A House of Many Doors

I gave A House of Many Doors a good attempt. It's supposedly very similar to Sunless Sea, although I couldn't verify that as I've not played the latter. I can, however, compare it to Faster Than Light. In case you're not familiar with either of those games, the essence (of at least FTL and A House of Many Doors) is that you're leading a ship with some grand goal. To get to that goal, you have to navigate around the world, manage your crew and supplies, make decisions, and quite often have a battle. The battles are very similar as well, with you commanding the crew around the ship, trying to destroy the opposing ship while the enemy does the same. The main difference is that A House of Many Doors focuses a lot more on the story.

... The main difference in essence, that is. Realistically the main difference is that A House of Many Doors is pretty poorly made. Were the idea well executed, I might even like it - I mean FTL was decent. However, A House of Many Doors has a lot of issues. To name some: Visual bugs where sprites slide off into infinity, layer issues blocking important game information, an overall inconsistent and arguably poor art style, a lack of explanation of what most stuff does or how to do various things... despite the otherwise overabundance of text. I understand it's a game with a lot of lore and story, but I felt like I was reading a book, not playing a game - some visual novels have more visual action than this game. The writing wasn't bad, and was actually somewhat interesting, but it felt disjoint as the game had barely started and I was already chasing like 3 different plot lines with tens of items in my inventory that maybe had some grander use.

Overall, a jumble of individually nicely written text walls with a terribly executed game on top. I feel like the author might have had more success writing a book or an interactive novel, not a game. Might have helped make the story and lore less spread out and more sensible. But as a game, not only is it not worth playing, it diminishes the quality of the underlying story. I wouldn't recommend it.
I noticed I did not have Sunless Sea nor Skies in my backlog, despite them seemingly being very similar games, just with higher production quality? In any case, because or despite of this game, I will not be trying either of those either. However from all I've read, I feel confident in recommending both of them (and FTL) over this. If you felt this game idea to be up your alley, try the Sunless games first, then come back to this if you want more.

PS. I misspelled the name of the game as "A House of Many Doots" far too many times. I found this humorous, and hoped you might as well, as a change from my undesirably dry writing.