A House of Many Doors

A House of Many Doors for PC is an incredibly original RPG focusing on exploration. It is considered a spiritual successor to 2015's Sunless Sea developed by Failbetter Games. A House of Many Doors was created by Pixel Trickery Games – a studio set up by Harry Tuffs, who was the initiator of the project. The crew was supported by the team that made the original game. The concept of the game received a warm welcome on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform, for the creators received 2.5 times more funds than expected.

Plot

In A House of Many Doors for PC, the player assumes the role of a traveler, who is also a spy and a poet. On an abstract train with multiplicity of legs, the protagonist traverses the titular "House of Many Doors", which is a kind of a parasitic dimension draining its power from numerous worlds existing on the basis of the parallel. The player's goal is to find out who built this "train", why, and how to get out of there.

Mechanics

The gameplay mechanics resemble the previously mentioned Sunless Sea in its general assumptions, though Harry Truffs's game offers substantially more elements of classic RPGs, as well as several new mechanics. The gameplay consists mainly of exploring the titular realm, which is generated proceduarlly for each playthrough, save for a few locations of high relevance to the plot. During the journey, the player encounters a massive number of original NPCs to whom they can talk and recruit them to the team. Interacting with the team members is crucial here; the player can communicate with them, discover their secrets, motivate them and sustain their morale.

The player fights different enemies as well, such as biomechanical robots, gigantic insects or different fallen gods. The game offers a real-time combat system featuring active pause. Another rather singular thing is that the protagonist writes a poem telling a story of their adventures alongside the progression of the story. The poem is generated automatically in the player's journal and the text itself depends on their actions taken in a procedurally generated environment. As a deliberate side effect of this, extremely twisted stories with original titles are born.

Technical aspects

A House of Many Doors for PC is similar to the original game developed by Failbetter Games both in terms of the visuals and the general concept behind the game. Two-dimensional graphics created by an experienced artist by the name of Catherine Unger are relatively minimalistic, apart from the menu and hand-painted static backgrounds. The game features nineteenth-century stylistics, inspired by works of writers and travelers such as Richard Francis Burton or Gertrude Bell, featuring a characteristic portion of absurd.

Last updated on April 18, 2016