Death’s Door Review: A Gorgeous Action RPG About Death

For the diminutive crow at the center of Acid Nerve’s Death’s Door, reaping pesky souls and delivering them to the afterlife is all in a day’s work. As coworkers busy themselves at desks or loiter about in the mostly monochrome and dream-like Hall of Doors, the unnamed protagonist is off scouring nearby lands for the souls who got away. In a preview of the Devolver Digital-published Death’s Door last month, it impressed with its cozy environments, snappy combat, and generous attention to detail, and the finished game follows suit with those first impressions. Death’s Door is a beautiful, refined, and digestible action-adventure with particularly stunning visual and audio design.

As the crow, players start off with a sword, but can also obtain a few different melee weapons and magic spells to contend with a variety of puzzles and battles with a gorgeously-animated bestiary. Death’s Door’s combat is central to its gameplay but isn’t exactly deep; weapons have a single basic combo apiece, and rechargeable spells can be folded into the action but lack the agile, quickdraw feel of something like Hades.

One of the main reasons Death’s Door works as well as it does is its outstanding visual presentation, where each environment’s finer details bring them to life, all aglow in dramatic lighting and color selection unique to each area. The isometric camera is mostly fixed but zoomed out far enough to allow each biome to impart its differentiated thematic and emotional tones, making exploration a joy from the first hour to the last, though there is also an integrated fast travel system via the Hall of Doors. A developing cast of uniquely drawn characters are great fun to meet and interact with, and the game’s economically written dialogue leaves breadcrumb trails that never slow the momentum.

Combat feedback is excellent, even if the fights themselves are usually on the easy side, save for a few extra-feisty rows in the back half of the game. Healing stations can be activated at set locations and checkpointing is usually generous, so don’t expect much groan-inducing backtracking. Death’s Door’s boss difficulty occupies that perfect sweet spot, with each never overstaying their welcome and the tougher bosses rewarding attention and a little patience. The storytelling has a bit of variety but usually leans towards humor, and always manages to hit the laughs it’s going for; while the dialogue isn’t as punchy nor the drawn world as high-concept as something like Grim Fandango, there’s arguable comparison to some of Double Fine’s work.

Death’s Door’s audio design might be its best feature, with the soundtrack in particular standing out as an impressive score, a spirited collection of instrumental themes that are critical to complete immersion in the slightly haunting, slightly cute environments. While it’s difficult to try and compare it to the beloved soundtracks of The Legend of Zelda games, it’s the closest touchstone, and similarly emphasizes the character and feel of each biome and encounter.

There was some talk about Death’s Door being a Soulslike, but this really isn’t the case at all. The aforementioned challenge level is fairly gentle, with upgrade currency being retained upon death, and the storytelling is much less oblique. It’s a game that consistently shows and tells it all, though there are a number of environmental secrets to unearth which lead to various helpful upgrades. A player content to experience the story and be done with it will find a rewarding beginning, middle, and end, though a creative and more mysterious post-game sequence is available – make sure to keep playing and exploring after credits roll.

If Death’s Door is not mentioned in a list of the year’s best indies, it will only be due to its finer focus and lack of complexity or significant depth, which also speaks to the game’s utter lack of bloat. Those who are looking for the cavernous biomes of Hollow Knight or the lore-rich epistolatory storytelling in a Souls game may feel shorted by the 10 or so breezy hours on offer here, but Death’s Door is a precisely engineered and immersive adventure which will fully satisfy anyone seeking that exact experience. Isometric action RPGs are a dime a dozen, but rarely are they polished to such a brilliant sheen.

Death’s Door releases on PC/Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on July 20. A digital PC code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.

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