Dots eXtreme
Dots eXtreme
Game
Game2017
A House of Many Doors
Developer Pixel Trickery
Explore the House, a parasite dimension that steals from other worlds, in a train that scuttles on mechanical legs. From the Steam store page
209 reactions from 2 sources (Steam reviews, Bluesky) · newest Oct 9, 2026 · last updated Oct 10, 2026 · How this works
Audience score
77
LovedLoved
151 positive · 45 negative
95% range 71–82%
| Source | + | − | = |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steam reviews | 151 | 45 | 0 |
| Bluesky * | 6 | 0 | 7 |
* shown, not counted in the score (label accuracy below our 85% bar or not yet audited).
Steam's own rating
Very Positive
330 of 399 reviews positive (all languages, per Valve)
What players are saying
77% recommend · 154 yes, 45 no
Counted from the reviewers’ own thumbs up/down on the 199 English Steam reviews we collected, not by the AI. Valve’s all-language rating: Very Positive (366 of 439 positive).
Players praise the game's rich, imaginative worldbuilding and excellent writing. [1][2][3] Many note that the gameplay is buggy, tedious, or poorly designed. [4][5][6] Some compare it favorably to Sunless Sea, citing less grind and more engaging story. [7][8][9]
Liked
Representative posts
- [6]
this is what happens when you have excellent writing and atrocious programming and game design. what happened here? did they sacrificed their devs to make a deal with satan, who helped the rest of the team to write? that's my head canon anyway. the setting that's what is great about this game. if you manage to read small font with notches (it's small even if you picked the "large" option), you will be hooked from …
- [1]
A House of Many Doors is a game that obviously pays homage to Sunless Sea while presenting its own version of reality. It's also noteworthy that Failbetter Games was fully supportive of this endeavor. So, what makes A House of Many Doors unique? Story The story in AHoMD begins with you, setting out to find a way to escape The House, which pulls beings, objects, even the land/water itself from various …
- [7]
House of Many Doors is, in short, a better Sunless Sea. While the aesthetic of an underground ocean full of horrors does have its appeal, House of Many Doors too has its locations strange, eldritch, and exciting to explore, all without hours of pointless tedium. Where in Sunless Sea you spend time trading resources and accruing currency to effectively restart you next run, House of Many Doors encapsulates all the …
- [5]
A House of Many Doors' gameplay is admittedly, very jank. Mostly it consists of trundling through empty rooms, on and on, to get to your next destination. The combat is worse, the mix of turn-based and real-time making it somehow both boringly slow moving and requiring incredibly fast reflexes. And all of this is compounded by the game's innumerable bugs, imbalances, and unintentional loopholes. Why then is A House …
- [2]
HOMD is somewhere in my top ten best games of all time. It is an unspeakably rich, vast and beautiful universe and I'm on my second playthrough. Having taken a couple of years since the previous run, I found it haunting my dreams constantly, occasionally I'd lie awake in bed missing it like a former lover, and I had to come crawling back. But let's start at the beginning. HOMD is set in The House, a bizarre …
Summarised from 34 of the 212 public posts collected about this game; every point cites the posts behind it ([n] opens the post) and the split is counted from the posts’ own ratings. Updated Oct 13, 2026. How summaries are made
RottenBot@rottenbot · automated account
A House of Many Doors sits at 77% positive across 196 opinionated reactions from 2 sources. Fresh or rotten — where do you land?
Reactions
60 of 209 · most liked firstA House of Many Doors is a game that obviously pays homage to Sunless Sea while presenting its own version of reality. It's also noteworthy that Failbetter Games was fully supportive of this endeavor. So, what makes A House of Many Doors unique? Story The story in AHoMD begins with you, setting out to find a way to escape The House, which pulls beings, objects, even the land/water itself from various realities/dimensions into this one, a realm of inherent darkness and madness formed as many…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →this is what happens when you have excellent writing and atrocious programming and game design. what happened here? did they sacrificed their devs to make a deal with satan, who helped the rest of the team to write? that's my head canon anyway. the setting that's what is great about this game. if you manage to read small font with notches (it's small even if you picked the "large" option), you will be hooked from the start. the game is unique and tries to tell a new story, in a new setting,…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →‘New weird’ is foxnip to me; I literally cannot resist diving into a work of fiction if it’s visibly something that I’ve never seen before. Shoutout to Alexis Kennedy as one of the genre’s most interesting voices. I’d further recommend the game A House of Many Doors, an indie new weird masterpiece.
