Death’s door is a game in the souls-like genre with fantastic visuals and an excellent soundtrack. The game tries to be a souls-like, but focuses on being punishing rather than challenging. It lacks the complexity in both combat and boss design, with to few bosses to boot. The game has a functional combat system, but it is basic and tedious. This somewhat works when you combine it with the excellent visuals to create a more relaxing and brain dead experience, but it is not what I think the game wants to do.
Narrative
Death’s door narrative centres around the theme of death and immortality. The narrative is a very basic story, it is coherent, but the main function is just to give you a minor story while you stab things. I was to some extent curious about what hid behind the large door and how the grim reaper office full of crows worked. It is a very forgettable story, but it is there and it is nothing wrong with it. It is just not the focus of the game in any sense.
Presentation
The game looks fabulous. The use of colour is fantastic. The animations are clean. The environments are gorgeous. In short everything about the visual experience of the game is appealing, and it is my favourite aspect of the game by far. The sound is also great, the sound effects are satisfying with a great soundtrack that fits great to the sequences they are attached to. My only issue with the soundtrack is that it has a tendency to repeat very distinctive sounds too often that pulls my attention to the soundtrack and away from the gameplay. The presentation is why people are drawn to the game, and one of the major reasons people might enjoy the game.
Unfortunately the game also has several visual effects and issues that makes it hard for me to properly enjoy the visuals. The game uses flash to white or other colours in loading screens or to signal effects, and I find this quite jarring. The game makes me feel motion sick and generally unwell the longer I play it. I believe that the source of these issue are to some extent the camera and some other source that I cannot identify. These issues makes a session longer than an hour unplayable for me. Which is obviously a shame when this is the type of game that shines the brightest when you are lost in its amazing visuals and great music.
Combat
Combat is the most important aspect of the game as a souls-like. You have the expected movement with the WASD keys, a dodge-roll, light attack, charge attack, a ranged attack and a dodge-roll attack. You can also deflect ranged attacks by hitting them, which is a nice touch. This system is implemented well with clean animations and hit boxes, but it is also a basic souls-like system which lacks any depth or complexity.
You get access to more weapons and abilities as you progress through the game, however the effective change on the gameplay is minimal. I did enjoy having new weapons and abilities to test, but I was disappointed in the depth of these weapons. Depth is one of my major issues with the entire game, and I think that having more distinct weapons would have helped the overall game immensely. The game is paced fairly slowly, and as such I think having the variance of very distinctive weapons is very important, and a major flaw of the game.
The regular enemies you spend most of the time fighting are pretty basic in their design. It was fun to fight them a couple of times, but once you understood them combat became pretty trivial and boring. For me the combat is not good enough to just throw the same basic enemies at me over and over again; the only way I am dying is if I am getting bored and stop paying attention.
The attack direction is controlled by the mouse, while the dodge is controlled by the WASD movement, and is as such only 8 directional. This means that the control you have over your character is limited by the isometric movement from the WASD movement. I would have liked an option to also tie the dodge direction to the mouse direction for that extra bit of control. This is especially an issue when one of your most powerful attacks is dependent on the dodge direction. The game also queues up actions, but that means that when you dodge and light attack it attacks in the direction of the dodge, and not the mouse cursor. These are not major issues, but they are things that takes control out of your hands, which I don’t think is a good thing in a game centred around its combat.
Bosses
I initially expected bosses to be a larger part of the game than what it ended up being. I loved the first couple of bosses, and was really excited to see where the game was going. I loved how simple and quick the bosses where, and how well executed they were considering their simplicity. I was expecting more of the same, quick, simple and well executed bosses appearing frequently.
You don’t get that at all, you get bosses at a much slower rate, much fewer than you would expect, and encounters that lasts way too long. I hate how the developers sets an expectation of a core-gameplay loop and then spits you in the face by giving you something completely else.
The Urn Witch is a well designed fight with a really cool theme. The obsessions with the urns and how she uses them in combat is a really cool stylistic choice. The fight was reasonably fun and lasted for about as long as it should have. The main problem is that there are no bosses running up to her, and I think there should either have been more bosses or you should have fought her in several phases with her running away as you explore the mansion.
