It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

This is a really enthralling video walking people through a 2023 fan-made Doom level myhouse.wad:

When I say “a fan-made Doom level,” I’m not doing it justice. It is not just a cool map, or just a technically impressive one. myouse.wad treats the Doom game engine as a canvas to tell a particular, and perhaps even poignant story, and a story could have only been told this way. From the author of the map, by way of an introduction:

Last August I lost a good childhood friend of mine, and took it pretty hard. When I was visiting my hometown for his funeral, I connected with his parents who shared with me some of his old belongings. Among them was a copy of an old map of his, backed up on a 3.5″ floppy from high school. Thomas and I were into amateur Doom mapping in the early ’00s, but I had never seen this map of his prior to uncovering it on one of the old floppy disks. As a way of paying tribute to him and all the great memories we had together, I took the plunge and installed Doom Builder in order to polish up his map and add a few modern amenities just for convenience sake.

And when I say “A really enthralling video,” I’m not doing that justice, either. In the summary of the 2023 BFI video awards, a reviewer wrote:

A masterpiece of recapping, Power Pak’s video is essentially a narrated journey through an ingenious mod. A good recap doesn’t just communicate plot, but also the point of the essay; this does both. Excellent pacing and vocal delivery communicates the tone of the map, and becomes a jumping off point for an analysis of horror in gaming / the oft-discussed topic of liminal spaces. […]

The video itself is performance, too, further blurring the lines between what is art and what is, erm, “real.”

This isn’t cheap machinima, and this isn’t a cheap walkthrough. Definitely worth checking it out.