positive · AI labelView post →I rarely write reviews for games, but this is a review I just had to write. A House of Many Doors is such an utterly unique and wonderful experience, one that will stick with you for a long time. I love this game so so much. People will often compare A House of Many Doors to Sunless Seas or Sunless Skies. Both because they are similar, and also because it's pretty much the only way you learn about A House of Many Doors. In my opinion, A House of Many Doors blows both of them away utterly. Yes…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →House of Many Doors is, in short, a better Sunless Sea. While the aesthetic of an underground ocean full of horrors does have its appeal, House of Many Doors too has its locations strange, eldritch, and exciting to explore, all without hours of pointless tedium. Where in Sunless Sea you spend time trading resources and accruing currency to effectively restart you next run, House of Many Doors encapsulates all the tension of tight resources, wily trading, and risky ventures without resorting to…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →HOMD is somewhere in my top ten best games of all time. It is an unspeakably rich, vast and beautiful universe and I'm on my second playthrough. Having taken a couple of years since the previous run, I found it haunting my dreams constantly, occasionally I'd lie awake in bed missing it like a former lover, and I had to come crawling back. But let's start at the beginning. HOMD is set in The House, a bizarre dimension that sucks in people from all kinds of universes, and dumps them into a…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →10/10 ate a dead god and then had sex with a murder of crows. The writing in House is great, the lore and the characters and the locations are all a wonderful flavour of weird that makes you want to learn more. The art complements it very nicely too. It all creates a very coherent & engaging whole made out of a variety of different stories/places/characters that still share enough of the common aesthetic to not feel too disparate. The actual mechanics do get boring though, fair warning (it's…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game has some of the best written prose out of any narrative game I've played. If you enjoy narrative-heavy games like Sunless Sea/Skies or Disco Elysium, this game easily fits up there with them. Many of the other reviews talk about buggy/poor gameplay, which was sort of true. While I personally think the game was worth playing in its entirety since it first released, I could understand why some people found the game tedious or unenjoyable. However, after several years, a fan-made…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It kind of breaks my heart to give this a bad review. There are a lot of good ideas and the writing is wonderful. Unfortunately, it feels like the beta version of a game that will never be completed. The bugs are awful and the game world feels unfinished. Play Sunless Sea instead.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This kind of game is actually way out of my scope of what I typically stick with. At first I thought I wasn't really going to like it because I wasn't sure where to begin. However, after some trial and error, getting some help from a very helpful friend. The game finally became enjoyable. The world of the House is a strange one. Various worlds are thrown into a room where they each coexist with one and another. My worse attempt at a analogy is imagining being in some sort of zoo. It is sorta…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Definitely a buggy game, and a bit slow, but some of the best worldbuilding and best writing I've seen in a game for a long time.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →If there was a book or a TV series in this universe, I would absolutely tell you to buy it. The story is rich and engaging and funny, and it somehow takes a place with darkness that tries to eat you, giant bugs as pack animals, vampires, things with shark heads, sentient mushrooms, and a god slaughterhouse (that is, a place in which gods are slaughtered) and has gritty realism. The art is beautiful and the locations are interesting. But this is a vidya game, and as one of those, it just…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The writing of the game is really great and very similar in tone to Sunless Seas. However, the actual gameplay is incredibly boring. The rooms of "The House" are basically all the same and wandering from one to the next is dull and drags on for far too long until the next brief moment of story.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Story: Excellent. Many good words. Travel: Surprisingly interesting. Interface: Unmitigated trash. Art: Great for cities, ok for characters, bad for overworld. Bugs: A flood of crashes and hard locks. Overall: Read a book. It'll be better value for time and money.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Fantastic game, travel is far less tedious than Sunless Sea/Skies, the amount of quests and content in the game is simply immense
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A great addition to the text-based gothic adventure genre, following the example of Sunless Sea. A creative original fantasy realm, deep complex characters and lots of adventures, survival is much easier than the Sunless Sea, combats are turn based and path-finding is almost automatic. Very enjoyable.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A forgotten gem of superb worldbuilding and story telling, if in need of a bit more mechanical polish
