Healing is where Death’s Door punishes you to teach a lesson. It’s both a blessing and a curse: There aren’t attacks that you can just take on the chin and keep battling, but nothing can one-shot you either. Death’s Door has a pip-based health bar, meaning every attack just removes a single pip of the bar. Instead, the difficulty comes in getting back to the boss with full health. There are no corpse runs in Death’s Door. After death, you keep both your knowledge of the fight and the Souls you’ve collected along the way.
When you die, you’re swiftly teleported back to a nearby door, which acts as a portal to the game’s hub world. They exist to teach you a singular idea, like the fact that greedily finishing your combo can get you killed. The first bosses have comically long windup animations. The early enemies you encounter have simple attacks, and you only face a few at a time. The game’s top-down perspective offers a great view of all kinds of areas Image: Acid Nerve/Devolver Digitalĭifficult games want you to succeed some are just more sadistic than others.ĭeath’s Door starts as a relatively friendly romp. It’s simply a way for you to learn and improve. It’s a toned-down version of FromSoftware’s RPG trappings, but it’s there.Įxcept that death is never punishing in Death’s Door. You’ll find new weapons that change things like attack speed, damage, and range. As you collect Souls (their actual name in Death’s Door), you can upgrade Crow’s strength or magic ability. Mechanically, Death’s Door is about weapons, stat increases, dodging, and watching for boss patterns. There’s a melancholy to Death’s Door that comes from the clash between charming NPCs, a gloomy world, and your role as the harbinger of death. The structure is similar to Zelda, but the tone evokes FromSoftware games.
The overworld is divided into areas, and by defeating each area’s boss, you can move forward to the next, and then the next. Sometimes in the dungeon you’ll unlock a new weapon or spell that will allow you to enter new areas, unlock new secrets, and create new shortcuts. You sprint through the overworld, taking out baddies, and then dive into a dungeon to solve some puzzles.
The game plays out like one of the top-down Zelda titles. You play as Crow, but everyone just refers to you as a “reaper.” It’s your job to travel from the bureaucratic afterlife to claim the lives of three powerful souls and use them to open a titular door that’s been sealed shut. Crow stares up at one of the game’s first bosses Image: Acid Nerve/Devolver Digitalĭeath’s Door is a 3D, top-down action game.