The presentation of Devolver Digital at the E3 conference was downright disappointing for many. The company not only laughed at the audience, showing an overflowing box with letters from Hotline Miami fans, who have been waiting for the announcement of a new part for six years, but also significantly reduced the degree of madness: neither you shoot Maria Zuk live, nor aliens tearing people apart. no … well, budget Jason Momoa was there. Behind the faintness of the event itself, it was easy to miss the fact that the publisher showed a couple of very unusual, and therefore interesting games. We managed to try one of them – Death’s Door, so we hasten to share our impressions in the preview!
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Disclaimer: the preview was written based on the results of the first hours of the game – the trial build ends after defeating one of the first bosses and opens a limited number of locations for research. Keep this in mind when reading – the impressions of the final version may be different.
Another Monday at the office. Screenshot: Death’s Door
Sorry for the bird
Death’s Door is a game about a little crow, on whose sloping shoulders the heavy burden of a grim reaper has fallen, helping mortals to say goodbye to the mortal world. Collecting the souls of the dead is real work. Therefore, our feathered hero even has an average lousy office, in which, despite such seemingly significant functionality, he rather acts as a plankton: he receives scolding from the line manager for being sluggish and generally endures in every possible way.
The heavenly office in Death’s Door is clearly going through hard times: many departments are covered with cobwebs, the guard at the entrance is so lazy that a city madman sneaked into the building, and at the reception of the protagonist, instead of a friendly administrator, he meets a sign: “I left to fix the pipe – I’ll be back in 3-4 of the year”. The reasons for the decline are not completely clear: either medicine has made a big step forward, or magic has intervened. One thing is clear: local residents die less often, which resulted in a kind of economic crisis in the crow’s office. “We need a new plague, otherwise we will be completely ruined,” one of the colleagues throws to the protagonist.
It would seem that everything – the ideal setting for a slasher is ready. It remains only to send our raven to the outside world to chop down everyone who turns up under the wing in order to quickly establish the supply of souls. But everything turns out to be not so simple: the Reaper Commission is a decent enterprise and does not resort to such barbaric methods. Instead, operatives keep a record of all the souls on the planet and go after those for whom the bell has officially rung.
There seems to be a Looney Tunes in the raven universe. Screenshot: Death’s Door
Due to the fact that locals die less often, the number of orders has also decreased, but one of them still goes to our little raven. The task is very honorable: you need to confiscate not some flimsy little soul, but the real soul of a giant. It will not be easy to get it, but the company will make serious profits if the order is still fulfilled. Perhaps our hero will even be given a couple of days off for this!
Souls in the office are converted into pure energy, which is spent on opening the gates to new worlds, from where even more souls can be received – such is the endless cycle. Going on a mission, our character easily finds a target and defeats it in a fair fight, but, unfortunately, does not have time to extract the soul – in this the protagonist is interfered with by another, already well-worn elderly crow. As a result, a giant with a soul subject to confiscation hides behind the Gates of Death, which are included in the name of the game. The doors of these doors are no longer under the jurisdiction of the Reapers Commission, and what is hidden behind them is unknown.
Opening them is the main task of the character in Death’s Door. To do this, he needs to collect the souls of three powerful creatures, the energy of which may be enough to open the gates. Returning to the commission empty-handed and getting rid of catching up with the bosses will not work – the terms of the contract do not allow. When the reaper accepts the order, the gates to the world where the target dwells open for him, and they can only be closed by completing the task. And here’s the nuance: usually immortal, the reaper is deprived of such privileges when he accepts the order, and begins to fade rapidly. Therefore, if our little crow does not find the doomed giant, it runs the risk of growing old and dying. Absolutely ridiculous outcome for the grim reaper, agree!
The only face that remained intact after the fight! Screenshot: Death’s Door
Not the darkest souls
The gameplay video shown at E3 hinted that a new Hades awaits us – as in the creation of Supergiant Games, the main character in the isometric Death’s Door can fight in hand-to-hand combat, shoot and cast spells, and, of course, roll – without it is generally difficult to imagine a decent game today. However, the first impression, as usual, turned out to be, if not erroneous, but at least not entirely complete. Death’s Door is not a Hades clone, but rather isometric Dark Souls. Albeit with a combat system from Hades.
I understand how everyone in the industry is tired of constant comparisons of all possible games with the Souls franchise, but judge for yourself: in Death’s Door, you have to, controlling a silent protagonist, explore a world filled with danger, in which something has disturbed the usual order of things. Like the Chosen Dead Man in the first DS, your crow is also not being pampered with instruction. At the very beginning of the game, the hero will receive instructions: “There are three bosses living somewhere in the world, kill them, and perhaps the Death Gate will open. Everything, good luck, you will collect. ” Very similar to that quest to find two bells, isn’t it?