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It is nearly impossible to talk about this game without referencing Sunless Sea; the two games are inextricably bound, this one having been inspired by but also receiving friendly support from the Failbetter Games team. The creator of the House went on to work extensively on Sunless Skies, as well, so there's that. While much is new and fascinating, there is a great deal that will feel familiar if you've spent any time on the 'Zee. For that reason, it's more worthwhile to address the…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Had sex with a crow god, a genderless mushroom person, a goatman, a shark man, a bug lady. Helped a tentacle monster seduce a toxic river. 10/10 will play again
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Short Summary: Perhaps the most imaginative and well put-together story-exploration game there is. A game that lets you explore bizarre and otherworldly mysteries, and actually gives you the answers to those mysteries rather than hiding behind colorful-prose. It's only flaw is that the gameplay outside the text-encounters loses tension around the mid-point when nothing really poses a threat to your vehicle anymore. A jewel for anyone who stumbles across it, I found myself falling in love…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I keep getting floored by the fact that everything here was written by one person. ONE! PERSON! And there's a whooole lot of words in it. Words arranged into lovely, fascinating worlds. It's very much a Sunless Sea/Skies-like, with that scurrying from places to places, role-playing choices and making skillchecks, having the sceneries unfolded in your mind with writing instead of visual (although there are some very nice visuals in here too). I think I like A House of Many Doors a whole lot…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A House of Many Doors' gameplay is admittedly, very jank. Mostly it consists of trundling through empty rooms, on and on, to get to your next destination. The combat is worse, the mix of turn-based and real-time making it somehow both boringly slow moving and requiring incredibly fast reflexes. And all of this is compounded by the game's innumerable bugs, imbalances, and unintentional loopholes. Why then is A House of Many Doors one of my favourite games of all time? The obvious answer would…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →As it's a 1 man dev project for the most part it's less polished than Sunless Sea/Skies which means it can be pretty buggy and the overworld isn't very fun to explore, but the writing is great and the world is well realised with lots of different factions at play and interesting locations. The game must have at least 100 quests and basically all of them are interesting, so well worth buying if you've played the Sunless games and are looking for something similar.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I honestly think this is better than sunless skies, I love the world that it created and the story it built, smart and filled with depth while being clear enough to actually progress through without selling your life to the game.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A friend of mine had a spare key so I got this game for free. I really recommend it! It's a narrative heavy game in the style of Fallen London/Sunless Sea, though with its own take. I enjoyed reading it, it made me laugh at times - especially the romance options. I think I managed all the options on the store page (and more!) except for 'Men' somehow, despite relentlessly flirting with literally anybody/thing I could. It's great, you can do wacky things and just see what happens! There are a…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Having loved Sunless Sea, and Cultist Simulator, and many other weird story-driven games, I am pleased to have been sucked in to the House of Many Doors. This House is one that does not let go of the things it steals from other places, including me. Its temperamental gods, its politics, its hidden corners that contain secrets unfathomable. One of the early concerns you receive is to find the City of Glass, which vanished some time ago. The clues you find point toward its hiding place, but you…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Genuinely my favourite game of all times. Someone said that some of the criticism is warranted and I agree - if you're in it for riveting gameplay or combats this won't be for you, although of course this is up for debate (I find it fine, a little tedious at times but certainly nothing that ever made me think I needed to close the game). The writing is unbeliveably inspiring, and the game really takes you from breathtaking sight to breathtaking horror; the characters are *so good* and become…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →If you like Sunless Sea or Sunless Skies you will like this game. Its a dark -literally dark- fantasy game where you explore a parallel dimension and its strange cities in your centipede-like vehicle. Interesting characters abd sites, and lots of good writing. Lots to read! - I have experienced a couple of crashes while playing it, but still good value 8 out of 10.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game is criminally underrated, and certainly worth the price. While the game doesn't hold your hand much with information, it also has a save system, so you're free to muck around and mess up, and reload when you're done. If you like good writing, good art, and eldritch locations, you should buy this.