Death's Door

The recipe for Death’s Door appears simple at first glance. In a large mixing bowl, stir together three cups The Legend of Zelda [ゼルダの伝説], two cups Dark Souls, and a pinch of Limbo. Preheat the oven to 450F (230C), pour the mix into a pan, bake for 36 minutes, and presto! You have Death’s Door.

Or do you? While Death’s Door is hardly original in the gameplay department – combat plays like isometric Souls, and access to new areas is granted by gear found in chests, just as in Zelda – it does offer a unique flavor that you won’t find in either of those series. There’s a sense of deliberative melancholy here, a mood that’s fleeting rare in video games. It’s the melancholy of accepting that life is what it is and it’s not likely to change. It reminds me of The End of Time in Chrono Trigger [クロノ・トリガー], where Gaspar waits patiently, stuck forever in a transitory state between hopeful and hopeless.

It’s probably no coincidence, then, that the hub area in Death’s Door looks a lot like The End of Time. You play as a Reaper – a Crow with a sword who hunts down the dead and sends their souls to the afterlife. But when your assigned soul is stolen before you can reap it, you end up on an unexpected adventure to harvest three giant souls and open Death’s Door itself to put things right. If you’ve played a Zelda game before, the gameplay will feel familiar. Enter a dungeon, explore, find a key item, delve deeper, defeat the boss, rinse and repeat. Yet there is plenty of Dark Souls’ DNA here, too. Combat features a heavy dose of dodge rolling and health is always in short supply – four hits and you’re a goner. You also use currency, known as – you guessed it – Souls, to purchase upgrades. One key difference from FromSoftware’s games, though, is that Death’s Door lets you hang onto your Souls when you die. No corpse runs here.

There’s no shortage of combat, and it always feels responsive and smooth. While there are a handful of weapons to collect and equip, they all feel fairly similar – a little faster or slower, a little shorter or longer. I experimented with all the options but ultimately found that the default sword offered a better balance of speed and damage output than the alternatives, with perhaps one late-game exception.

When you’re not engaged in combat, you’ll be exploring the world – a rewarding activity in its own right. In addition to the cemetery, which is as close as Death’s Door comes to an overworld, there are three main areas, and each of these main areas is subdivided into two or three distinct subareas. Take, for instance, the first area, the estate of the Urn Witch. You approach through the garden and then creep through the decrepit manor’s interior, before making a final assault through the secret furnace in the basement. One feature that’s notably absent is an in-game map, a design choice that boosts immersion at the expense of navigability. Although I’m not entirely convinced this is a good trade, it’s one I came to terms with.

The second and third main areas follow similar patterns, albeit with less cohesion. Whereas the Urn Witch feels like a fully fleshed out character, the second boss, the Frog King, is a typical jester-esque bad dude, and the third boss barely has any story beats associated with it at all. Whether this was intentional or the result of the inevitable time crunch that occurs at the end of game development, I can’t say. The third area, in particular, feels divorced from the boss at the end, focusing instead on the history of the Doors and the Crows. And once you collect all three giant souls, you’re treated to a brief info dump about how the world became stuck in its timeless state. To be fair, it feels like an info dump well-earned – I enjoyed it – but it is an info dump nonetheless.

I doubt anyone will deny that Death’s Door is derivative. But it takes familiar pieces and with them bakes a delightful new treat. My lasting memory of the game will be strolling through the melancholic land and spreading the seeds of hope. Only by keeping Death’s Door open can we fully appreciate the gift of life.