A House of Many Doors

This game has some of the best written prose out of any narrative game I've played. If you enjoy narrative-heavy games like Sunless Sea/Skies or Disco Elysium, this game easily fits up there with them. Many of the other reviews talk about buggy/poor gameplay, which was sort of true. While I personally think the game was worth playing in its entirety since it first released, I could understand why some people found the game tedious or unenjoyable. However, after several years, a fan-made (Altotas my beloved) update has fixed 99% of the issues this game once had. My main advice for people picking up the game would be to change the text size from medium to large or extra large right at the beginning. If you like reading about an expansive, developed world full of everything bizarre, dark, and otherworldly, this is definitely a game to play through multiple times.
Just remember: the awoken man drowns in unquiet waters.

A forgotten gem of superb worldbuilding and story telling, if in need of a bit more mechanical polish

This game is criminally underrated, and certainly worth the price. While the game doesn't hold your hand much with information, it also has a save system, so you're free to muck around and mess up, and reload when you're done. If you like good writing, good art, and eldritch locations, you should buy this.

This recommendation is conditional: If you can handle buggy combat, long periods of boredom and repetition between fascinating events, and occasionally buggy everything you will enjoy this game. Now here are some disorganized thoughts.
Making the main character a poet and travel writer is a great twist on the Escape Velocity-like (for lack of a better genre to ape) since it gives you a clear monetary benefit to just wandering around. You can get paid for it! You're not forced to think about profit margins or speculative trading, you can just tool around as much as your fuel and sanity allows and probably make enough cash to recover.
Further, making one of your starting party members an old grouch who you can impress with a world tour is yet another a good way to probe you into exploring further afield, perhaps getting out of any profitable pattern you may have found.
Combat is still pretty wack though

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

It's a bit rough around the edges, but this is an amazing gem of interactive fiction. If you played Sunless Seas and/or Sunless Skies and want "more of that but different" -- a (different) incomprehensibly weird world full of strange places to explore and even weirder creatures to meet -- this game is exactly that. There are literally dozens, maybe over a hundred unique Weird Places to go visit! And in all those places are countless unimaginable experiences, from befriending a tribe of word-hunters to romancing ten million crows.
I hesitate to directly compare them against each other, but at times I find A House of Many Doors actually has stronger writing than Failbetter's work, though that may simply be because it's a one-writer project, so the overall feeling is a bit more cohesive. Catherine Unger's art is also incredibly evocative and really adds to the already-wonderful writing.
It's not perfect, and be prepared to encounter many bugs, a few design weirdnesses, and so forth. As a result, I'd say it might be a bit less accessible than Sunless Seas/Skies, so it's probably easier to wrap your head around if you've played those first.

So, know what you're getting into. The game is not particularly challenging since you can save regularly and just reload when you don't like a negative turnout, and that seems to be super important to a lot of people these days. I'm just trying to explore a sick narrative and go on wild adventures through a richly narrated videogame. I'm apparently like 14 hours in and having a blast, which I can't say about a ton of games these days.
I've pissed off gods, governors, and every type of people you can imagine (One complaint.... I still have no idea what a carchair is. I wanna know about the people I'm screwing with. They take up more cargo space is all I know)
Banged a vampire until she loved me
Ran away from every fight so far except at a church