House of Many Doors is essentially a text adventure with elements inspired by the Indie game FTL. You play as the captain of a kinetopede, a cross between a train and a centipede you use to explore The House, a "parasite dimension" which is comprised of things and places absorbed from other worlds, creating a landscape of bizarre and varied ruling powers and arbitrary laws of the universe.

You begin the game in the middle of nowhere, your head bleeding from an attack by memory pirates who've drilled into your skull, capturing one of your memories to sell as a commodity. Naturally you prefer your thoughts remain your own so you set off with your intrepid crew to try and retrieve it and then continue on with your goal to attempt to escape The House.

Gameplay generally falls into one of 3 categories: exploration, combat, and most importantly, dialogue. Your success and failure in most activity is determined by your stats which are modified by your crew members who have their own stories and histories but can be swapped out with others as you see fit.

Exploration may the game's weakest aspect. You scuttle along in your kinetopede map tile by map-tiles ala-Zelda 1, each screen being procedurally generated with a few assets, and occasionally another vessel to encounter or some curio to explore. The art is very rudimentary, and the procedural generation results in the same assets being pasted in a row at times making the environments look quite tacky. Encounters are easily avoided due to your speed which can be upgraded as the game progresses and there's nothing much worth seeing in these tiles, so you generally just spend your time trying to get to the next point of interest as quickly as possible. Combat doesn't improve on visuals either, the game is pretty ugly outside of the hand drawn art shown at places of interest.

Combat is similar to FTL's crew-and-rooms progression, being able to destroy parts and kill crew with varying effects on what you target. There's an action point system limiting your options within your turn, forcing you to make choice between approaching to board the enemy and engage in hand to hand combat or bombarding them from afar; all the while needing to keep crew alive and your systems running.

Combat is by the large, optional. I encountered one optional quest which required combat, the main storyline I played required none. When I did fight however I didn't see much reason to do anything else but fire away. Your ships crew is rather crowded together in the kinetopede and since moving each one takes an action point the best course of action is to simply blow the other vessel up before they kill your members or blow you up. Boarding vessels was only beneficial if your guards outnumbered theirs and you could kill their gunners quickly. Luckily mildly clever maneuvering can avoid combat altogether so you can get to your destination safely.

The game's true focus is its imaginative writing. When the dialogue windows open you're treated to some of the most interesting writing I've seen in video games in a long time. Each location you find is a new and strange land, inspiring wonder and curiosity. Some are bustling hubs of bizarre denizens with strange ways of life, and others are deserted mysteries of unknown purport.

As you take on quests and advance plots, checks are made against your various stats in order to determine success or failure. Attempting to pick a lock might test your guile while a attempting to make a rousing speech will call your spirit into question. The situations vary greatly, throwing you into fascinating scenarios. Quests are not only found in cities, but by your crew members themselves. I helped my ships surgeon work for a cure to a plague by developing a means to communicate with the sickness as a sentient being. Meanwhile I worked with royalty from multiple nations to prevent a civil war over the abolition of slavery.

As you progress the game has an interesting system of using thoughts, experiences, and tales as currency, some being sold outright for money, others being used as options in dialogue with NPC's. As you progress you gain Apprehensions which are used to increase your stats or advance the main plotline. You can work as a freelance writer, selling reports of other cities to the papers or write your own poetry (which procedurally generates actual stanzas) for more apprehensions to spend on stats.

HOMD's variety-show of writing was enough to keep me guessing and wanting more. Each advancement of a plot made seek its conclusion; skittering across the foreboding darkness of The House to collect supplies for rituals while I learned more about my crew creates a deep narrative experience that's easy to get addicted to. The game has 2 mutually exclusive plot paths to pursue and I hardly explored everything and it took me 15-20 hours to complete. Different backgrounds on character creation and outcomes from quests, as well as being able to find different crew members gives some potential for replayability.

Lovers of myriad universes such as Planescape: Torment will find lots to appreciate in HOMD, but those looking for more "game" in their game will find it lacking. That being said I played non stop until I beat it. Good writing in video games is hard to find these days and I ate it up as much as I could. The real conclusion is that HOMD is a better choose-your-own-adventure book than it is a video game. I'd love to see the gameplay cleaned up and fleshed out for a more wholesome experience. At somewhere between $5-15 it's time in is well worth the cash if you like what the game has to offer. 'Til then, play HOMD for the story, and FTL for the combat.