A House of Many Doors

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.

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' gameplay is admittedly, very jank. Mostly it consists of trundling through empty rooms, on and on, to get to your next destination. The combat is worse, the mix of turn-based and real-time making it somehow both boringly slow moving and requiring incredibly fast reflexes. And all of this is compounded by the game's innumerable bugs, imbalances, and unintentional loopholes.
Why then is A House of Many Doors one of my favourite games of all time?
The obvious answer would be to say the game's luscious worldbuilding. Each location is described with strange yet perfectly clear imagery, the world is very well developed but it never feels like the game is simply dropping exposition on the player's head, and so much feels unique and different compared to the standard fantasy tropes that define the genre. This world building is definitely what drew me to A House of Many Doors in the first place. But if we compare it to its direct inspirations, the games in the Fallen London universe, particularly Sunless Sea, these games are just as successful in their worldbuilding -- and yet I think A House of Many Doors surpasses even these.
What I think really makes this game succeed is in its cohesion and structure. The problem I have with the Sunless games is that while they are in theory at least about the player character's unquenchable ambition -- a central plot thread that the player character will pursue at any cost -- in truth, these ambitions are the least interesting parts of the games (with perhaps the exception of Sunless Skies' Martyr King's Cup, which surprise, surprise is in fact written by Harry Tuffs, the writer behind A House of Many Doors). In contrast, A House of Many Doors main quest is not only incredibly interesting, but is also mechanically and narratively tied to the game's sidequests. To progress in the main plot, you need to explore and complete sidequests, and ultimately this then positions you to make the difficult choices that the plot demands. Through exploring the House, the player gains the insight necessary to decide its fate. Everything fits together into a compelling and thematic whole.
I would definitely recommend A House of Many Doors if you enjoy narrative heavy games and don't mind the slower pace. There is an overlapping audience with fans of the Fallen London games, but A House of Many Doors is a lot less bleak and unforgiving, so even if you don't enjoy those games, it might be worth giving this one a go.

I admire the creativity and writing craft in this game but it is too complex and lacking quality of life features. It takes a long time to travel round locations and it feels necessary to keep a spreadsheet or notes to keep track. Thankfully there is lots of help available in the forum. Also, while the world is full of colourful characters and bizarre places, the world is too dark for my liking. I wanted to play a more passive explorer type character and not have to get involved in wars or politics. Still, I'm pleased to have tried it. There is plenty to appreciate but I recommend watching a video or two before committing to purchase.

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.