Death’s Door (Xbox Series X)

Crows have a strong cultural association with death, so perhaps it’s little surprise that if you’re going to forego the usual skeleton in a cloak, a murder of crows might be put in charge of rounding up souls for the afterlife. In the action game Death’s Door, the bureaucracy in charge of determining when a mortal’s life has ended sends out crows as reapers to claim such souls, the little birds armed just in case the target doesn’t go willingly. Playing as one such crow yourself, things become complicated when your attempt to do your job is interrupted by an older wizened crow snatching your quarry’s life force. While this is a disruption to your profession, the more worrying part of not snagging the soul you were sent for is that it may very well cost you your life.

A crow must be made mortal to enter the realm of the living and properly take a soul, so our silent protagonist is left scrambling to go and try to grab the other crow only to quickly learn it’s too late. The large soul has been used as part of an effort to unlock Death’s Door, and if you want to have a hope of regaining your immortality, you’ll need to follow the older crow’s instructions and find other powerful souls to try and break the seal. Luckily there are some awful characters who have been defying death you can seek out and destroy, but despite this focus on death and your character’s mortal peril, Death’s Door balances its visual dreariness and heavy subject with a sense of humor. One of your targets is a witch who is performing experiments to trick death into overlooking people because they have been fused with funerary urns, but apparently along this path she made a lazy knight named Pothead who instead has a head full of soup he’s happy to offer you. The frog king who cruelly rules over his domain is a pompous goofball, a bard who writes songs of your exploits includes lyrics about buttcheeks, and there’s one crow working at death’s bureaucracy who doesn’t care about the ethical ramifications of his work so long as he’s allow to keep typing away. Seeing the next strange little disruption to a world that can look grim and serious is a nice treat, the game able to present bleak ruins or eerie laboratories earnestly before you stumble across a comical character who keeps it from feeling truly dour.

The main focus of Death’s Door though is the action, the little crow often finding itself dwarfed or outnumbered by the monstrous threats guarding the way to the undying. You begin with only a sword that requires you to get in fairly close to hit with but your dodge roll allows you to get in and out fairly quickly and avoid attacks fairly well. In fact, the dodge might even be a bit too effective, although that mostly comes down to the tactics of many of the creatures you encounter on your quest. Fairly often in Death’s Door a conflict boils down to getting in close to a monster, slashing them a few times, and then safely rolling away as they execute a telegraphed attack. If a humanoid creature runs towards you, wait until you see it rear up for its swipe and roll away. If a monstrous plant is going to bite you, you can see it’s wind up well in advance and roll away. After the dodge, you can safely go back in, get in a quick combo, and roll back out, the battles not often demanding much in terms of learning a foe or having good reflexes at first. There are some projectile focused characters and the ability to smack their shots back breaks up your usual strategy, but even then they can often be dealt with by just rushing them down before they fire off a fireball or arrow. Thankfully Death’s Door does start to roll out some more capable threats eventually. Archers who fire multiple shots regardless of whether you’re whaling on them and bosses who have rolling attacks that will track you somewhat so a simple dodge roll won’t be enough to shake their targeting are some simple but effective additions to break you out of your comfort zone. The game isn’t entirely empty of such dangers before then too, an exploding living pot you don’t want to hit here and a lingering poison cloud to deny you space there, but even though dying yourself isn’t particularly rare in Death’s Door, the actual fights are typically rather basic in terms of what you put into them and sometimes disruptions like adding slippery ice floors are more annoying than exciting new variables that spice up a fight.

There are some attempts to expand your options beyond the slash and dodge cycle, the player gradually finding a few different weapons that vary in terms of strength, speed, and reach so they can figure out a preferred version of dishing out that simple strike combo before rolling away from the enemy’s basic response. A bit more interesting though are some secondary abilities that all draw from the same resource. Over the course of the adventure you’ll get some extra tools like firing a bow or throwing an explosive blast, these giving you a ranged option useful against other ranged attackers or just giving you a way to pepper a foe from afar. The charge time they have ensure they’re not perfect substitutes for aggression and to replenish your energy for them you’ll need to get in and strike the foe with your actual weapon. This at least can give you something to do after you roll away and wait out the enemy’s attack and for some of the stronger and more interesting enemies it is a preferred or necessary option even, but they perhaps find stronger use in the game’s navigation.

