Death's Door (PlayStation 4) review "Who would have thought that being a Reaper involved as much bureaucracy as about any other office job?"

Death’s Door has the tough task of making death seem like a charming proposition, but does a more-than-adequate job of pulling it off with style. Maybe not as proficiently as the average visit to social media does, but still a good effort!

When developing this 2021 game, Acid Nerve took a fair amount of inspiration from the assorted Zelda games to create a world that might not be all that large, but is loaded with all sorts of secrets and items, so that you’ll be crossing each and every one of its screens multiple times in an attempt to find all the goodies and make your character the strongest little crow it can be.

Said crow works as a Reaper, meaning its job is to collect the souls of those whose time is about to expire. In this role, the bird is near immortal. When not on the job, Reapers are ageless beings; however, they do grow older whenever in the field seeking their quarry — a really effective way to inspire quick and efficient work, if you ask me!

This quickly turns into a big problem for you, as your crow opens the game being sent out to reap a monster. While that task is easy to accomplish, after doing so, another crow swipes the soul in a bid to force you in assisting it with its problem. Seems that a soul it was hunting got lost on the other side of Death’s Door and to open it, the power of three giant souls is needed. The thing is, giant souls tend to be in the possession of really powerful beings who’ve been able to cheat death for a long time, with the “really powerful” part being the reason why that crow hasn’t tried to accomplish the feat itself.

With no other options beyond throwing up your wings and waiting for death, you’ll then travel the world to find those three beings and send them to their graves in order to collect their souls and make things right — a task that takes you through a massive graveyard to such places as a witch’s massive mansion, the swamp fortress of the frog king and the ruin-strewn mountain of a yeti.

You’ll start out with a sword and gradually get the option to switch to other melee weapons that are differentiated by such factors as swinging speed, attack range and pure power. To supplement those weapons, you’ll also pick up a few magical attacks that tend to also have other purposes. The fire spell can damage foes, but also is regularly used to light braziers. You can use the grappling hook to propel you into a foe, but its primary use is, much like the Zelda hookshot, to grapple over pits and bodies of water to reach places your crow couldn’t previously access. There also is the bomb, which breaks certain walls, and the bow-and-arrow, which, uh, got mostly ignored by me about as soon as I got the far more useful fire attack.

And a diligent player can make some of these abilities very useful. By scouring the land, you can find hidden boss battles with giant knights. Topple these foes and the ability they represent will become enhanced. With the bomb, you’ll no longer take damage if you’re in its explosion radius. Even better, the fire attack will cause a burn effect on enemies, making them take extra damage over time. It wasn’t far into the game that I got that particular enhancement and, guess what? Against any foe that was remotely tricky to topple, I’d spend as much time as possible hanging back and shooting fireballs.

While you only can use any of these abilities a few times before running out of magic points, this is not much of a setback. There are all sorts of little breakable objects scattered throughout the world and hitting them will restore some of that magic, as will hitting enemies. Not killing enemies, just hitting them. So, if you’re fighting a boss and run out of magic, just whack it two or three times and you’ll have that many extras uses of your fire spell.

That isn’t to say it’s a piece of cake to advance through the world of Death’s Door. As a game which apes a lot of classic Zelda stuff, your power will be determined by the amount of work you put into scouring the world for all the upgrades a crow can possibly find. You start out with a total of four health and magic points and need to find all the hidden shrines to gradually get up to a maximum of six of each. Essentially, this means the key to making progress through this game is simply to get good because it will take a while to get those shrine upgrades. Not only are they scattered far and wide throughout the world, but you’ll need one ability or another to access most of them, so you can’t count on obtaining extra health or magic for quite some time.

You’ll also be able to use the currency dropped by monsters to purchase upgrades to things like attack power, magic power and attack range. This also can be a slow process, as foes don’t tend to drop a lot of that stuff. However, by being a thorough explorer, you’ll find lots of currency hidden away, which can make things progress a bit more quickly on that front.

Since this is an action-adventure designed in this era, of course it takes a few cues from the Souls family of games. It is a rule, after all! Your main way to avoid enemy attacks is a handy dodge roll and your success against tougher foes and bosses often relies on your ability to recognize their attacks and know when it’s time to dodge and when it’s safe to issue your own attacks. The lairs of the foes holding those necessary giant souls are littered with “doors to before”, so after you clear a chunk of a dungeon, you’ll be able to easily access your door back to headquarters and then skip past that portion upon returning.

All in all, I had a really good time with Death’s Door. It had some nice little touches, such as how powerful enemies show damage by developing cracks along their body to easily let you know just how close you are to victory without the need for life bars. While the world isn’t huge, it is dense with lots of hidden stuff to ferret out. And it fits into that sweet spot as far as difficulty goes where it’s challenging, but not frustrating. While a few bosses and set encounters with multiple waves of various enemies did get the better of me a few times, the issue was less “This is too hard!” and more “I just need to learn how to do this.” You know, the type of fights where you might lose five times and then utterly destroy your adversary so convincingly that it’s hard to believe you struggled at all for any length of time.

About the only thing this game doesn’t do is stick the landing. After defeating the final boss, you get taken to a post-game that has you flip things from day to night in order to find a number of items necessary to open a particular door to get the true ending. This leads to a very mixed bag of challenges where you fight one new boss and have a rematch with an evil treasure chest that swallows you to force you to fight four waves of foes before relinquishing its prize. And also do a few tedious missions where you might have to light a few torches in one region or lead ghosts to particular statues in another. And then there’s the one where you have to find all the seeds to plant in each and every pot. Odds are you’ve done a lot of that work simply because those seeds grow plants that provide you with a means of healing yourself without running back to headquarters, but even with an NPC’s help, it was boring to gather the final few.

And your reward for taking a handful of hours to do all this? An ending that, from what I read, ties this game in with another created by the same company. A game I had not played, so none of this had any meaning to me and I felt that, other than the two challenges that involved fighting enemies, I’d wasted my time by not simply pulling the plug after beating the main game.

But other than that? I had a really fun time with Death’s Door where my main complaint was simply that it didn’t quite reach the same level for me that those classic Zelda games did — probably because it is smaller in scope than they are with only three big baddies to topple before starting the endgame. As a diversion, though, it did provide its fair share of enjoyment and that’s all I was asking for to help carry me through these dark, gloomy post-Shadows of the Erdtree days.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (November 22, 2024) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.