First saw Death’s Door as a tiny little snippet at uhhh… E3? Either the Devolver or Xbox pressers? I honestly don’t remember which. It looked super muted, like full on Inside-style black and white with the occasional color pop. It didn’t jump out, couldn’t really tell what kind of game it was, whatever.

Then it was HEAVILY pushed at SGDQ 2021. The last game pushed that way by Devolver was Loop Hero. Loop Hero paid off amazingly, so screw it, it’s $20, I’ll do that on a lark.

It’s so good. It’s, for lack of a better term, a Zelda-Like. Hub world, 3 dungeons, then endgame. Optional sidequests and upgrades and collectibles, etc. Dungeons have keys, locks, one power upgrade, then a boss. Power upgrade acts as a key within its own dungeon. Literally Zelda. An interesting wrinkle is that the third act of a dungeon, reminiscent of the Ori games, is sort of a fast-paced progressively unlocking escape sequence. Lots of combat, fast paced puzzle solving, and if you screw up and die you’ve been unlocking a fast path through the zone as you move.

Art design? Great! The muted area is the sub-space purgatory. Everything else has plenty of color, which makes me think that first trailer beefed it. Enemy design is pretty good too! Only really one truly frustrating boss, and only really frustrating due to one move. Combat is pretty skill oriented. There’s no clutch heal move, you can only heal at checkpoints. It’s all precision dodging, angling, skills, slashes. There’s a variety of weapons, they all feel different enough, but I stuck with the Sword and Sword But Better most of the game.

There’s two phases to beating the game, credits roll in about 10-15 hrs, then there’s some light collectible stuff post-game to get a true ending. No New Game Plus, no boss refights, and yet two of the achievements require you to do very specific things with boss fights with late-game upgrades. Like, to do one of them you would have to get a power, disregard the dungeon you got it in, backtrack, do a hard bonus fight, and THEN go beat the dungeon. It’s missable and unintuitive. There’s also a stereotypical “needlessly difficult combat requirement” achievement, so this one isn’t getting truly 100%’ed.

All that said, it was a joy. Strongly recommended at $20.