Death's Door

Overall I do recommend it - but just barely. I'll start with the pro's: the game is beautiful. The team had a clear art style in mind and they nailed it. Music is by David Fenn who also did the music for Moonlighter and it's absolutely amazing. Dude needs to be hired more cos he's a genius. The characters are quite likable if not a bit forgettable - they get the job done. Onto the cons and why I quit halfway through. The game doesn't have a map function and the paths are windy and hard to remember. There are often areas that require powers you get in the future so you'll need to backtrack but good luck if your memory is bad like mine. There's no sprint either so you're going to be spamming dodge roll the entire time and that's not fun. The combat is totally fine so not really a con. The difficulty is on the easier side but there will times where you will have to retry battles. Overall I give it like a 6. With a map? I'd give it like a 7.5

[h1]Death's Door[/h1] In this game you play as a crow fledgling, collecting souls and soul orbs, solving small puzzles, fighting enemies and opening new doors that lead to new places. Is this game good? I guess it's serviceable. The game mechanics work, but the map - or rather the lack of one - is your biggest enemy. I had moments where navigation confusion took over everything else. In some places I had to almost take notes, like: "go straight, then right, then right, then left, then take the 2nd door, then jump down, then go straight, then go through the gap, then take the first door, then go left". There are also many dead ends in this game, and you often go searching for the next way to go only to find out that you chose a way that had nothing there. And whoever decided that doors (which teleport between the main hub and different areas) should be used for navigation made a questionable decision, because it doesn't help with the biggest issue, which is poor navigation - it just helps you lose your sense of direction. Unless you play this game in intense stints, you're probably going to forget where you need to go or which areas had pink soul orbs that you couldn't access before. And you might want to backtrack if you care about upgrades, because each pink soul orb is worth 100 orbs, and you can get upgrades with 400 or 600 orbs. Not that upgrades matter that much, because you'll be fighting enemies with a melee weapon, a health bar that has four slots and a bow that has four arrows (health upgrades are locked behind backtracking!). You can manage with that because combat is quite easy and it's mostly a matter of patience. Once you know the attack pattern of each enemy type, the combat becomes almost like a chore. Basically, you slash and roll away when the enemy attacks and then slash again. The arrows replenish when you hit enemies or ceramic pots/mushrooms that respawn, so there's usually plenty of arrows. When I put orbs into upgrades, I couldn't tell any difference in combat whatsoever, even after putting my first 2000 orbs into upgrades. And the weapons you find on your travels? I don't even know what they're supposed to be used for because you can just use your basic sword weapon once you get accustomed to it, so there's really no reason to change it. Stats are a bit different, but not worth changing the weapon. I tried the hammer, but it just made movement too slow and I could no longer dodge certain enemies like before. The art style and music in this game are very good, but the gameplay is like "meh". Most of the enemies are easy to handle. As you make progress, the game mostly just throws more enemies at you and there are more waves of them. That makes the game feel as if the difficulty remains quite static, and it even goes up and down in inexplicable ways. Some enemies have weird attack patterns and there's at least one enemy type that can't turn around when you attack it from behind. Sometimes combat feels a bit weird when enemies literally strike far away from you and dance around like fools - it doesn't even look like combat to me. But when things get rough, positioning in combat is key, because roll dodge alone won't always save you from getting hit, even if you move in the opposite direction from the enemy. I started to enjoy the gameplay more at about 8 hours of playtime when the game got a little harder and more interesting in the Castle Lockstone and Old Watchtowers areas. Before that I kinda struggled to keep myself motivated and most of the time I was just trying to find my way to the next objective. If the game had less puzzles and awkward navigation and the combat was a little harder, this game would be amazing. But to me it's more like a play-once-and-forget-about-it type of experience. It's not really a souls-like type of game. You play this mainly for the story and atmosphere and good music. But I think there's a risk that many players will drop this game either due to the poor navigation and lack of a map, or because the repetitive and easy combat makes it feel like the game progression is going nowhere and there's nothing that justifies putting more time into it. [b]Final score: 6.5/10[/b]