Death’s Door is, in a lot of ways, what you want to see every video game studio produce.
I don’t say that to describe Death’s Door as a perfect game, or a game for everyone. It’s the second title from the makers of the brutally difficult Titan Souls, a 2D pixel-art game about beating massive, oppressive bosses.
It was well crafted, if you liked that kind of game. The boss fights were genuinely hard. The pixel art was beautiful for its time. The controls were exceptionally tight, a necessity for the genre, and the design of giving you a single arrow that returned to your quiver led to some fascinating mid-fight challenges.
But Titan Souls was also missing lots of elements, like a more engaging world tieing all the fights together, or the distance between respawn points and bosses. And trial by error isn’t a core idea that a lot of people buy into: it’s fun as a mechanic sometimes, but people generally want a hero, an identity they can believe in.
Death’s Door solves that problem with a cute little crow.
Your job is to run around and collect souls. You’re basically the Reaper, but cuter and with feathers. What’s not to like, right? But your monotonous job turns sour when your assigned soul is stolen by a Grey Crow, who basically gives you a choice: help me break through Death’s Door, the end point of all life, to recover a soul that escaped from them years ago.
“Your death is now an inevitability,” you’re told. Only by collecting the souls of three powerful beasts — a King in a flooded cathedral, a Beast in the West, and a Witch in the North obsessed with staying alive — might you be able to force Death’s Door open, retrieving your stolen soul and regaining the ability to carry on with life.
Death’s Door is more of a Metroidvania-style game than Acid Nerve’s previous work, so naturally a lot of the moment-to-moment action is less stressful than Titan Souls ever was. But what really seals it all is how smooth and sweet a lot of the animations are.
It’s shown off best in the first boss fight, which was available in the preview build I was given access to ahead of the game’s launch on July 20. (It’s launching July 21 if you’re playing through Steam.) The crow’s sweet dodge roll gets a great workout, and there’s plenty of opportunity to switch it up between ranged attacks and your neon red samurai sword.
If you’re wondering how tough the boss fights are, this first one is forgiving enough that I managed to survive with one HP left. The Gate of the Guardian has some nice mechanics, like an AOE swipe when you get too close, a vortex that limits your dodge and tries to draw you in, and a combination of charges and long-range missile attacks.
You’ve got a healthy amount of invincibility frames on the dodge, as seen from the GIF above. The enemies you come across in the first hour are pretty simple to deal with as well: anyone who’s played games like Axiom Verge, Ori and the Will of the Wisps or even bullet-hell esque games like SYNTHETIK, Nuclear Throne or Enter the Gungeon will have no trouble with Death’s Door.
And that’s maybe what I like so much about it too. It’s not necessarily that it’s easier: it’s more that a studio took the great elements of their first project and built on top of that to create a world that’s more accessible and more engaging. It’s more Zelda than Titan Souls, really.
It’s not just the mechanics, either. I want to know more about the crow and the post office-like hub world you start the game in. I want to see what the next generation of Titan Souls bosses are like. There’s a suit of upgrades you can unlock with the various souls you collect, and I’m keen to see the different weapons offer, how it all syncs together against tougher enemies and bosses.
Titan Souls was a good game built around a single well-executed idea. Death’s Door brings more to the party, including one of the cutest characters I’ve seen so far this year. The game’s out for PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S and X on July 20, with confirmed enhancements for the next-gen consoles at launch. It’s available for $24.60 right now through Steam, or $25.45 on Xbox.
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