A House of Many Doors

This game is a masterpiece. I played it on my friend's account for a while before purchasing it for myself, and it was money well spent. The gameplay itself is a bit of a drag at times, but the inclusion of fetch-mirrors makes the later game travel a lot less boring, and it's absolutely worth it for the visceral storytelling. A House of Many Doors builds a web of relatable stories about a range of characters with so much depth and complexity you start to care for them as if they were real people. It's immersive, and really captures that feeling of "We live in a hellhole and everything wants to kill us" without everything just being constantly drab and depressing. I cried when I reached the end of the game, in a good way. 10/10 please play this game it changed my life

If you like Sunless Sea or Sunless Skies you will like this game. Its a dark -literally dark- fantasy game where you explore a parallel dimension and its strange cities in your centipede-like vehicle. Interesting characters abd sites, and lots of good writing. Lots to read! - I have experienced a couple of crashes while playing it, but still good value 8 out of 10.

A sort of "FTL" mixed with the vibes of "the night cage" and "kingdom death monster" the game is glitchy and a bit slow, but if you like reading, this might be for you.

A House of Many Doors is a game I've loved for ages, so it's where I'm going to start with my new project of "review more games in my library".
I'll be honest, this game can be a slog. I am a person who can easily put on a podcast in order to do boring game tasks like "crawling from city to city in a largely fixed and repetitive map"; I am also a person who puts in the effort to make a map in a spreadsheet to make playing the game easier. The vehicle-to-vehicle combat minigame is difficult to master, and there's a LOT of clicking through storyline options in a city and little tasks to attend to (I do also enjoy little tasks).
That said? The game was made by one guy doing frankly unsustainable levels of work, and the art and writing captivate me so intensely I will overlook the boring travel parts in order to dive into the beautiful, offbeat, cynical, deeply humanist stories the game conjures. Each location and each person commits to its strangeness wholeheartedly, and the patchwork creates a whole world as diverse, cruel, and marvelous as our own. It reminds me of a lazy spring afternoon hauling a tabletop role-playing sourcebook into the tree outside my house when I was twelve and getting lost in someplace else, with a far clearer-headed attitude towards power and living in systems of power than most, and for that, I'll overlook any fault.

It's my favourite game, ever. Storytelling, worldbuilding, everything is astounding- the travel can be a bit bothersome, but that's been fixed in the recent patch. Get it!

Good, but flawed. Play Sunless Sea first, and if that runs out and you want more: probably play Sunless Skies. Then, you can lower your expectations and play A House of Many Doors.
The best part of the game is its abundance of stories. Like, Sunless Sea, there are a ton of threads to pull on. With their being so many, some fall pretty flat and feel unfinished (and some may actually be unfinished). For example, at the start of the game you have the option to give up your heart, giving you the distinction "Heartless." That never paid off in a story sense or cause any complications.
In general it's fun to work through the various factions and support your crew with their concerns. Exploration is a bit long, and you would do well to increase your Insight score a lot so your navigator will put cities on your map without having to comb long stretches of doors.
It's an interesting world with interesting places, but we only get glimpses and hints at the possible depth of it all. There aren't really that many events in each location. The random things you encounter as you travel ge repetitive. There seems to be content that can't be accessed because you cannot get enough reputation (City of Angels, I'm looking at you).
Combat is a chore and should mostly be avoided until you have increased your stats and upgraded your Kinetopede. It's then less of a chore but still generally not worth it. That said, defeating enemies by killing their crew does yield a lot of Keys.
Pro-tip: Buy laudanum from the Poet-Knights and sell it in the City of Masks. This will quickly make money no object.
Also, don't dream of clocks for your first playthrough as this ending deletes your saves and makes the game unplayable (there is a file you can delete to get the game working again, but your saves will be gone).
Now, the game has bugs. More than a few that don't break the game, and a couple that do. It generally feels unpolished. A lot of quality of life options are missing (mainly ways to buy and sell goods more than 1 at a time, and getting stuff out of your shed without snapping back to the top every single selection). For some reason I was given the near final challenge of a heist but was able to go straight to the Orchard at the end of the game anyway. I completed a crewmembers Concern and when I recruited him again he wanted to do the same thing over again.
It's still a fun experience with it's own emergent stories. I fell in love with a vampire who would occasionally kill a crewmember, forcing me to pretend it was some kind of accident and press-gang a prisoner into service. "Genevieve, dear, would you mind just eating the prisoners? I do keep a few around all the time you know."
It's a love-letter to Sunless Sea, written by an earnest undergraduate. There's potential here that I hope is realised in future games.

A House of Many Doors is one of my absolute favorites that I keep coming back to. The narration is superb, and reading the descriptions alongside the illustrations makes my imagination flare like no other game can. The story is pretty good and it's encapsulated in and out of itself, so you how far you want to go/know falls down to your will to go beyond/explore all the rooms.
The fact that the dev also is still updating the game while also restoring some planned features that on launch couldn't be added is just magnificent. Would be nice to have more Romances, but the ones that are there are enough for a baseline.