https://www.cybersport.ru/games/articles/obzor-death-s-door-odna-iz-glavnykh-indi-goda-kotoraya-umiraet-pryamo-u-vas-na-glazakh

Classic Adventure Formula

The structural basis of Death’s Door becomes clear to the player from the first minutes of the plot: in front of the main character – a little crow, performing the duties of death itself, if you suddenly forget – there is a gate, through which is the essence of the whole adventure. The problem is that the doors are sealed and can only be opened with the help of the energy of the souls of the three bosses, each living in its own domain. In turn, we go through three different worlds, burying local rulers, and we get a ticket straight to the epilogue – the plot structure familiar to every gamer, which has been working properly for more than a decade.

You shouldn’t expect unexpected ingredients in the classic recipe from Death’s Door: this is a really straightforward game that even evokes some semblance of nostalgia. Meeting the boss here is not an annoying obstacle on the way, but rather a solemn ceremony that announces that you have reached the end of another world, have officially passed the location and now you can return home to go on an adventure in a new setting.

It took me about ten hours to complete it, and this is taking into account the regular pauses for screenshots and the search for secrets. And if you score on collectibles and perceive the creation of Acid Nerve exclusively as a slasher, then you can probably do twice as fast: all you need to do is kill three bosses and … go through a short segment that becomes available after the opening of the Gate of Death – but what is on that side, you are not supposed to know yet.

Like a crow in a wheel

However, passing Death’s Door in this way, devoting time only to the combat system, means depriving yourself of the lion’s share of pleasure. And not only because the peaceful collection of collectibles and the search for secrets is so interesting. Simply purely mechanically, for the entire journey of your crow from the cemetery to the witch’s house, from there to the flooded kingdom, and then to the mountain peaks, the game offers unforgivably little gameplay innovations.

Chopping enemies in the first location with the incorruptible “hit-dodge-hit” combo, I could not even imagine that ten hours later I would be dealing with the final boss in exactly the same way. However, Death’s Door simply does not provide more interesting tools for dealing with opponents during the passage, and the standard method proves to be surprisingly effective in absolutely any combat situation.

There are five weapons in the game: a sword, a bigger sword, dual daggers, a hammer and – suddenly – an umbrella that has taken the place of a spear in the gentleman’s set of any other melee action game. At first glance, it seems that the developers decided to be original, but having collected all the available arsenal in Death’s Door, you suddenly realize that the reason is different: for the spear, you would simply have to make different attack animations.

All five weapons from the list above are used by the little crow to sweep in front of him. The two-handed sword has the largest impact zone, the daggers have the smallest, but in dynamics this does not change the rules of the game too much: almost all mobs tend to bunch up in heaps right in front of your beak, and therefore you can even cut them in pairs, cutting through them in pairs blades. All other differences are in the characteristics. The damage of an ordinary sword is taken as a basis in Death’s Door – x1. The two-hander hits harder – x1.25, and the hammer – x1.15, however, they can inflict only two hits in a series, but with daggers (x0.8 damage) – six at once. Not too inspiring to experiment, right?

The variety in the combat system was supposed to bring the spells that the little crow learns during the journey, but even these, when viewed, seem to be at least insipid. The protagonist has four spells: the first one allows you to throw magic arrows, the second – fireballs, the third – bombs … Do you already feel the catch?

The fourth spell is a little knocked out of the general canvas: with its help, the crow launches not magic projectiles at the enemies, but itself, clinging to the victim with a chain and sharply pulling itself. The same ability is also used for exploration in later locations: by shooting a chain at beams and crosses, your chick will be able to jump over pits and other obstacles.

It’s funny, but the other three skills are also used in the game to solve riddles, but in thought, all such segments do not differ from each other. Arrows can activate magic beacons, fireballs can set fires on fire. Both are, in essence, the same buttons, only needed to add an intermediate action to the game before you go to the next room. And you press them, in fact, with the same shells, which only change their external attributes. When do you get the bombing skill and even use it, just to open another door … Did I already tell you what madness is?

Guli and Alguli

There would be fewer questions about magic if it were more closely related to combat mechanics – for example, if there were enemies in the game, from which it is necessary to knock down armor with bombs before they become open to conventional attacks. The developers of Death’s Door, however, turned out to be above such stereotyped solutions, but this led to the fact that it is faster to hack any mob in the game, rolling around it in circles, than to try to experiment with fireballs.

In the preview, I wrote: “It doesn’t get boring to beat hordes of enemies, the game consistently throws up new types of opponents, or at least the types of their elimination.” I confess I was wrong – the second part of the statement did not stand the test of time. Immediately after the completion of the introductory fragment, the conveyor for the production of enemies clearly switched to the energy saving mode: in the possessions of the second and third bosses, for the most part you will have to meet all the same familiar faces with literally a couple of new mobs per location.

However, to beat them in the full version of the game still does not get bored, since all the types necessary for a good “battle” are available here: fast, but weak mobs, huddled in heaps; archers and sorcerers to run after; massive “tanks”, absorbing two dozen blows, and their different variations. The system works like clockwork: crowds of weak opponents interfere with quietly hitting more monsters, shooters prevent them from scattering the latter around the arena with light swings of the sword, but it is also problematic to get to them quickly, because the creatures that block your path must roll around the arena.

As a result, each protracted battle turns into a kind of puzzle in which you have to find the correct order of eliminating opponents. Death’s Door does not offer anything new in this regard, it just took the standard scheme and balanced it well: literally every arena is a test that is difficult, but still interesting to pass.

