Written and developed by Harry Tuffs, with art by Catherine Unger, A House Of Many Doors is something of a cautionary tale. It's just about at the limit of what a single developer supported by a few artistic collaborators can deliver. There's an awful lot of game here, which by all accounts was exhausting to finish. Even so, "finished" requires some caveats. There are parts of the game that feel underbaked, not-insubstantial corners of the world that were clearly meant to be more involved, and a community patch made by fans to resolve a host of bugs that ultimately fell beyond Tufts' bandwidth to fix himself. I dearly love that this game exists, but it is also an object to be handled gingerly, like a museum piece, lest you break something.
As much as Unger's art style, the soundtrack by Zach Beever is responsible for giving the world a coherent identity. Its instrumentation is, consistently, percussive and metallic, mixing more conventional piano parts with tinnier strings and klangier bells. It is a brass harpsichord of a beast, a soundscape wholly distinct from the flutes, horns, and general saturation of the nautical Sunless Sea soundtrack that (as with all other elements of AHOMD) serves as its original inspiration. While Beever ultimately pursued a career in electrical engineering rather than music, I'm relieve to see that he's still making music to this day, released from time to time on Soundcloud.
Links
A House of Many Doors OST on Bandcamp.
Zach Beever's Soundcloud (It looks like his web domain was taken over by domain squatters at some point, best to avoid it).
(But yeah, I have heard about some bugs that deleted files on your computer. That's pretty bad. It's just... this game is so good, y'all, like, some of the most memorable events in game, and so many stories, and the soundtrack is amazing, and, and...)
AYO??????????????
From the soundtrack, Abyssal is a long-time favorite, & has left me yearning for more music like this. I have never heard crawling things in the dark so well-crafted in the auditory sphere.
The game itself is great. Too bad I can't figure out the combat, which has constrained me quite squarely to the early story.











