Gaming —

A House of Many Doors is a house with many problems

This house is too buggy and repetitive, with too much empty space

Don't try to fight that big, green ball.
Enlarge / Don't try to fight that big, green ball.
A House of Many Doors opens like a power-drill to the skull. That’s not an analogy picked at random—the game starts just after "memory thieves" have augured into your cranium. Of course, you're not going to let them get away with it. Your first priority in this "exploration RPG" is to hop astride your steampunk centipede tank and repossess your recollections.

Things only get weirder from there, as the House's explicit inspirations from Sunless Sea and China Miéville come to the fore (the game was funded by a combination of Sunless Sea developer Failbetter Games and Kickstarter). A House of Many Doors is set in a "parasite dimension" known only as the House. Its features are described in an abundance of text about shark-men, reality-shaping dream gas, clock-faced gods, and doctors who steal hearts for profit while leaving their patients, ostensibly, alive. Impressionistic portraits and landscapes lit with St. Elmo's Fire hint at further stories that even the 10 metric tons of Dickensian scrawling can't fully put into words.

The fiction in A House of Many Doors is so full of verve and diversity that it's hard to hold more than a scattershot image of it in my head at one time. And much like a shotgun blast, the game has plenty of empty spaces in between those thinly spread impressions.

A House of Many Squares

To understand A House of Many Doors, you have to understand the House itself. It’s kind of like your house, if your house is chopped grid-like into seemingly endless "rooms" for you to navigate in search of one speck of civilization or another. Chief among these civilizations is the City of Keys, where you can trade goods, information, and even experiences to customize your character or earn a few coins.

Between these motes of light, though, is infinitely more darkness. Most rooms in the House are completely empty—so long as you keep your all-important Heartlight burning to ward off random encounters with terrifying creatures. Meanwhile, you navigate your "kinetopede" in real-time around six or seven repeated pieces of bric-a-brac. You triple-check your map to make sure you're headed toward something more interesting and occasionally dodge incoming bandits. You move on through the vast expanse.

Sometimes smaller, more literal lights attract your attention. A red glow indicates when a pile of debris is actually an object of interest. Maybe your crew discovered a weeping woman pulled into the House from less horrifying climes? Maybe you've unearthed an occult artifact? Maybe nothing will happen at all, depending on a digital roll of the dice influenced by your character's stats, like Grit and Guile?

Usually what you'll find, though, is more of the same. Minor out-of-city encounters repeat themselves early and often. The same "randomized" story events will often happen twice in a row, in rapid succession.

Social Currency

That repetition is a grade-A bummer, because A House of Many Doors is built on unique experiences—not just conceptually, but mechanically. Almost every successful roll of the dice during events will grant your character tangible memories of their ordeals. Your character can craft these into procedurally generated epic poems or box them up for resale to big-time newspapers back at the City of Keys.

How you decide to commodify your in-game experiences leads to different in-game rewards. Thus, A House of Many Doors becomes a sort of traveling poet/journalist/spy simulator as you trundle through beautiful and horrifying vistas for gain. You can picture yourself as Hunter S. Thompson trapped in a capitalist twist on the Cthulhu Mythos.

On paper, the concept is fantastic. In practice, though, the promise of gonzo journalism in outer spheres dissolves when you don't have enough adventures to fill your plate. The big events in A House of Many Doors mostly come from your kinetopede crewmates. Cozying up to them fills your screen with tales of wonder and marks your map with points of interest. These narrative pit stops are just as grand as the game's eclectic universe promises. Too bad they're also separated by dozens of empty squares in an enormous, mostly uniform grey grid.

Prepare to be Boarded

Besides blips of architecture, the halls of the House are also filled with more proactive dangers. Blimps, rival insectoid tanks, and mobile churches will try to run you down from time to time. You can give them what they want, run away by temporarily dousing your Heartlight, or fight them. Whatever option you choose, though, the game doesn't explain itself well at all.

Combat is a clear riff on FTL: Faster Than Light. Crewmembers operate turrets, act as guards, or keep the Heartlight burning in turn-based combat. But battles are presented much less clearly in House than in FTL.

You might begin a run through the game with one Swabbie among your merry staff. Unfortunately, the game won't give you any idea what a Swabbie is in this context or what duty they fulfill. Personnel like doctors and guards are obvious from their names alone, but there’s no hint to what these mop-wielding warriors actually do.

The same goes for certain tactics. A one-time tooltip will inform you that you can board enemy ships and be boarded in return. But it doesn’t give any clues as to how that process works. How you're supposed to move your little stick figures to fight their little stick figures is also never made precisely clear. Other potentially useful bits of data that aren't listed in the game (as near as I can tell) include which character's stats influence combat and decision-making dice rolls and the effects of different long-term injuries on your character.

A House of Many Doors is intentionally inscrutable in spots, like when it only gives you a vague notion of how likely you are to bluff dream pirates or cheat at cards with local mobsters. Still, many other missing explanations seem like oversights. At times, House feels like you're playing Dungeons and Dragons with a DM who refuses to let you see key portions of the rulebook.

This, as you can imagine, often leads to nasty outcomes. You should save at every opportunity or else risk dead crewmates and lost cargo.

Fatal Errors

Worse than all of the inscrutability and emptiness, though, is the technical bugs that plague A House of Many Door. More than half of my play sessions abruptly ended with a terminal glitch. Mostly, these were run-of-the-mill crashes to the desktop. Other times, though, I was unable to click my way out of quest dialogue, which forced me to force-quit the game, restart from my last save, and trudge back through the same empty rooms all over again.

The strangest bug I've seen so far, though, is that sometimes the game makes choices for you when flipping between city menus. That's a real problem when the choice involves imprisoning (or eating) a human passenger. Your crewmates don't take kindly when you answer that incorrectly. Those bugs led to more reloaded saves and more lost progress.

I don't just want to like A House of Many Doors in spite of all these faults. I'm desperate for a game about adventures in nightmare journalism to be as good as it should be. As it stands, House's wonderful, scattered, ambitious fiction managed to drag me through all the boredom and frustration.

Still, that doesn't change the fact that I was, mostly, bored and frustrated. A House of Many Doors has an incredible, creative intention. It just isn't very good at serving it to you.

The good

  • The House's more civilized rooms contain mountains of stellar, evocative writing
  • Wonderful art works in tandem with the fiction
  • Turning "experiences" into rewards is novel

The bad

  • You spend too much time driving through empty space
  • Combat and other features are poorly explained, if at all
  • Critical bugs means frequent reloading
  • Small-scale events are repetitive and not as interesting as they could be

The ugly

  • When the game glitches and causes you to strap a live human to the front of your tank

Verdict: A House of Many Doors is just begging to be filled with more random encounters, varied environments, and bug fixes. Right now, though, it's a shell of what it ought to be. Skip it.

Channel Ars Technica