Death’s Door is an isometric action-adventure game with fun puzzles and an amazing combat system. It’s nearly perfect.
What Is It? Death’s Door is a small-scale take on a bunch of different aspects of ‘90s action-adventure games. Sword-swinging combat, light puzzling, and dungeons are prominent throughout. It feels like a combination of a dozen different games that gamers of a certain age would have played long ago. The greatest trick Death’s Door manages to pull off, however, is making these decade old concepts feel fresh.
You control a crow who is a soul-collecting cog in the bureaucratic machine that is the Reaping Commission. You are sent out on what appears to be a routine assignment to collect the soul of a monster who has other plans. Upon defeating this monster, which is a weird plant-like creature, you are ambushed by a large, old crow who steals the soul you were assigned to collect. Unfortunately, the penalty for losing a soul is not pretty so your new mission is to track down this crow who snagged it from you as your adventure truly begins.
You will fight your way through a large overworld and three unique dungeons, solving light puzzles along the way. Combat consists of melee attacks with your sword (or umbrella, for those wanting a challenge and/or trophy completion) and your magic. There are four magic abilities you will unlock over the course of the game. All abilities, as well as basic speed and strength stats, can be upgraded at the Reaping Commission Headquarters (RCH) in exchange for souls.
The combat here is perfect. The melee attacks feel great and require a constant input of running and dodging to avoid getting hit to conserve your extremely limited hit points. Using magic requires a charge which can only be replenished by performing melee attacks. This is a wonderful trade-off which ensures players don’t get too comfortable firing from range which is a trap a lot of games like this fall into. You will only get to fire four arrows before needing to recharge via melee attack.
Healing is rarely an interesting aspect of a game like this, but Death’s Door delivers there as well. You collect seeds to plant at select locations throughout the world and return to them to pluck their healing fruit to fully heal yourself. The plant will remain barren until you die or return to RCH, either of which will result in all enemies respawning. The game will give you a few seeds that are very difficult to miss, but many are hidden quite well, so the nervous game of when to plant them versus holding them until a tougher section is an incredibly small part of the game, but also a fascinating one.
The game looks great with a unique art style that really pops the entire time. The setting and the bosses, in particular, are real standouts. Your tiny crow is almost always the most boring thing on the screen at any given time.
There are light Metroidvania aspects as the abilities you unlock will allow access to new areas. The fire ability will allow you to burn your way into new areas, the hookshot will allow you to cross missing paths, and the bombs will allow you to bomb through weak objects. This all sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?
The Best Part: The give and take of combat. I am certain it is not the first game to do this, but requiring players to engage in close-range melee attacks in order to charge their long range attacks is a perfect way to keep the game balanced. I typically would always prefer ranged combat in a game like this, so limiting that with a core mechanic, versus via an arrow limit or something else, really forced me to engage this game in ways I typically wouldn’t have and is a big reason I love this game so much.
The Worst Part: I don’t have a good answer here. This is one of the few games I would consider to be 10/10. I wish it were a bit longer, given the nine hour runtime, but I also understand that longer does not mean better.
The Verdict: The goal of any indie game attempting to pull heavily from beloved games of the past is to find the right balance of familiar, but fresh. I’m not sure I’ve seen another game do that as well as Death’s Door does. The art style is striking and ensures this game will develop its own unique memories as you play while the gameplay pulls bits and pieces from all around and executes them wonderfully. You will probably feel like you’ve played dozens of games like Death’s Door as you work through the myriad of strange enemies and locations the game offers, but I’m willing to bet you haven’t played many games like this at all. It is a wonderful, modern classic in my book, one that anybody with a vague interest in the genre should experience.
How to Play: PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series S/X, Switch, PC, iOS, Android
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