You know, something crazy I just realized about the house is how... You can just end the playthrough your first go around by burning the house down. The goal IS to escape the house, afterall. You get trapped in past a certain checkpoint and your only interest is just in getting out past that point, so you do and... Well, you just get curious. Curiosity brings you back and you find out that you didn't just miss a "big" chunk of the story, you missed everything. It keeps unfolding and unfolding further and further with seemingly no end in sight until it just DOES and drops you with some choice dialogue that really makes you think. Happiness must be fought for. The QR code suggesting the creator's death. The unspoken, concealed love story hidden in this old WAD. This game stops being scary when it becomes a MEMORY you're just reliving, and that's what gives MyHouse such a special feel. It doesn't feel like a horror game trying to scare you, it just feels like it plucked you out of 2023 and placed you right down in a child's fever dream from the late 90's. It's so haunting and nostalgic in all of the right AND wrong ways, like we're peering into an unbiased, undistorted MEMORY. It stops being scary and you just want to know what is actually going on here. I don't know if I can think of another game that's provoked these kinds of feelings and thoughts which makes MyHouse pretty d*** unique in my book.
"Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour.”
I've associated it with the airport. The wad came out around the time I started travelling by myself by plane, and the rising chords really captured the feeling of being in a small and nearly desolate airport at 5 in the morning, before the sun was rising.
The 90s as a kid was one hell of a drug. Whispers of the 80s overlapping with the promise of a golden future of the millennium on the horizon, long phone calls with friends and struggles to play games together at lan parties. Eventually you look back and realize you took it all for granted, and your friends not there with you anymore, but somehow threw the noise and emotionally traumatic experience of realizing all of that you have to press forward, for yourself and for your friend.
On another musical release in a similar emotional space, someone commented that instead of feeling melancholy, we should try to imagine ourselves sitting next to our younger selves and old friends, sharing in the enjoyment of what they were experiencing at that time. They would want us to be happy for all the good times we had. I can't help but think about that with music like this (and the mod itself). You're right that we have to push forwards, but damn if it's hard not to wish yourself back there.
I've never resonated more with a comment in my life. I know it's a bit of a stereotypical thing to say these days, but I genuinely don't feel that being a 90's kid can be related to by either generations before or after us. So much technological innovation occured right there during our childhoods and we, exclusively, got to watch the very nature of childhood change and become warped by all of the tech we were introduced to in our teens. At first smart phones and social media and MMO's were so cool, but that was only until we looked back and realized those very things made us stop hanging outside with friends, stop having social lan parties, stop doing all of the other things we used to do and APPRECIATE before the internet came into our lives. And it happened so f***ing quickly. The generations before us were already grown, the generations after us were born already having access to this tech or had it introduced by the time they were 6-9. It's hard to not feel "alone". And that's what keeps bringing me back to this god d*** WAD. It's so bitter and lonely. It makes me miss my childhood while also making me realize not EVERYTHING was so bright and peachy; the people I grew up with didn't all lead successful lives. My friend mind overdosed and died, my best friend who I moved away from became an alcoholic woman beater, my other bestie is struggling more now than ever and he just walked in on his dead father in the kitchen the other day. It's genuinely haunting. And all of this evoked from a Doom WAD despite years before this memes springing up about Xbox Live friends you'd never talk to again or the last day you spent with your friends not knowing it was the last day you would. They were still painful thoughts before, but this game contextualized it in a way that really just brings you back. Now, more than ever, I wish I could just rewind the clock and see my friends again before the world corrupted, killed, or hurt them. But that isn't ever going to happen. You have to move on and fight for your own happiness, nostalgia is just a drug to distract you from what's happening right here and now.
@@Impalingthorn I can’t imagine how it feels to be that deep into your life, I feel it only gets heavier as the decades pass. Even after the 90’s in the early 2000’s i’m sure you guys still had true childhood happiness in you. It’s only after the 2000’s passed that I think it really started to hit for y’all like early 2010’s. I was born in 2000 exactly & I got everything left from the 90s & all of the 2000s at the same time. The 2000’s/early 2010’s was a crazy time to be a kid & I hated how much everyone around me was glued to technology already. I was always an outside kid, I wanted to climb the highest roof & any tree in sight. I loved finding salamanders under rocks with my best friend down the street & riding our bikes everywhere. Going home to play on our PS1 & 2 for a while until before it got dark. I only lived as a young kid for a second, & then before I knew it by the time I was 17 I wasn’t even in high school. Living this shaky couch to couch lifestyle just wanting to go home. I blinked & then it was already almost 2020 & the 2010’s were over. I wasn’t a teenager anymore & that really hit. & everything from 2000 up to that point was gone already. I only blinked once or twice but I wasn’t even ready to, I just wanted to get back there. 10 years ahead of this, like where the perspective of 90s kids is at right now, I’m gonna be right there with y’all. Reminiscing & chasing the feeling to just get back there at least one more time.. The only difference in y’all’s generation to one’s now is the constant disconnection from true nature & life. Some still live that life i’m sure of it, but technology has definitely covered everyone’s eyes & we will never get back to how it was. Growing old with time really sucks. I just want to go back because I don’t know where i’m going now.
This is what makes this piece so melancholic this is like reminiscing memories of a long bygone era that no longer exists anymore as if that's what liminal spaces actually is.
This somehow always makes me imagine that this is what it feels like to cast off all of my burdens and problems and enter a different reality or something. I'm just standing there as a calm ghost looking at all of my problems on an objective perspective and looking back at all of the old and ancient memories I have forgotten throughout the years playing before my eyes.
This song inspires me to write, but when I go to write I can never settle on anything. So I keep coming back and hoping the inner voice speaks to me. But instead I just listen. Floating along the waves on the beach. Maybe another day.
I love how ambient music like this is just always so good at evoking so many strange feelings and emotions out of me. It's amazing music like this that's inspired so many of my strangest creations that I'm the most proud of. It's such an overlooked music genre that seriously carries a games atmosphere, tension, and even scariness in some cases. I love this.
It’s like White Noiz from Silent Hill 2, especially at parts like 13:37 Makes me feel like I’m in a safe and comfy space, yet it’s the last comfy space left on Earth.
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but the wad and pk3 really bring together so many amazing elements into this utterly surreal story mode. And it boosted so many of them via MyHouse. Backrooms got a nice boost, Esselfortium did, and so did Statues In Motion and Like the Wind, the song they don't claim.
Esselfortium has a number of works out there, but this one really gained fame through MyHouse. It just fit what the designer was doing so incredibly well.
I made a video a couple months ago using the back half of this soundtrack. I was going through a couple things, mainly a separation. It's been a very long time since I connected with a piece of a music like I did with this one, if ever. After finding out the origins of the mod, that it was actually based on Steve's relationship with his wife coming to an end, It resonated with me even more. It's an amateur video at best, but I feel like it really captured something during that time. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-B0vyneg8J5w.htmlsi=rnw4PrDXnTmLGJQi
i had just got around to finishing myhouse.wad just now and honestly hearing this remembering how i barely saved my game making the playthrough..it was really crazy and then the dog being at the beach and everything it was "peace at last." the title of my saved game.
