A House of Many Doors

Absolutely wonderful writing (I can't overstate how good it is), dense Lovecraftian atmosphere and weird moral choices make this an easy recommendation. Despite the mediocre combat & sluggish pace of exploration (which can easily and quickly be fixed via mods and/or cheats, but I didn't even bother with those because I was so engrossed), I have nothing but fondness and admiration for this game and the developer who made it. It's been updated since I last played it, too, so the experience has improved. I'll amend my review when I play the updated version. I liked it even better than Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies. It dispenses with much of the tedium of the former and I think the worldbuilding is somehow more strange , mysterious and mesmerising than Sunless Skies. It's a gem and it deserves *way* more attention.

[h2]No*[/h2] The writing is good, everything else is hit or miss, mostly miss for me. There is interesting stuff, but buried under "meh" gameplay; the worst being traversing the House, which is very repetitive. As far as I am aware the first 15 minutes is representative of a large portion of the experience, hence the low play time. I could see some enjoying this, but unlike Sunless Sea/Skies (games very similar to this), there is not much here OTHER than the writing.

The game has a banger opening introduction, but in less than an hour of playing, the game has crashed twice. I do not want to constantly be taken out of the atmosphere that the game attempts to provide because it crashes to desktop so often and risks your progress being lost. There are also circles that you click on that serve as tutorials, of a sort, and the text doesn't seem to scale with the options to make text bigger. It's rather difficult to read because of how small it is.

Has some rough edges and failed design ideas, but it's a decent trading game, great exploration game and fantastic lore binging/atmospheric game.

genuinely unplayable

Sunless Seas / skies but with turn based ftl lite combat.