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This recommendation is conditional: If you can handle buggy combat, long periods of boredom and repetition between fascinating events, and occasionally buggy everything you will enjoy this game. Now here are some disorganized thoughts. Making the main character a poet and travel writer is a great twist on the Escape Velocity-like (for lack of a better genre to ape) since it gives you a clear monetary benefit to just wandering around. You can get paid for it! You're not forced to think about…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The game shares a lot of similarities with Sunless Seas/Skies including the procedural layout, emphasis on creating and maintaining a large vessel, collecting an eclectic cast of officers that each have their own stories, and reliance on what could be best described as intense metaphysical pulp writing. However, the way that it is presented in HoMD is unique enough that calling it a clone would be disparaging to both. HoMD is a rough game, but a beautiful and deep world that is filled with…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →needs more polish. menuing feels janky, which is bad for a game that is mostly menus. i have a laptop size screen that is 1080p native. at 1920x1080, text is blurry and too small to read comfortably. at lower resolutions, the ui doesnt scale so it becomes this cluttered mess of ungainly ui elements, and the text is still blurry. ive tried adjusting the usual suspects (.exe dpi options, windows scaling), and it still doesnt work.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A House of Many Doors is a game that incorporates vivid storytelling via text with periods of top-down travel in your "kinetopede" to new locations. You're a poet/journalist on an adventure to break out or escape "The House". I put off finishing this game for about a month because I really didn't want it to end. I did the final quest today, there are alternate decisions you can make to finalize your play through. I have never played a game before with such creative and captive writing. It was…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Absolutely memorizing writing and atmosphere wrapped up in sub-par code. I would give ANYTHING for a mutli-million dollar remake of this game but I'm afraid it would lose its indie charm in the process.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I DO NOT LIKE Sunless Sea. I find the writing deeply pretentious and affected and the tedium and repetition of early runs absolutely ruins any fun that I can have with it. Some of the graphics, environments, moods, stories are quite nice, but it is a heinous arse-pain to actually access most of the good content at all. This sort of hardcore roguelike gating for a narrative game is unacceptable. COMPARATIVELY HOMD is written much more punchily, simultaneously less adorned and full of itself…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Fun game with really entertaining writing and a really unique world.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Really enjoying this game. It's a lot like Sunless Sea, but I personally enjoy it more. I find the writing style easier to get in to than Sunless Sea and the gameplay less tedious. I'm very curious to see what twists and turns the stories take.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Strong narrative, expansive lore, excellent worldbuilding, utterly delicious writing. If you like all of those things then this gem needs to be in your collection. A huge amount of content too, serious value for money.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →One of the best games of it's genre, whatever that is - probably top-down-narratively-focussed-RPGs? You (and I) have probably found this game in search of another Sunless Sea, and A House of Many Doors delivers. Before I go on a long and boring bloglike entry why AHomD is great, I'll just write a simple pro/con list. Pro: - Storytelling on the level (and arguably surpassing) Failbetter Games writing - Absolutely unique setting full of with brilliant, whimsical ideas - Great Dialogues,…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game is very much focused on story, being a sort of spiritual successor to sunless sea. The setting is interesting and grisly, but it goes too far into being "weird" and "occult" for it to have any punch. There isn't anything to anchor onto as a point of reference, so it winds up just being a surrealist mash where divine visitations, impossible geometries, the walking dead, memory thieves, magic, and industrial drudgery all become about as interesting as ants on a sidewalk. It's too bad,…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A clone of Sunless Sea that ends up being worse than its model despite better writing. On paper, the House is more interesting than the pilfered "Zee" (I can't write this ridiculous word without cringe.) On screen however, the original looks good, while this one is a true lemon. The rooms, their agency, the general map, the combat map... yuck yuck yuck! If that was the only flaw though, I wouldn't care. Most flaws were copied from the game it leeched, so the physical gameplay is tremendously…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →For those of you on my stream earlier, @khanlusa.bsky.social is the youtuber from whom I learned of A House of Many Doors. She makes delightful video essays about various games and game things, and doesn't shy away from some horniness. See her "hear-me-outs" videos. You should watch her.
