene setting within a familiar frame to frightening effect. It makes sense that this was all inspired by House of Leaves, a book that is also starts out inhabiting a familiar format before shifting and breaking.

The mod’s designer Veddge leaves (pun intended) a lot of clues about their inspiration. At the end of the first level, there’s a yard sign for “Navidson Realty,” a reference to characters in House. Later, the player gets stuck in a labyrinth similar to one described in House of Leaves. And this story isn’t just told within the game’s levels. The mod’s files come packaged in a folder with photos and a text file, a journal where the creator writes about sleeplessly losing their connection to reality as they work to complete their friend’s map. The word “house” is highlighted in blue in this journal, another reference.

If you’re curious, it’s worth poking around the Wikipedia page, especially to see all the references, layers, and endings Veddge build into their multimedia piece. But if you have the time and interest, Power Pak’s video is a great exploration of this weird piece of art, and nicely recreates the feeling of experiencing the game’s twists in real time. And the video is perhaps endorsed by Danielewski, who posted it on X.

I’m very enamored by how Veddge re-imagines both Danielewski’s house that isn’t what it seems and Doom’s mechanics of rendering a pixel world of demons. Is MyWorld.wad literature? Why not? Literature is expansive, and creativity inspires more creativity, in an endless, virtuous cycle.