Indie A House of Many Doors (Released)

[CryptRat]

Link to their site : http://www.pixeltrickerygames.com/

Welcome to the House. You are not welcome.

Explore the House, a parasite dimension that steals from other worlds, in a train that scuttles on mechanical legs.

Uncover secrets. Open locked doors. Lead a crew of dysfunctional characters. Write procedurally-generated poems. Fight in turn-based combat. Explore a strange new setting, dripping with atmosphere, crusted with lore. Escape. Escape. Escape.

You are an explorer, poet and spy, launching yourself into the unknown in search of adventure. Rig an election in the city of the dead. Visit a village lit by the burning corpse of a god (careful not to inhale the holy smoke). Sell your teeth to skittering spider-things for a moment in their library. Over 90 bizarre locations await discovery in the dust and the dark.

A House of Many Doors is a 2D exploration RPG that takes inspiration from Sunless Sea, China Mieville, Planescape: Torment and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. It features over 300,000 words of branching original story and over 770 trillion bad poems.

They already deserve some respect because they switched from Rtwp to Turn-based combat during developpement.

Available on February 3rd (or 4th?) on Steam and itch.io.

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

That's not shit music. Interesting.

 

[thesheeep]

Heavy Sunless Sea inspiration + touch of FTL?

 

[mondblut]

I take it we control that yellow spermatozoid thing? Much quirk, so weirdy, wow.

 

[CryptRat]

Released on Steam :


EDIT : Also avalaiable on itch.io (DRM-Free + Steam key).

 

[Cromwell]

I bought it and played a bit. From what I saw it has some of the same problems Sunless sea has of course. For one you have the same system which means you have one gazillion little items which you dont know what they are good for and have to find out like "romantic relationshipü tokens" - which you can use to write poems for example.

The combat system is turn based but not in a good meaningful way. If you enter combat you see the two vehicles which are engaged you now have 4 action points to aim with your cannons move the crew around or drive nearer to the enemy or farther away. If you are near enough you can get your soldiers to board the enemy and do stuff there. It took a while for me to find out that they fight automaticly you just have to spend a point to move them where they have to be. Same goes for the crew on your ship, move the engineer to something and he will repair it turn by turn.

Which brings me to the next point I found shit, explanation. Either I am an Idiot and dint see it or there is no manual, and the tooltipps are shit. For example, there is a tooltip that tells me that my turn will end if I click the end turn button, but there isnt one that explained to me why I sometimes can board them and sometimes not even if I am in range. Theres also a tooltipp that tells me I can win the fight without blowing them up but nothing on how to do that (maybe kill the captain) or telling me why not all of my guards board their vehicle. I also have read the combat is somewhat similar to ftl but since I did not play that I have no idea how true that is.

Its generally still the same as sunless sea so you aimlessly wander around "exploring" to find little objects ion the hope you remember where and for what to use them. Which ended with me wanting to do something I found interesting and reading I need 3 Items I had no idea were to get, I assume if I eventually find them I will have forgotten where to use them (the game doesnt strike me as going for the "use a pen and paper to write that shit down" type of game).

Also annoying is their save system. Technically you can save anywhere, so say you move from away from town a and in the process you burn 10 units of fuel and your train gets damaged by fighting soemeone. You are now two rooms away from wheer you were going and decide to save. You die one room further and reload. Now you are where you started, in town a, just that your hull is damaged and you burned ten units of fuel getting to the room where you did save. Which means you have to buy the fuel again to get to the point where you previously saved. Of course you also keep whatever you find on the way, which means that if you just cruise around the house without going to a special site like a town again you can just reload and use the items in your starting town without having to drive back, creating some sort of retarded quicktravel system. I dont know why it was impossible for them to save your actual location.

The writing is more or less the same as in sunless sea, not better not worse, so thats good but since the gameplay is more or less the same I foudn myself with the same problem I had in SS. I start exploring find something interesting and cant proceed, but since I dont know where to find the stuff I need and have burned all my resources getting there I am somewhat stuck needing money and theres no way getting some apart from tediously crippling around the house until I get lucky.

Bottomline its the same as SS so if you want more of that and dont mind its faults its ok and not very expensive.

edit:

Played some more. I used a Trick to get me a shitton of money since I thought making it easier and quicker to get from a to b would make it also less boring. It didnt. Much like Sunless Sea they managed to make game where even when you use meta knowledge to give you a very good starting point the exploration parts of the game (as opposed to the choose your own adventure stuff) are utterly boring and uninteresting.

The tactical TB combat consists of aim your cannons and click end turn repeat until enemy is dead. The exploration consists of "travel through an empty grid where everything looks the same until an event pops up".

They force you to explore since you need random items to progress through the stories which means you have to start a story at point A travel 15 minutes to point B (if you know where B is) get items xyz travel back read the next snippet rinse repeat. Thats assuming you meta knowledge cheat your way to money, if not you will have to grind stupid traderoutes where nothing happens for a meager profit. If you finally have your items you amy fail the stat checks since to level up you need another sort of point which you only get by visiting new cities and not by solving quests or doing other interesting things. So they do their best to cripple their own stories by constantly throwing you out of them and forcing you to do very boring things.

As I said the writing is still good (depending on your taste) but you would be better off to spend that money on a good book or a visual novel since the writing is the only good thing here and the strictly gamey parts are mobile game tier shit.