Doom’s Myhouse.WAD is one of gaming’s greatest literary adaptations

destructoid.com:

If bringing a novel to the big screen is a tough job, then making a movie into a video game tends to spell doom from the get-go. And we don’t mean the good kind of Doom. Go ahead, try to think of a film’s video game tie-in or even a less rushed adaptation that’s even a tad beyond “meh”. If it took your mind no more than one second to think of The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, then congrats. You win.

But that’s an absolute anomaly in the history of video games. We’re talking about a tie-in that’d be better than its movie even if the movie were good. Given the adaptation curse that no one can deny, it’d be no surprise if a Doom 2 mod inspired by a novel would result in the ultimate failure. But… it did not.

Steve “Veddge” Nelson’s My House took inspiration from Mark Z. Danielewsky’s House Of Leaves. That’s a critically acclaimed novel so cryptic many still wonder whether it belongs in the horror or love story category. But the most surprising aspects regarding My House are how it’s not only a fantastic mod, but also one of gaming’s best literary adaptations ever.

It’s worth noting from the off that House Of Leaves is far from your average novel Book-to-film adaptation history is already filled with the corpses of projects declared dead due to “unfilmable material”. Such complaints usually stem from attempts at adapting books written in regular prose format. Interesting. House Of Leaves will challenge you because of its meta-textual narrative, yes, but also especially because it seems to physically want you to not understand it.

This is what you can expect from the average page of House Of Leaves:

Conversely, My House doesn’t fall for the trappings of trying to retell the events from House Of Leaves in