I Played Death’s Door.

Death’s Door was a game that captured my interest immediately. I saw the trailer/gameplay during some E3 or some video game conference video and immediately knew I wanted to play it. I’m not sure what it is about this style of game that gets me interested. I’d typically lean towards thanking the Legend of Zelda series, but even that ice is slick to traverse and thin to boot. My memories of A Link to the Past are rich with joy and excitement, but when I jumped back into the original NES title, I enjoyed the gameplay enough, but got extraordinarily frustrated with the lack of feedback the game provides for you as you blindly traverse the overworld. There are no hints about where to go, how to find what you need or if where you’re heading is correct. And strangely, I think that’s the appeal?

So when I sit down with (and deeply enjoy!) games like Hyperlight Drifter, and this game as well, games that offer few little hints and signposts to tell you that you’re headed in the right direction, it confuses me quite a bit. I’m not sure that I’ve found the explicit connection between games in this style that I gel with and games in this style that put me off.

I can tell you that regardless of what style of gameplay this title ended up offering, the art style and sense of humor, the sheer personality of this game can easily coax its way into my heart. The main character you control in the game is a silent Crow who works in an ethereal office ‘building’, clocking in daily to head out into a misty backyard and collect souls that they are commissioned to collect. The opening area is a graveyard but it branches off into a small village, a swamp fortress and a collection of towers that lead high into the mountains. The enemies you fight are fairly predictable and straight forward from a design standpoint, but their fortitude, aggression and persistence lean the combat encounters (especially the larger scale ones) in a FromSoft direction (albeit, maybe FromSoft lite). The way the enemies look almost as if they could have been built or designed from clay may have a great deal to do with why I continued to throw myself into the fray to force my way uphill against battles that began to beat my head against a wall.

There are moments in this game that are frustrating. Certainly elements of a game that wants to keep its presentation concise, but also wants you to spend a considerable amount of time with it. Ironically, it isn’t the actual boss-battles themselves which felt like they were the most difficult encounters. Those ended up just being pattern-based puzzles that could be solved easily enough if you spent the time to learn the item or skill that you’d just earned on your way through the dungeon to face them. No, it was mostly the bottle-necked melees that ground me down to my patience’s final burning wick. But even that being said, a game like this allows you to analyze the toolset, to examine the timing and the motion of the opponent… and often one will realize that what did you in was your own haste, your own greed. It was definitely a lesson learned, and once I got myself into a state of flow within those battles, things started to play out exactly as predictably as if they had written down the dance steps and I was able to follow along to a beat. The feeling of clarity when you’re able to finally clear a battleground of the handfuls of enemies and/or the waves necessary to get you past a gate is hard to equal. Everything just starts to fall into place beautifully and it’s up to your fingers to waltz and provide the blows.

While your character remains silent throughout the game, the NPCs and bosses that you encounter throughout are written in such a playful and casual manner that it tends to fall somewhere between the dialog and banter of Adventure Time and Over the Garden Wall (the latter sharing a lot of the same type of ‘wooden-bucket aesthetic’), with these characters not being placed in a fable and speaking in grandiose and obtuse classic language, instead sounding like they’re in a group-chat with the crew, breaking down obstacles, desires, hatred and disdain with an off-beat casual style. It really suited me.

I spent about 12 hours in total with this game, divided up over the course of a few months. I don’t know what exactly would pull me from the game’s grasp, but I would play it for a day or two, and then put it down for months, diving into something else entirely and losing the trail. It was this final run that I put in the final 6 hours (beat the second boss and the rest that followed) and tucked in and did some real damage. And really, it felt like two parts that really brought me to that 12 hour mark. The final boss, of course, was a huge endeavor, as their fight is broken up into between 3–6 parts, counting combat pauses and “obstacle courses” that would often send me back to its beginning if I would fail, and then having to complete a final bigger battle in the end. There was another part that barely even had a personality in the run-up to the giant ice boss (Betty the Yeti to be exact) which had me dying dozens of times, and I’m truly not even sure why. I think you could probably beat this game in a weekend through a couple sittings if you spent the time with it.

I highly recommend this game! It’s an absolute blast. The design of everything involved from the weapons, the items, and the characters and settings are gorgeous and the dialog won’t get you rolling your eyes and boring you to tears. It’s a tightly packed parcel, the controls possibly being the highlight of all things with the dodge rolls coming at the exact moment you press the button and the weapon swings feeling synced just right with the type of weapon you’re carrying. These types of things add so much quality to the game, eliminating any separation from you, the player, and the game itself. Things just feel right as you’re playing, and I couldn’t ask for more. I loved it! Wish I would have finished it sooner. You can definitely check it out at the time of this writing via Game Pass!

I’ll be adding some screenshots on my instagram account (‘iamnoimpact’) today as well if you’d like to see some of my favorite captures as I played.