Death's Door

Death's Door drew me in with its relatively high review score, pretty good looking environments, and the promise of being a soulslike, which is a genre I rather enjoy. It's also from the makers of Titan Souls, which was among my favorite games list for years before dropping out a few years ago.

The game most certainly takes a lot of inspiration from soulslikes, having a dodge roll as an important combat ability, and even the currency being souls. But it does also remind me quite a bit of action adventure games, having a top-down view, rapid attack animations, and a lot of running about the world. Between beating up regular enemies, there are quite a few boss fights, big and small, which are definitely the highlight of the game. While the combat is fluid, I found the regular enemies rather boring, as they are simple to dodge, and you can often just mash attack for at least a few seconds to beat them after evading them once. Perhaps that's for the best, as the map is rather empty, and checkpoints are not too frequent, making the journey back tiresome. Some light puzzle elements have also been used. Not enough to really call it a puzzle game, but enough to be annoying, to be honest. Between wasting time on trivial enemies, waddling through open space, and having to solve "puzzles", most of the gameplay is not very enjoyable. I'd probably like it if they had just the bossfights, but then it becomes Titan Souls again, and perhaps they wanted to avoid that. Perhaps they shouldn't have tried to avoid it.

Despite my criticism, the game is polished and plays well. It's not even that everything outside bossfights is bad, it's that there's a lot of games in this genre, and Death's Door isn't doing anything to stand out, or even match what the best in the genre have to offer, so it's hard to like it. It has a basic upgrade system, basic weapon collection, basic exploration, basic combat. It's all done well, but it's not ambitious. Judging from the reviews, that's enough for many, but I can't recommend it unless you've actually completed all the 20+ better games in the genre and want more.