Review: Death’s Door – Much More Than The Sum Of Its Zelda And Soulslike Parts

Ready to play the reaper’s game?

Despite all the innovation that frequently takes place in the indie space, there’s an awful lot of games that are content to just do what’s already been done. It can be easy to become jaded, then, when a lot of these copycat games turn out to be worse than their clear inspiration. After all, who wants to waste their time playing a weak approximation of a better game? However, every now and then a game like Death’s Door comes along. Death’s Door is a game that you’ve probably played before — and we don’t just mean on other platforms where it’s been available for months. Developer Acid Nerve doesn’t do anything new per se, yet delivers a tremendously well-designed experience that shows true mastery of the mechanics and genres it was inspired by, making for a game you won’t want to miss.

Death’s Door begins by placing you in the role of an adorable little crow who works as a Reaper at the Reaping Commission Headquarters, a Kafkaesque bureaucracy which is responsible for administrating the process of death. Every now and then there are beings that refuse to die, and these special cases are where Reapers like your character are dispatched to kill them and collect their souls. However, a Reaper is temporarily made mortal while on a mission, and they only regain their immortality status once the soul they were assigned is successfully brought back. This usually isn’t a problem, until someone intervenes in your character’s first assignment and casts your target soul behind the eponymous Death’s Door. To open it and retrieve your soul, you have no choice but to track down the owners of the three Giant Souls and kill them so you can win back your immortality.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com