A House of Many Doors is a game I've loved for ages, so it's where I'm going to start with my new project of "review more games in my library".

I'll be honest, this game can be a slog. I am a person who can easily put on a podcast in order to do boring game tasks like "crawling from city to city in a largely fixed and repetitive map"; I am also a person who puts in the effort to make a map in a spreadsheet to make playing the game easier. The vehicle-to-vehicle combat minigame is difficult to master, and there's a LOT of clicking through storyline options in a city and little tasks to attend to (I do also enjoy little tasks).

That said? The game was made by one guy doing frankly unsustainable levels of work, and the art and writing captivate me so intensely I will overlook the boring travel parts in order to dive into the beautiful, offbeat, cynical, deeply humanist stories the game conjures. Each location and each person commits to its strangeness wholeheartedly, and the patchwork creates a whole world as diverse, cruel, and marvelous as our own. It reminds me of a lazy spring afternoon hauling a tabletop role-playing sourcebook into the tree outside my house when I was twelve and getting lost in someplace else, with a far clearer-headed attitude towards power and living in systems of power than most, and for that, I'll overlook any fault.

genuinely unplayable