Death's Door: Early impressions

Death's Door is a metroid-vania like adventure game that uses what i consider to be old-school graphics and gameplay and combines it with modern digital sound and music. The game itself is simple but as you progress there are reasons to revisit areas that have already been conquered due to new areas being capable of being reached as you obtain new skills. You know, just like a metroid-vania adventure game should do.

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Death's Door is available on PC and Xbox presently and the developer has made no announcement about if they intend to bring it to Playstation or not. The word on the street is that this is a time-limited Xbox exclusive but will later be released to PS players.

I do not own an Xbox and haven't since that one that was the size of a small car that produced enough heat to make dinner on. So I am playing this on a PC.

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You start the game off on a bus getting dropped off at headquarters where you, a crow, are just doing your 9-5 grind of collecting souls from various doors that are opened for you. I found this part of it amusing because the office environment is filled with continuous complaints about paperwork just like a real office.

You hit the ground running in a small tutorial where they point out the very limited moves that you have at your disposal at the start of the game. It doesn't do a great deal of hand-holding though because after you KO a couple of shlub enemies that are easily dispatched (one of them doesn't even attack you) you get thrown into the fray by having a boss fight almost immediately.

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I wouldn't say that this is tough but if you game like me you are still really shite at the controls after playing for a mere 6 minutes and you die a few times. It doesn't much matter because they make it very easy for you to return to this spot over and over again. In the future, the game will not be so kind so don't get too accustomed to this.

After doing your first job of the day the story really begins as a world of the souls unfolds in front of you. You are a reaper of sorts as far as I can tell and I would imagine that this story gets a bit more dark as time goes by.

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As you progress perhaps you will get the same sensation that I did in that this game feels an awful lot like a more grown up version of Zelda back when those games were top down or in this case, at an angle of sorts. There are relatively simple puzzles and most of the enemies, once you get them figured out, don't pose much in the way of danger. This is a good thing though because even though I am only a few hours into the game, I am dying on the regular at the moment. Unlike other games, the only way that you can restore any health (and health is extremely limited at just 4 units at first) is to plant this seed that makes a plant grow and fully restores your health.

In a way this is kind of like a checkpoint because once you have unlocked these plants, progressing through the level becomes a great deal easier.

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For the most part, if you are getting thwonked by the enemies you are probably approaching the situation incorrectly rather than being in a situation where not having more health is likely the issue. In this regard Death's Door is considerably more difficult than other Zelda-like games.

By killing enemies and finding "soul orbs" you are able to gradually increase your damage, dexterity, speed, and magic. You wont be doing this a great deal though since the upgrades are pretty darn expensive and after a couple of hours and 25% of the game completed, I have only managed 3 total upgrades and to be honest, I don't really notice the difference in damage output since enemies that took 3 hits to kill when I was a rank zero, still take 3 hits to kill at rank 2. I guess this is a factor on bosses but it does seem to be slight.

_{Gameplay trailer is pretty honest, the official trailer is all animation that isn't even in the game... I hate it when they do that!}

So far I absolutely love this game because I am a huge fan of Zelda-like games and also appreciate a little bit of cute stuff" being in my games as well. There are parts that are challenging, but thus far I haven't found anything that requires Nioh or Dark Souls type precision. It is definitely more difficult than Zelda but from what I have seen thus far it doesn't appear as though it will be anywhere near as long.

So far this is one of the best games I have played in a while and considering that it comes right when I couldn't figure out what to play next, it is very welcome.

If you want to play it on PC the requirements are relatively low. I am playing it on an i7 something or other that I bought a 2.5 years ago and it performs just fine. Get out there and buy / steal this game if you are down with adventure games. I love it so far!