This review contains spoilers
Death's Door is good. The main game is largely fun, with mostly good dungeons with only a couple of things to nitpick. Sometimes dying leads to you making a fairly long walk back to where you died, but the game mostly mitigates this in its dungeon design by having you permanently unlock shortcuts as you go on. The first two bosses are great, the third one is bad with some funky hitboxes and not much warning before its attacks, and the final boss is decent. There's a good incentive to explore with lots of trinkets and bonuses around. There's no map though, which is a little annoying at times. I think Death's Door is a good, albeit short, combat-puzzle game that I enjoyed the main game of a fair amount.
Then you beat the game and postgame starts and the game becomes suddenly much less good. The postgame is based around you having to complete 7 tasks, many of which are not intuitive and not explained to you. You just have to stumble around and hope that you achieve goals, or look it up. You also do most of these in the world's night, which makes the world somewhat sparse and lifeless with very few enemies in most regions. Of the seven tasks:
- The ghost task is obtuse but easy to stumble upon the right answer by accident at least. Not telegraphed well but they are around immediately after it turns to night.
- The gravedigger fight is not telegraphed at all (that you have to get the trinket first) but it's a rather good fight at least.
- The owls aren't that bad, but the constant "hoo hoo"ing is obnoxious until you find them.
- The Avarice chest is good and telegraphed well, you can see the stairs when you go to that area the first time in the game.
- The torches are not telegraphed at all and are somewhat hard to find in the dark.
- The Jefferson task is actually pretty good, just a bit of a walk since you have to go all the way across the map for it while doing nothing else of note.
- The seeds task is egregious and is VERY bad. Tying 100% seed gathering and planting into the true ending is a painful grindy chore, especially as you've been somewhat led to conserve them up to this point and have to backtrack everywhere to fill all the pots you've already filled.
And all of that is for.... a short cutscene. The true ending was a bunch of grindy stuff with a little bonus lore that amounted to virtually zero consequence. Which is a shame, because I really liked the first like two thirds of this game a lot! It's still fun, but don't bother with the postgame stuff.
Then you beat the game and postgame starts and the game becomes suddenly much less good. The postgame is based around you having to complete 7 tasks, many of which are not intuitive and not explained to you. You just have to stumble around and hope that you achieve goals, or look it up. You also do most of these in the world's night, which makes the world somewhat sparse and lifeless with very few enemies in most regions. Of the seven tasks:
- The ghost task is obtuse but easy to stumble upon the right answer by accident at least. Not telegraphed well but they are around immediately after it turns to night.
- The gravedigger fight is not telegraphed at all (that you have to get the trinket first) but it's a rather good fight at least.
- The owls aren't that bad, but the constant "hoo hoo"ing is obnoxious until you find them.
- The Avarice chest is good and telegraphed well, you can see the stairs when you go to that area the first time in the game.
- The torches are not telegraphed at all and are somewhat hard to find in the dark.
- The Jefferson task is actually pretty good, just a bit of a walk since you have to go all the way across the map for it while doing nothing else of note.
- The seeds task is egregious and is VERY bad. Tying 100% seed gathering and planting into the true ending is a painful grindy chore, especially as you've been somewhat led to conserve them up to this point and have to backtrack everywhere to fill all the pots you've already filled.
And all of that is for.... a short cutscene. The true ending was a bunch of grindy stuff with a little bonus lore that amounted to virtually zero consequence. Which is a shame, because I really liked the first like two thirds of this game a lot! It's still fun, but don't bother with the postgame stuff.