AceOmega

doomguy holding my hand guiding me through myhouse.wad like it’s a haunted mansion attraction

Hhhhhh when the house is haunting you. When you finally escape it but it (the house, the structure, the anchored thing, it) follows you impossibly. When you've gotten out and you're free and you're somewhere unsettling but finally different and new and no, you recognise this turn. You recognise the angle of this wall. The placement of this bathroom. The familiarity is sickening and this is the house again. When it wears different masks and parades different furniture but it cannot change the bars (brick walls, windows, mortar, cement, load bearing foundations, frames, floor plan,) of your prison. Your den has turned into your coffin. Forever looping on itself. When it is never going to stop being the house, and you don't really need to leave, anyway.

at the back of the party muttering they don't know that the addition of a giant scary shrek in the preschool level of myhouse.wad isn't for le epic meme reasons but rather a lampoon of how subgenres of horror that become popular on the internet such as liminal spaces quickly become parodies of themselves through a memetic game of telephone that results in the genre's defining elements being watered down to complete absurdity, which usually results in some flavor of "what if a thing that is normally fun or comforting was actually scary, wouldl that be fucked up or what"

Absolute big fan of horror media that take advantage of the games they are using as a medium to tell its story. Obviously there would be the Minecraft ARG that Wifies highly publicized through his "Searching For a World That Doesn't Exist" video, how it beautifully makes you uneasy through the grass spreading indicating chunks loading meaning that someone was there, but also using it for some comedic effect such as "Unfortunately for you, I have a pickaxe". But another great example would be My House.wad, its just an absolutely phenomenal and creative way of tackling the story of two childhood friends, the implied abuse that happened in that house, the grief and depression that followed soon after the MC's childhood friend dies, how it was a house and never a home. Admittedly, I am not a big doom fan, but even I was unsettled by how in the second run, the door animation changes, how the avatar is now taller, how there are more frames in your gun shooting animation -- all adding to this surreal and uncanny feeling building in your gut. Obviously, My House.wad unsettles you using its game mechanics in more ways, but I'm not gonna tackle them all in this post. Would love to see more media that just takes advantage of the game mechanics to unsettle you. No jumpscares or creepy music or etc., just taking what is familiar and concrete and flipping it over your head.