neutral · AI labelView post →Great writing but the gameplay ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Good, but flawed. Play Sunless Sea first, and if that runs out and you want more: play A House of Many Doors. Then play Sunless Skies and be disappointed it isn't weird enough. The best part of the game is its abundance of stories. Like, Sunless Sea, there are a ton of threads to pull on. With their being so many, some fall pretty flat and feel unfinished (and some may actually be unfinished). For example, at the start of the game you have the option to give up your heart, giving you the…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A sort of "FTL" mixed with the vibes of "the night cage" and "kingdom death monster" the game is glitchy and a bit slow, but if you like reading, this might be for you.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It's a bit rough around the edges, but this is an amazing gem of interactive fiction. If you played Sunless Seas and/or Sunless Skies and want "more of that but different" -- a (different) incomprehensibly weird world full of strange places to explore and even weirder creatures to meet -- this game is exactly that. There are literally dozens, maybe over a hundred unique Weird Places to go visit! And in all those places are countless unimaginable experiences, from befriending a tribe of…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Next to no tutorial - the only way to learn how to play this game is to start googling as soon as you buy it. Practically impossible to play, crazy high difficulty to do ANYTHING. The 'world' is absolutely enormous and nearly entirely EMPTY. You will drive your train through 10-12 sectors without anything to see or do (except lose your 'sanity' arbitrarily). Really cannot emphasize how bad this game is. I can forgive a lot as Lovecraftian is my fav genre of games, but this is truly unplayable.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The v2.0 update for A House of Many Doors is now live! Featuring extensive bug-fixes and polish store.steampowered.com/news/app/437...
neutral · AI labelView post →The writing, story, and world-building in this game are utterly fantastic. Truly my favorite game of all time. It has its flaws, and it's definitely not for everyone, but I find it better than sunless sea in many regards. If you like the supernatural, high concept science fiction, and wonderfully written characters, this game is absolutely worth trying.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A House of Many Doors is a ripoff of Sunless Sea. It's a story driven "survival" RNG stat grinder game where you make various decisions and interact with the members of your group, all of which influences the story and affects your stats. Like Oregon Trail and others of this "RNG Survival" genre, it's a negative sum game as attrition will probably kill you before you get to any reasonable end. Instead of sailing a boat on a Cthulu sea, or riding a wagon train in the untamed West, you've got…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →When an absolutely great and genius narrative is objectively undermined by terrible, terrible code, you get A House of Many Doors. Gameplay and the art-style that you're going to see for 70% of your time is sub-par. What is truly exceptional is the cities, the places you happen to visit, their illustrations that can manage to both be sad and colorful and the writing, which is stellar. No, seriously, it's incredibly good. The writer of this game made a couple of quests in Failbetter's…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Go into this with modest expectations of an indie game (mostly written and coded by one person) and you'll love it. Combat is silly. There are many bugs, and the game seems to reliably run out of memory and CTD after a few hours constant play, but with how forgiving the difficulty is and how easily you can save, this was never very frustrating and never cost much progress. The exploration is more lonely and repetitive than Sunless Seas (there is a fast travel system which helps a lot, look…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Excellent fantasy-style Stede Bonnet simulator. The main storyline is primarily sidelined to the intricate world that is laid out for you to explore. If you can handle initial slow progression, occasional glitches, and some unintuitive/vague design, it is well worth the investment.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This is a beautiful, creative exploration game with excellent writing, perfect if you're in the mood for something like Sunless Sea or Sunless Skies. It has its flaws, but it's all the more charming for that. This is one of the most intriguing and creative settings I have ever seen.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The travel is slow and monotonous, the combat is lackluster, there are many bugs, and any sense of challenge evaporates after an hour or two. However the setting, story, and characters have made this one of my all time favorite games.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A true hidden gem of a game. The expansive lore and the lovecraftian themes are very fascinating and enjoyable. Every character has deep backstories and fleshed out, interesting personalities. You can get lost in the terrific world brimming with stories. I just want to play the game over and over again
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I don't know why this is gendery to me but it speaks to me on a primal level and all of the associated text is great (game: A House of Many Doors)
positive · AI labelView post →I adore this game. I've played it off and on since it was released in 2017. The stories in this game are full of interesting lore and quests that add depth to this unnerving massive underground room. You play as a train driver that drives through various rooms to locate a way out of the "House." Along the way you recruit people to your train's staff as well as solve mysteries for those in the various cities you encounter. Each region of the House has it's own enemies and secrets to uncover.…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →finished playing A House of Many Doors. Really really enjoyed that game, the writing was great. I cried a little at one of the epilogue slides
positive · AI labelView post →Did you like Sunless Sea? Would you like it to be... worse?
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →
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