The frog king is a terribly designed boss. The boss will destroy the platform you stand on or otherwise try to make you fall into the water. The boss also has a lot of invulnerable frames that are very poorly conveyed. It is hard to understand when he does not take damage, and it took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to do. It took me a while to understand that I did not do any damage at all. However once you figure out that you have to slap him in the back, the fight is very simple, but it is very tedious and repetititve to the extreme. The boss flipped the board 20 times (I counted) before I won. That is too many times to repeat the same attack-loop. This is the definition of boring me to death. This boss highlights my problems with the dodging being annoying to precisely control, both in terms of dealing damage and in dodging while not falling of the board.
Betty felt immensely frustrating to fight; the hit-boxes in this fight felt arbitrary and the mechanics so much more brutal than the previous combat encounters. I learned the hit-boxes through trial and error, and not intuitively understanding it by looking at the animations; the backhand is probably the worst offender here, but almost everything in this fight lacks polish when it comes to hit-box clarity. I never succeeded in hitting the snowball it throws, I don’t know if it is possible, but it should be possible based on the rules established previously in the game. I hate the way that Betty jumps up into the air as it is so difficult to track where she lands. This was for me by far the most frustrating and time consuming fight to get through in the entire game. I felt like the game made me lose, and not that I played poorly most of the time. The difficulty of this boss is just so different from the entire section leading up to it that it feels wrong in this game. The difficulty feels inconsistent alongside what I think is a subpar execution of a boss design.
The grey crow is the worst looking boss fight in this game by far. The largest challenge in this fight was to not vomit from the way that the camera moved on a blank canvas. The mechanics were laughably simple where you just smashed the projectiles and shot the boss 100 times with arrows. This is again not particularly difficult as it is punishing. This is again a fight where the hit-box are hard to see due to the change in elevation between you and the boss.
The last lord was more or less a combination of all the previous boss mechanics with the added mechanic of charging door-bulls. The checkpoints of this fight seems pretty arbitrary to me, sometimes it is too short in-between and sometimes too far-in between them. I do appreciate that they added the checkpoints and did not send you back to the start though. The last lord has an attack where he stops you from dodging, and you have to press space repeatedly to get out of it. How is the player supposed to know that? I had to search online to find out how to deal with the mechanic, which is never a good sign. The boss is a sponge for damage, and is really trying to bore you to death rather than having challenging mechanics to overcome and understand.
My overall impression of the game is that the entire game is crafted around the concept of punishing gameplay instead of challenging gameplay. The bosses are frequently padded out to give them more health to increase the chance of failure. The regular encounters push you far back if you lose in order to punish you. The problem is that the game is not very challenging; the challenge is in overcoming the tedious and repetitive nature of the game. This is in my book the worst type of challenge, where the developers only way of making you fail is boring you to death.
I found the pacing of the game to be very slow due to the basic combat, the way that the sound is repeated and the maze-like levels that makes you run in circles for so long. The levels have a lot of secrets, and you need to go back with your new unlocked ranged abilities to get to a lot of the locations. However, you don’t have a good map at all for some reason. You don’t even have a compass or any proper navigation tools. I really feel like the game suffers because of this, so much time is spent running around while you are lost. I don’t think this is a very fun experience as you end up just running past every enemy when the game does not forces you to fight. For me the length of the encounters and how hard you are punished is not fun.
No matter how I look at the game I find it lacking. The game is not challenging and the game lacks variation in the combat loop. The game feels like it is trying to be dark-souls with an isometric camera, and I think it fails miserable at it. I think it needed more depth in the weapons and abilities you have access to, I think it needed more bosses and better executed and designed bosses if it wanted to be isometric dark souls. The regular encounters are too boring and stale for the game to function as a isometric horde game as the game lacks variation in combat options. I think presentation carries this game heavily as people can get lost in it and enjoy the basic combat and enemies because the game looks good and sounds good.