Death's Door
Exploration and combat in an exceptionally stylish package. Plus you get to be a little guy.
Okay, I’ll start with a secret. Despite having a HowLongToBeat of just nine hours for the main story, and Iron Pineapple saying it took him just around seven to finish, it took me more like 11.5 hours. I actually got to the end-game area within about 8.5 hours, but an NPC told me off for having collected no upgrades, and I thought he had a good point because I’d struggled with the previous boss, so I went off and did some more exploring and grabbed some extra health and magic before tackling the end game. There’s a chance that I could have powered through and won with the base health and magic, but I didn’t. It’s my blog and you’re not my real dad.
Anyway, Death’s Door is an isometric Zelda-esque dungeon crawler with some minor Souls-like trappings that stands out because it picks a few things to do and does them really well. The most obvious is how it looks. This game is absolutely beautiful. I know style is subjective, but Death’s Door really works for me. I took so many screenshots while playing, ostensibly to add to this article but I only ever use two or three pics, so what are the other 50 for? It combines artistic greyscale with pops of colour, areas with muted tones and areas with brighter colours. The music also absolutely slaps, particularly the refrain that plays in the ‘hub’ area.
You play as a crow and it’s the most “just a little guy” video game protagonist that I’ve seen in a long time. Seriously, what a cute little dude. Your tippy-tappy little feet, your inquisitive little head tilt, and your diminutive stature. It’s no overstatement to say that I loved this little guy and that was a part of my enjoyment of this game. It was such a joy.
The premise of the game is that you are part of the Reaping Commission, tasked with going out into the world to collect souls that are clinging to life beyond their time. Naturally, it doesn’t go to plan and the game unfolds as you try to recover the missing soul. It takes a fairly simple approach of “go to these three places and collect these three things to reach the end game” but honestly, that’s fine – it doesn’t need to spring a sudden extra act on you. It’s as long as it needs to be.
Most of the game is in the combat. There are actually very few bosses and enemy types in the game – where many games would add in a miniboss, Death’s Door will have a wave battle with regular enemies. Despite sounding lazy, I think this is fine and let me tell you why – they’ve devoted the design time to the main bosses, and these are all exceptional. First and foremost, they are really fun. A grandma who throws urns at you and who turned her grandson’s head into a pot in search of immortality and a giant frog who pogo sticks around whom you need to cut out of his too-small armour are two of the most memorable.
Although it’s pretty simplistic as far as combat goes, I still had fun with it. Slash, slash, roll out the way. Gain some distance, throw a bomb. Repeat. Find a rhythm, knock projectiles back into the face of the enemy they came from, make good use of i-frame dodges. It doesn’t need to be more complex than that to be fun.
The game incorporated two innovative and interesting approaches to common tropes: the healing system and the ‘mana’ system. I am all for innovating, but the healing system added more frustration to the game for me despite being quite interesting, but as already established, I am bad at the game, so it’s probably a me problem.
Scattered around the world are seeds and pots to put them into. When planted, you can heal from the resulting flower, but only once between either dying or returning to the hub world (enemies respawn on both these triggers, a la Dark Souls). Their stationary nature means that you can only heal when the game deems it appropriate, which made boss fights frustrating for someone used to being able to back off and swig a healing potion at my leisure. Despite my personal frustration, I think it’s a really neat system, though they might have been afraid to properly commit to it because even though I did fairly minimal exploring until right near the end of the game, I still had nine spare seeds at the end and only one pot I hadn’t planted in. I understand it’s meant to reward exploration and fully accept that if it had been too restrictive and demanded you spent a long time seeking the seeds I’d be complaining about it right now, but it feels like they had a fun idea and then maybe focus groups were struggling with the game too much so they added more seeds. I don’t know. I guess I’m just hard to please.
As for the mana regen system, I thought what they did was really cool. It’s not a mana bar in the traditional sense, it’s a number of charges. Your ranged attacks use up one or two charges when you cast them, and you regain them when you land a melee hit (including on scenery objects, so traversal doesn’t get too frustrating). This makes for a very balanced system. As much as I wanted to stand at the back and lob bombs into my enemy’s faces, I was forced to engage in the melee combat. It made combat dynamic and interesting. I really wish I had mastered using the hook shot in combat but I never managed it – I can only imagine the added fun brought by the manoeuvrability.
Death Door’s story is exactly as long as it needs to be. It doesn’t belabour the point over much but still has one to make. Death as a theme has the potential to be grim and heavy, but it’s mitigated by incredible character design and writing. It’s very funny at points, and somehow relatable in parts too. One of the highlights for me was the restaurant proprietor who was a giant squid hiding behind a humanoid corpse, desperately trying to convince me he was just a normal chef. I also enjoyed the inevitable betrayal that led to your boss becoming the boss at the end of the game, a nice play on words.
If you enjoy Zelda-like exploration and dungeon puzzles or games filled with charm, style, and novelty, you should absolutely check out Death’s Door. The exploration and combat are rewarding, the story is meaningful but avoids being too Dark by interspersing itself with humour, and the characters and bosses are some of the most memorable I’ve seen in a long time.
Game: Death’s Door
Developer: Acid Nerve
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Platforms: PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch
I wanna be a lil guy
This is on a steam sale at the moment. I added it to my wish list after reading this and am looking forward to playing this afternoon.