Getting Started

That's Not My Mom is a first-person anomaly-finding horror game built around a single, repeated routine: walk home from school, check the house, and figure out whether anything has quietly changed since the last visit.

The Setup

You play as a young elementary school boy returning home day after day while an unexplained anomaly outbreak spreads through the city. Your mother is the first and most obvious place that outbreak shows up — her behavior, position, and even her physical form can shift without warning — but she's far from the only thing in the house worth checking.

How a Visit Works

There's no level select and no separate mission map. Each visit is a return trip to the same house, and the first day exists purely to let you study the normal layout: where the chairs sit, where the paintings hang, how many plants are on the windowsill. Every visit after that is judged against the picture you built on day one. See the Daily Sequence guide for how the structure escalates from there.

Controls

The input is simple: keyboard to move between rooms, mouse to look around, and an interaction prompt that appears when something needs a closer look. Full details, including what to do when a chase starts, are on the Controls page.

What You're Actually Looking For

Anomalies take several different forms — objects that vanish, objects that duplicate, altered pictures, things that are the wrong size. The Spotting Anomalies guide breaks down every type, and the mother herself gets a dedicated page at The Mother's Many Forms, since she behaves differently from every other anomaly in the house.

Where to Play It

That's Not My Mom is a Windows PC game, originally released on itch.io before a later Steam release. There's no browser version — it's a download on both storefronts, not something you play directly in a page.

From that first ordinary walk through the front door, That's Not My Mom builds its entire tension out of a single question repeated more than twenty times: does this still look like home?