Death’s Door Review (but not really)

Every so often I find myself in a little bit of an unsatisfied mood when it comes to the selection of games to play. Fighting games require me to be in a certain state of mind, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to tolerate getting battered for minutes to hours on end. There are games I can always go back to, like Monster Hunter, my never ending Final Fantasy X NSG loop, Bloodborne, Hollow Knight and now I can even include Metroid Dread in here. Sometimes I do want something completely new and that’s important, that’s how I even found Hollow Knight in early 2017. I wanted something casual, nothing that tests your patience, but still something that requires you to at least keep parts of your brain engaged. That’s how I came across Death’s Door, although at the time I didn’t even know if it would check all of these boxes— thankfully it did.

Spoiler Alert

Just so you are aware, I am not going to be holding back on spoilers here. While the narrative of Death’s Door is by no means its biggest selling point, it does have a lot of charm and manages to be very entertaining. If you’re still out to play Death’s Door and want to experience the story as intended by the developers, leave now.

17 hours in three days

Over the course of a weekend I had spent roughly 17 hours over the course of two playthroughs to the platinum trophy for Death’s Door on PS5. I am really happy whenever I find a game like that. While I don’t think I’ll revisit Death’s Door unless some type of additional content is being added, I found the whole experience Death’s Door had to offer very enjoyable. As you go about your way in your first playthrough I actually felt compelled to move forward and to explore as much as possible as I wanted to see what other hints about the world could be gleaned from the shinies you find.

You constantly find goodies of some sort, be it the aforementioned shinies, which for the most part just act as key items that serve the purpose of telling the player more about the world. Then there are the life seeds, which in combination with the flower pots actually create a very graceful way to force the player to not get reckless during combat, but at the same are frequent enough that you barely ever have to worry about going long distances on low health.

Short Game

Death’s Door is by no means a long game, but it also doesn’t overstay its welcome. I personally would have preferred one more full area, but the game’s length does a fairly decent job of preventing you from burning out, even if you keep playing non-stop like I did. There are hub areas, like the Hall of Doors, which connect you to the entire world and then there’s the Lost Cemetery, which is technically an area in itself, but is more of a mob and loot filled hub, that connects you to the other explore areas of Death’s Door… the closest comparison I can draw here would be Hyrule Field, but that’s not quite right.

The three main areas also have sub areas, but the easiest way to categorise them would be the Witch’s domain, the forest area and the frozen mountains. Each of the areas feels different enough from the other and even within a domain, there are enough visual changes to keep you from getting bored. Every domain is also filled with goodies, be it upgrades for your abilities, health and magic containers, or more life seeds or even weapons. It’s just enough to keep that dopamine factory in your head churning out little boosts constantly.

Death’s Door’s Abilities, Bosses & Combat

Next to your standard melee attack and dodge mechanic, which both feel snappy enough, you also have ranged abilities.

Abilities

You start out with a magic based arrow and as you progress through the game you’ll gain access to a fireball, a throwable bomb spell and a hookshot. All of these can be upgraded. The Arrow will get a second charge to do more damage, the fireball will receive a burn effect that continues to do damage over time, the bomb spell’s upgrade makes it so that the explosions no longer hurt yourself, allowing you to use the bomb at close range and the hookshot allows you to hurl yourself with a dash attack at whatever poor soul stands in your way. To quickly cycle back to your melee attack, you can also charge up melee strikes and do a more unique style of attack if you buffer a melee input during a dodge. I’ve barely used the charge attack myself, I couldn’t really find a good enough purpose for it.

Bosses

There are a total of eight or nine bosses, depending on if you count the last boss as one encounter as a whole, or as two. The bosses range from really cool and exciting to, eh not really sure what to think about this. While boss fights like the first two against Demonic Forest Spirit and Guardian of the Door prime you to expect ever more increasingly insane bosses, that is unfortunately not going to happen gradually. The three major boss fights against the Urn Witch, the Frog King and Betty are all relatively uneventful and not that exciting when compared to how just the first two fights played out. That’s not to say that they don’t get more challenging, they do, it’s just that the spectacle is kind of missing. The fight against Grey Crow on the other hand is a really cool encounter as well, the final boss fight against the Last Lord on the other hand, yeah there’s a lot happening, but it’s still nothing compared to the fight you just finished against Grey Crow. There is one more boss in the post game against the Grave Digger, which actually does a pretty decent job in terms of spectacles even though it starts kind of subdued. There are also four optional minibosses that are all very similar to each other. They upgrade your skills when beaten, yeah that’s it though.

All in all the bosses all do a good job in keeping a balance of challenge and enjoyment. This is not a difficult game, but the bosses are still quite fun to fight. A little more visual insanity is all I am missing here for some of the bosses, but I still wouldn’t dock any points from a gameplay perspective.

Combat

Combat feels responsive, even though boss patterns tend to be more on the simplistic side of things they are engaging and fun to fight. It’s quite a simplistic combat system all things considered, but it works. You dodge, with a very healthy amount of i-frames, you attack with your melee or charge up your ranged attacks. You keep repeating that and try to find gaps where you can dish out the most amount of damage.

The type of combat you’ll motley likely spend the most amount of time in are gauntlets in locked rooms. Just fighting hordes of enemies which spawn in waves. That’s something you’ll have to get used to very early on, as that is a very common occurrence in this game. You’ll get somewhere important and the doors lock until you have dispatched every enemy that spawns. That’s also how you unlock your ranged skills. The skills you unlock are not optional though, all of three unlockable skills are required to finish Death’s Door, so when you get to those gauntlets you know exactly what’s going to happen afterwards, you’ll get something new that will both let you move forward and also allow you to access previously inaccessible areas. While it’s a little too predictable after the first Avarice, the gauntlets themselves represent a nice challenge your first time through the game and the combat holds up too, so it’s still quite fun.

Umbrella run

After I went through the game the first time, I checked to see what kind of trophies I was missing and saw that there were two boss specific trophies I didn’t get and also a trophy called Academy of Umbrellas. I went through Death’s Door a second time with the restriction of only using the Umbrella as my melee weapon. The Umbrella is so weak, that from the beginning I made the decision to fully invest into magic. I really liked that, because I had barely used anything other than the hookshot in my first playthrough. In my second playthrough I started out as an archer and then settled on being a pyromancer. Again the Umbrella does pitiful damage, which means your melee attack is now no longer a means of damage, even though every little bit of damage does help of course, your melee attack is now a battery charger to keep your magic supply up, so that you can keep hurling burning flames at your enemies.

It was a little difficult at first, as I wasn’t accustomed to charging spells, but once I got the rhythm down, my challenge run turned out to be a much more OP run through the game, than my initial melee focused stat build. Most importantly though, the second run still felt fresh, because I was playing it in such a different manner. That’s a roundabout way of saying, the hunt for this trophy didn’t feel like a chore at all, but it was actually even more fun from a combat point of view.

Closing Words

Have you played Death’s Door? If you have, what are your thoughts? Did you like it? In case you haven’t played the game and ignored my spoiler warning in the beginning, are you considering giving the game a try? Let me know in the comments. See you next time.