Oddly enough, the situation with bosses is different: they turn out to be no more complicated than the average arena and seem terribly drawn-out. The most interesting fight was available in the preview version of Death’s Door, while the quality of battles with subsequent bosses is frankly descending – fortunately, most of them hardly require you to try many times.

Treasures of an immortal world

Stretch the passage and help you distract from the not as deep as it seems at first glance, the combat system is designed to search for secrets and collectibles. This part remains the most interesting until the end of the game (and even after it), which was made possible primarily by the really cool level design.

The locations in Death’s Door are built in such a way that you never get lost in them, but constantly feel the itching feeling that you have missed something – and more often than not, this feeling is absolutely true. The whole point of the first passage of new worlds in the game is to open doors, descend stairs and other creation of shortcuts in the best traditions of Dark Souls (sorry), which subsequently allows you to move through the levels literally through and through, although a run from beginning to end in a still virgin location could well take away about an hour.

The worlds are beautiful, different from each other, and also lavishly packed with secrets that are interesting to look for. Collectibles in Death’s Door are divided into several types. The crow can collect:

• shards of Life and Magic crystals (each – eight pieces), which allow you to increase the reserves of health and mana;
• weapons (about it above) – you really need to look for it, and not receive it as a gift according to the plot;
• improvements for spells – to obtain them, the raven has to defeat the keepers of ancient knowledge;
• shiny things – pieces of lore, from the description of which you can learn a little more about the world in the best traditions … sorry;
• tablets of knowledge – leitgame content that will reveal a secret ending to the player;
• first aid kits and souls are consumables that also have story value.

A lot, right? Something can be found just by looking closely around, other souvenirs are hidden behind a series of riddles, and still others require very specific actions to be unlocked. And this is damn interesting – if you like quests and riddles, of course. For those who do not hesitate to return to an already passed location in order to stick their beak into every bush in order to – possibly – get three more lines of near-plot text, the world of Death’s Door will be a real gift.

Another question is that the pleasure here is exclusively in the search process, but definitely not as a result – to shoot an hour-long video, collecting lore bit by bit, based on the descriptions of brilliant things, will definitely not work. The Death’s Door universe is just not that big.

NieR: Automata vice versa

In the preview version, perhaps the main highlight of Death’s Door is the theme of death, which is taken in the game as the basis of the plot and the entire style. Video games rarely talk about death seriously, but the developers at Acid Nerve have stepped back from tradition and made an action game in which killing bosses is awkward and even sad. How they did it, you better find out in the preview, because in the full version such a dark charm of the game slowly began to fade away: the opponents themselves became less contradictory figures, which became possible to destroy without a second thought, and a philosophical background that Death’s seemed to have Door, has been supplanted by a much more insipid story of a great deception in the soul collection corporation.

It would be strange to demand from a small game about a crow a deep study of characters or a dramatic story – if Death’s Door itself had not stated these complex themes at the beginning. Think about it: in the first hours of the plot, the protagonist kills people in front of their relatives; listens to the monologues of friends who are looking for death, but cannot find it in any way; learns how the funeral of a loved one can suck all the strength from the soul and simply deprive the motivation to live; learns to see death as a blessing for the world … And then Death’s Door seems to be frightened of its own seriousness and presents the player with a vulgar comic-religion – Death itself with a fashionable belt bag and cheap jokes in its repertoire.

At the same time, the very technique of relief from laughter has the right to life – Grim Fandango from the existence of Glottis definitely did not become worse. But in the quest from LucasArts, the chosen tragicomic style was maintained to the end. Death’s Door, on the other hand, begins to rush from side to side in the course of the plot, and at the end also openly rush, which is why the impressions of the epilogue remain rather crumpled: in order not to go into spoilers, I can say that between the boss fights in the final scenes there is clearly not enough some kind of pause.

When the main story connected with the fate of the crow’s office gains momentum and comes to the fore, all the “quests” of the secondary characters in Death’s Door suddenly end, preventing the characters of these heroes from being revealed and the stories from coming to their logical conclusion. The tragic figure of the Bowler (you can also learn about him in the preview), for example, ends up happily living in a tent next to a local tavern. He does not find a new vocation, does not get rid of the pot on his head and does not even meet friends who would accept him for who he is – he just suddenly turns into a happy dummy, who bask in the sun all day, completely forgetting about his worries, dreams of getting rid of the bowler hat or dead relatives. Needless to say, the hero did not come to any insight that would calm his soul? He just played his role in history and was thrown out of history, virtually losing his character.

This is a very offensive downgrade that happens right in front of your eyes as you progress through the game. From a sad parable, Death’s Door is gradually becoming just a good action game. What is there – great action with exemplary level design, a catchy soundtrack and a very, very nice visual style. But still, a much weaker story, which, as a result, is not able to distinguish Death’s Door against the background of a whole mass of other indie games.

Today, on the NieR: Automata Steam page, you can find dozens of variations of the same review: “Came for 2B’s ass, left with a broken heart and tears in my eyes.” What is fair – the game about a sexual android in the course of the plot turns into an amazing commentary on the works of existentialists, and in the end makes the user experience a real catharsis. I would like to leave a mirror response to Death’s Door: “I came for tears in my eyes, left happy that I had killed a crowd of 30 monsters”. As far as this can be considered a compliment, everyone must decide for himself.