Death's Door

The art and gameplay of this game feels like nothing else, is sincerelly fun and exciting, as well as easy to learn the controls. New skills and weapons gives variety on combat and getting new abilities allows you to rediscover some previously unaccesible areas in the map. Also discovering hidden zones makes exploration very dinamic.

-------------------- Video review: https://youtu.be/mf4eXG0yNVY -------------------- Positive: * Great visuals * Fluid, fast-paced combat * Fun boss battles * Amazing Soundtrack * Interesting level design * Overall extremely polished * You get to be a cute crow Neutral: * No way to change difficulty * Both puzzles and combat are rather simple * Stat upgrades are barely noticeable Negative: * (I didn’t want it to end) I absolutely adore this game and can’t recommend it enough!

I already left a review and either it didn't save or was removed, so in summary: Pros - Music great - Art great - Writing Great Cons - Upgrades feel pointless - Every area follows same basic pattern and combat challenges rely heavily on mini-arenas with basic enemy waves again and again. - The solution to a couple of puzzle is completely arbitrary, not based on logic (I can't elaborate without spoilers). - And The Big One that ruined it for me - There is no map. Some games don't need a map. This really does. With a map, I'd probably give this a 4 out of 5. Without a map, I ended up hating a lot of the experience. My sense of direction is terrible and yet it's never normally a problem in games because either they have a map (like most games with backtracking) or are designed around it (Dark Souls). It's something a I can handle with effort and note taking if it's designed well, but this is horrendous because you can't look around and the environments are very samey. It doesn't even really lend itself to drawing your own. I spent a huge amount of time lost, and had to follow an online guide constantly just to figure out where I had been when I died. This is the only game I've ever had a problem like this. This won't be a problem for some but it ruined the game for me. If you aren't bothered, great, I hope you enjoy it. But why not have the map option turned off my default if you want? This is an accessibilty issue as far as I'm concerned. I could not have finished this without Googling maps constantly and It's left my wishing I hadn't bought it, which is a real shame as it's otherwise pretty good.

Mostly fun to play. It has nice music, good graphics and lots of exploration. Problem is that there is little reason to explore anything. Most secrets are more or less useless things you can't do anything with. Just pictures to look at with a few lines of text. Supposedly to add some depth to the world but it didn't really add much. Writing is at times of very low quality. They should have put some more focus into that. All characters feel empty and forgettable. While they are well designed none of them feels like a full blown character. They are just graphics with a few lines of dialogue. Some of them even ruin the game play. Especially that comic relief bard guy that loves to tell bad jokes. Locations are empty and dull. There are secrets hidden everywhere but in their frenzy to add as many secrets as possible they seem to have forgotten about adding non secret stuff. I loved it in Zelda Twilight Princess for example, how in that dark and largely dead world there were some bubbles here and there with interesting characters and fun things to do. None of that here. Just looking for useless secret items. Here, there are few such places and even the one's you'll find feel hollow. It's a shame. The game could have been great but lack of work on characters, story, environments, dialogue etc makes it a 3/5. I think if I'd ever be asked for an example of a poorly designed tutorial stage, I'd mention the one in Death's Door.