Death’s Door is an isometric, hacky-slashy, Souls-like with the adventure of a Zelda-like and the grimness of the aforementioned Demon’s/Dark Souls. You play as a crow-reaper in a world that has, more or less, cured death. You are basically middle-management in death’s accountancy firm. Your first assignment is to collect the soul of a big flower that is the game’s opening boss, and ultimately, you disappoint.

I’m not just suggesting that you will die, that’s the point of these games. The soul you’re tasked with gathering disappears, and you have to go through the world tracking it down. Along the way, you will be accumulating the souls of several others, growing more powerful, and finding the more personal stories of those around it. Death’s Door builds an atmosphere that is not only gloomy and disheartening but also adventurous and inviting. Coming from the developer behind Titan Souls, a game I didn’t enjoy too greatly for what I played of it, I was interested to see what Acid Nerve’s subsequent game was to be.

Picking over the crow’s nest of Souls-like ideas, Metroidvania layouts, and other glistening trinkets filling Death’s Door, there is one thing that persists in my mind. There are moments I don’t want to play it. As I’ve noted, the world is inviting: The art direction is wholesome, the use of color in the reaping commission’s HQ is wonderful, and the characters are endearing. I love my mate Pothead, a bloke with a lot of wood for a neck and a cooking pot filled with soup for a literal head. That’s a bit for the parents to get if their kids are playing, of course, but I can’t help love those somewhat innocent jokes laced throughout.

Characters provide that perfectly likable dialogue about the environment and them, but much like Dark Souls, do very little in the way of saying what is coming up next and where to go. If you don’t fancy the Dark Souls comparison, maybe you shouldn’t invite it with the whole reaping of the souls, the grim atmosphere, only re-healing from something that specifically replenishes your health but is also in short supply, and the rest of the game for that matter. The only thing lacking in this year’s hottest new crow murdering game that the homework it copied itself from didn’t have is that isometric thing; It kind of ruins the very grim skybox FromSoft made.

If Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights can be remarked for having possibly too many checkpoints (benches, bonfires, or doors), it might be more than fair to note that Death’s Door could have too few. Death becomes the most significant annoyance as you trudge through the same bit of environment you’ve been in for the last 5-10 minutes. That is all well and good when banging your head against the wall, but unless you know exactly where everything is, you’ll spend six months exploring the never-ending world to find that boss again. There is no map, and with a lack of identifiers other than the change in color palettes and foliage, you might as well consult a wiki made by its most ardent defenders as the best indie Souls-like.

Match together the lack of a map, the sparse layout of doors, and gameplay that can be infuriating more often than not, and you’ll get the finished product. I don’t know what I am supposed to reassure you with. Yes, I enjoy Death’s Door for many reasons, but do I think it is a great game? I think it has as many imperfections as there are reasons to appreciate it, making me in equal measure not want to play it once I am done and never play it again. The metaphor for a “balanced” Souls game is that you desire to chew on a brick but also throw the brick into a window, here I just want to throw the brick, I’ve chewed it enough.

Without it being explained (as far as I saw) you have to understand that you’ll not find a boss’ health bar at the bottom. They’ll gain cracks on their body before shattering with your final hit. Twice, in my final moments, I’d hit bosses and be killed at the same time, not with a ranged attack, but a melee one. The second time, the boss had properly died. If you were having a dinner of bricks, walking the same three miles to find out if you’d beaten the boss, and were frustrated with gameplay that is nice but not tightened up enough, you’d want to throw that brick too.

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Death's Door

$19.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Beautiful art-direction.
• Grim yet inviting atmosphere.

Cons

• A lack of a map in a game so sprawling.
• Doors are spread out annoyingly far from common death points.