Exploring the dungeons and connecting areas of Death’s Door is actually a fairly large part of the experience, the player able to find many hidden side roads and able to return to previous areas with new tools to find secrets and useful upgrades. In fact, after the plot there is still a fair bit to do in regards to starting to pursue the secrets of the world, although as a tip it should be said that the healing seeds you can plant throughout the world should be planted as often as possible. Originally presented as a possibly limited resource, the seeds for healing plants, the only way you can restore your health normally, are abundant and trying to later go back and plant or find them all does make pursuing the true ending a bit less exciting if you mistakenly tried to ration them out before then. However, navigating the world to find little goodies or open up new paths gives Death’s Door some more life and helps ease the game away from its fairly unambitious combat design problems. Often when you first arrive in an area you’ll need to use the environment to your advantage in puzzle solving like baiting explosive-firing plants into making you a path before you later get the explosive shot yourself after it’s put that concept through its paces well enough.

The areas in Death’s Door are not straightforward and give you a good sense of actually exploring a place to figure it out properly because of it, although sometimes they feel vast without filling that space with too much interesting to do. Some of this can come down to scattering those tasks you’ll get to later in the plot, meaning you sometimes head off down a side path to find nothing of present importance, but the game also makes sure to throw in shortcuts so that navigating it becomes more manageable, especially since the checkpoints you respawn at are often quite spaced out. Some of the better moments involve some intersection of danger and navigation where enemies are more impediments to disrupt your work trying to navigate the area, but there are still a great deal of moments where you’ll be locked into a space and forced to fight where the limited intelligence and attack variety of your opposition is unfortunately put into a spotlight. Boss creativity can offset it some, but the path to such battles feels like it can be a bit low energy because the obstacles aren’t pushing the player often enough or hard enough to keep it consistently engaging.

THE VERDICT: While it can balance a stylishly grim world with injections of goofy comedy, Death’s Door doesn’t so expertly handle its combat balance, easily boiling down to a basic combo and roll away approach that works on too many foes. The world navigation gives the experience some much needed life though thanks to its puzzle solving elements and secrets and bosses can often at least force you out of the typical battle approach for a bit, but in general Death’s Door can feel quite basic for long stretches because its injections of action aren’t often all that engaging.

And so, I give Death’s Door for Xbox Series X…

An OKAY rating. Death’s Door perhaps leans a little too strongly on a combat system that could have been acceptably straightforward if more focus was given to the puzzle-solving and figuring out the world you’re exploring. It would still be a shame to see how many enemies fall quite easily to the basic approach of getting in to get your strikes and rolling out when you see the obvious attack wind-up, so perhaps more daring variation in this system would still be required to really up the game’s level of danger and keep it more consistently engaging. There is some nice sense of discovery to entering a new place and trying to identify where to go and what you’ll need to do to get around the area’s specific barriers even if sometimes its more a trial of proper execution rather than figuring out a solution. It really feels like either half could almost be left alone if the other side was made more involved and featured better shake-ups to its format, but right now Death’s Door is a bit stuck between combat that gets more interesting in short sporadic bursts and navigation challenges that are sometimes spaced out too much. The levity added by the silly personalities you encounter does do a good job of perking up the player every now and then, a good laugh able to pierce through not only some of the deliberate gloom but also those periods where success is coming too simply to really keep things exciting. There is a still a serviceable amount of subversions to the simplistic battle formula that you never grow totally complacent or outright bored, but showing it knows how to shake things up effectively also makes it strange that it didn’t elect to do so more often.

A bit more life needs to be added to this game about death, not so much in the tone of the experience but the energy of its action. Death’s Door feels somewhat close to The Legend of Zelda on NES in terms of its intended appeals gameplay-wise but also isn’t quite as condensed to pull off the simplicity in navigation and action that game gets away with. Death’s Door is vast enough that it needed to make its battles more lively and puzzles more thought-provoking, but they’re not often failures when considered in a vacuum and there’s just enough variety to them that Death’s Door doesn’t become dull. Death’s Door has enough going on in its world design that it isn’t forgettable, but it doesn’t excel in any area strongly enough to remain consistently compelling.