Death's Door is an aggravating game because it is so incredibly polished and close to being fantastic, but at least for me ended up feeling like an exercise in frustration and test of patience more than anything else. That said I wholeheartedly want games like this to be able to exist, so if you're a fan of isometric action/adventure RPGs, at least buy this when it's on sale.
My core problem with the game is it was just never *fun*. The three components of gameplay for a game like Death's Door are puzzle-solving, exploration, and combat, so let's go through those.
[u]Puzzle Solving[/u]
Actual "puzzles" feel few and far between, and your abilities end up feeling like just an extra click to get through a door. e.g. You walk into a clearing, and rather than climb a ladder up a wall, you have to light a torch with your fireball spell that then shows an animation of the ladder spawning, *then* you can climb out.
Why? There was no puzzle to solve, it didn't gate me from getting to something to early because this is in an area that I needed the fireball to access. The abilities feel like more of a gate to progression than something interesting to use.
There are some actual puzzles involved to get the true ending... but playing through the story blindly to the regular ending just felt so disappointing in this area.
[u]Exploration[/u]
The exploration in Death's Door is extremely hit-or-miss. Generally speaking you can find 4 types of items: seeds for creating healing checkpoints, XP orbs, collectibles (most of which are just that), and crystal pieces that will eventually upgrade your max health/mana. The attentive reader will note that 4/4 of those categories [I]do not provide any immediate benefit[/I], at least in a meaningful way.
When you reach a fork, go halfway down one side, realize that's the main way to go, then run back the other way to explore the secrets, only to reach the end of the path and find an orb for +100xp (roughly the same as a clearing or two's worth of enemies), it's just so disappointing. (Stats also barely feel like they matter, which makes the XP even less relevant.) Often the more well-hidden secrets are just "here's a collectible! Wow!" or a heart piece that doesn't do anything right now. Some of this definitely is a skill issue... but the game leaves so many nooks and crannies for you to explore, only for 1/4 of them to actually have any loot, most of which feels disappointing. I look at Ender Lilies or Tunic as much better examples of games where the exploration always felt worthwhile and gave me the little dopamine hits to want to keep spending the time doing it.
And did I mention Death's Door has no map? As a stylistic choice sure, this isn't an inherent problem, but when there are [I]many[/I] secrets that require backtracking (not to mention the main story requires it multiple times with no dialogue to indicate it!) this quickly becomes cumbersome. Especially for an isometric game where each zone internally looks extremely samey, it feels nigh impossible to remember where things are unless you use a pen and paper or guide.
[u]Combat[/u]
This was the worst area of the game for me. For having such fluid animations I was constantly surprised at how clunky and awkward combat felt in Death's Door. None of the enemies in the entire main story felt challenging, yet I did die a fair number of times just because combat is such a test of patience. Every large enemy and boss tends to attack immediately when you approach with moves that instantly pivot to where you are and which have a low cooldown. This leads to gameplay frequently being "hit two times -> roll -> hit one time -> roll -> repeat", and the ranged abilities awkwardly interrupt combat to the point that they feel more like a "I'm so tired of this guy" tool than something to integrate into your fighting.
On top of this, the hitboxes feel really inconsistent. One boss had multiple moves that I thought didn't actually hurt me because of how weird the hitbox was, and I had plenty of experience swinging through enemies dealing no damage due to lots of enemies being strangely invulnerable during parts of their moveset. Enemies scale up faster than your damage really does (unless you're grinding) which just makes the game perpetually feel like a slog and test of patience in combat rather than a test of skill. Enemies are recycled through the game and do not have particularly interesting movesets, nor do they feel balanced for any sort of purpose. Some enemies felt infuriatingly slow to fight, whereas there were some others (boomerang enemies for any fellow players) where it felt like it was almost impossible to actually be hit by them.
Many enemies (including bosses) also are invulnerable for more than half of what they're doing, which worsens the problems. And if they aren't invulnerable while attacking, they probably have an attack which can 180 to hit you when it launches, which functionally means they're invulnerable since you have few hit points and there is no healing outside of checkpoints.
Finally the mechanics of how your player abilities work together in combat feels so awkward. Some pain points:
- There are few iframes after being hit
- You can't cancel a weapon swing into a dodge
- Weapon swings can be buffered if you click the button too many times -- but rolls cannot (or they must have a much tighter window for buffering)
- All ranged attacks require a charge up
- Melee attacks can't be chained into a ranged attack, you just have to stop what you're doing to use a ranged ability
- Strong swings don't do anything to stagger enemies, but they do leave you more open
- Strong swings don't have a significantly bigger hitbox than regular swings
All of these features together make combat feel the opposite of fluid, where rather than weaving moves together like a dance, I feel like I'm pulling a lever on a crane back and forth to tink the boss for 1 hit at a time.
So ends this rant about the game. I was really thinking that Death's Door looked like a great game, but man did I lose enjoyment of it quickly.
