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• Content warnings
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A House of Many Doors (video game)

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Fandom name: A House of Many Doors
What medium is it and where to find it: PC/Mac video game, available on Steam or itch.io for about $13
A summary (try to avoid major spoilers): You are an inhabitant of the House, a parasite dimension that absorbs people, things, places, sometimes entire cultures from other worlds. You captain a "kinetopede," an odd train-ship that trundles through the darkness of the House's empty rooms between one settlement and another, trading information and goods, writing poetry about the House's mysteries, picking up interesting weirdos to help operate your ship, and chasing the possibility that somewhere out there is a way to escape the House for the worlds beyond.

Content warnings Textual descriptions of body horror, moments of dissociation; "sanity" mechanic to measure travel stress that touches on suicidal themes if it gets critically low (playing cautiously it's possible to avoid the suicide parts entirely).

Why you like it: HoMD uses some of the same code/engine (and has a similar archly dark atmosphere) as Sunless Sea, but the mechanics are much more forgiving; it's more purely about exploring a world rather than roguelike death-to-progress strategy. The world and cultures are fascinating to uncover, and the sense of discovery is exciting. You write poetry as a means of generating income and the game procedurally generates parts of your poems in several formal styles, often ridiculous and sometimes beautiful. There are a number of ship's officer characters with their own storylines; some of them are romanceable, others will have a fling but not a romance, and others have various reasons for not being interested -- none of them are gender-locked, as the game never nails down the captain's gender. Overall it's a beautiful, strange environment where all sorts of things are possible.

Helpful hints for getting started:
1) Ship combat is almost entirely unnecessary, apart from the battle at the very beginning. If you don't like it and/or if you haven't upgraded your ship much yet, just run away from aggressive ships/monsters.
2) If you need to make money in the early game, there is a profitable trade route running laudanum from the poets' colony Fargyle Keep, south of your starting city, to the City of Masks.
3) Advertise for new crewmembers when you can afford it; your starting crew do very little to improve your/your ship's stats and you can get much better boosts from people looking for jobs in the cities.