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.