The gates, the local analogue of bonfires, operate according to the well-known principle: use them and get a full supply of health in exchange for respawning all the mobs on the map. Getting from one gate to another is not an easy task, but in the process you can open shortcuts that will make the initially complex and confusing world much clearer and more convenient. Dialogues with local NPCs, like in DS, are in fact monologues – and to hear all the lines, you will also have to talk to the character several times. Why am I, in essence, crucifying! In Death’s Door there is such a character who is waiting for you at the closed gates that prevent him from continuing the adventure – this is not even a reference, but a literal quotation.
Reincarnation of Sigmeier from Katarina in Death’s Door
The game, however, makes certain adjustments to the usual Souls-like formula. For example, in Death’s Door, the healing system has been interestingly changed: while traveling the world, you will collect plant seeds – they serve as first-aid kits. However, to get the healing effect, the seeds must be planted in pots, which are quite rare and can only be used once. Resource management, of course, is not the most difficult, but the mechanics are regularly remembered with an unkind word, when in the next battle you do not have enough HP to win.
The combat system, on the other hand, is really more reminiscent of Hades – as a rule, you always have to fight right away with a crowd of enemies, maneuvering around the arena with somersaults and inflicting light jabs on everyone who had the carelessness of being around. However, it doesn’t smell like complicated tactical duels here: any particular monster is easily defeated by repeated repetitions of the good old combo “dodged – waved the sword – dodged”, and some types of enemies even willingly share souls after the first missed blow. The number and variety of opponents usually creates problems for the crow. Dodging one enemy, which rolls into you, curled up in a ball, is a trifling matter, but if there are five such living cobblestones in the arena at once, the direction of somersaults has to be chosen more carefully. Add a couple more sorcerers to the formula, launching fireballs at you, or an enemy with a mortar from outside the screen, and the average arena in Death’s Door will come out.
At the same time, it does not get boring to beat hordes of enemies, the game consistently throws up new types of opponents or at least types of their elimination. And in Death’s Door, the ragdoll system is perfectly implemented, because of which death animations continue to deliver some frightening pleasure even several hours after the start of the passage. Arenas with mobs are diluted by bosses and mini-bosses, which – if you simplify everything – are also killed by the same combo, but in fact require adjustments to tactics: from some, before hitting, you need to run around the arena, others should hold on to back. Big, storyline bosses change its rules several times per battle – there is simply no time left to think about whether this is a rehearsal process.
The lighting in the game deserves special praise – at least in the description of the picture. Screenshot: Death’s Door
Excursion to the afterlife
In addition to the combat system, Death’s Door has world exploration, which takes a good half of the game time. This is not only about finding collectibles under each stone (although this is available – through the descriptions of trinkets you can learn a little more about the world), but also about solving riddles on the way along the main quest.
Riddles are, of course, a conditional term, you hardly have to puzzle in Death’s Door. To light a sequence of fires with flaming arrows, or to find the five levers hidden in a room – that is all the intellectual effort that the player will have to make. Such segments successfully dilute the action-packed arena battles, but … I myself perfectly understand how fake it sounds. In fact, the primitiveness of riddles and the absence of third-party activities in Death’s Door do not hurt the eye so much, primarily due to the variety of locations and the visual performance of the world. I won’t argue: looking for leverage for the third time should have been extremely boring. But directly in the moment about the repetition of the mechanic, you simply do not think, being distracted by sightseeing in each new room.
Screenshot: Death’s Door
Don’t let me mislead you: the graphics are still quite minimalistic, and therefore, of course, there is no need to talk about another picture revolution in the indie segment. At the same time, it will be fair to note that the locations came out stylish and different from each other. The starting Grove of Spirits carries a fabulous vibe with revived flowers that follow your little crow in a friendly crowd. But the local cemetery already creates a much more gloomy impression with its initially seemingly endless labyrinth of stone tombstones, stairs and fortress walls. The maze awaits your reaper in the next location, but already in a completely different mood – in the garden of the Ceramic Witch you have to wander through the intertwined alleys of greenery and trees, diving headlong into heaps of fallen autumn leaves.
It is really interesting to explore each new location, especially since the developers do not hesitate to mix elements of the real and fantasy worlds. Your crow arrives at a completely non-magical office on an ordinary bus (which, however, is driven by Charon), but through portals it can get into much more amazing locations, where eateries with neon signs that are absolutely clear to us can coexist with monsters and wizards. Once in a new location, at first you just run through it, chopping off aggressive mobs, then the time comes for a game photo (in two hours I made more than a hundred screenshots), and then there is exploration with the search for secrets, which are abundant here. The game hides awards not only behind primitive riddles: sometimes, in order to find some kind of bonus, you have to carefully study every pixel of the location, or just bang your forehead against all the walls – brute force also works.
It is also worth noting here a charming soundtrack, in which each location received its own soundtrack. Battle tunes (one of which was just used in the trailer at E3) may not seem too original, but the measured tracks, to which you have to wander through this world that does not want to die, are expressive and therefore will be remembered by the players for a long time.
