Somehow, either through good fortune or sheer coincidence, I ended up playing two games this week with a considerable amount of overlap. One is Respawn's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and the other is this week's Indie Game of the Week, Death's Door: both games feature a certain breezier variant of Souls combat where cautious strikes and situational awareness are key factors while also being open-ish explormers full of secrets to find and no small amount of backtracking required to do so. I've also been enjoying them both quite a bit, given the center of that Venn diagram might as well have my name written all over it.

In Death's Door, a crow reaper is assigned to procure a "giant soul" - one where the owner has been alive so long that they've turned gigantic, their souls having bloated with age in a cute nod to one of the less explicable aspects of Souls lore - but is ambushed and robbed before they can return it to the reaper base of operations, finding themselves on the hunt for three more before they can return to their grayscale dimension and, vitally, halt the natural aging process reapers undergo when on assignment. The gameplay balances combat, usually wave-based fracas against multiple opponents, and exploration propelled by some mild puzzle-solving and acquired traversal abilities. Were it not for the isometric perspective and the CG artstyle it'd be a dead ringer for Hyper Light Drifter.

That comparison is especially apparent in the rapid pace of the combat, where you're whizzing around dodging projectiles and incoming foes to carve out melee hits between enemy chains or use some of your ranged abilities, each requiring a small amount of charge up. Mostly any projectile can be reflected also, provided they don't fall on you from above, and so you can use the attacks of ranged enemies to soften up the melee ones advancing menacingly upon you. Abilities use an ammo system that is replenished with melee hits, so you're encouraged to mix it up with long- and close-range assaults whenever possible. It's been a great deal of fun, in part because enemies and projectiles move slowly enough that you're rarely caught unawares by an attack or are unable to juggle all these enemies at once. Unless you really leave yourself open, you have more than a fraction of a second to react in time by dodge rolling out of the way, or swiping at the enemy/bullet to briefly stun them/send it flying, respectively. Notably, getting this rhythm down is easier than it looks and makes you feel like a badass when you're able to control the battlefield so readily. To compensate, you have a very limited amount of health and equally limited opportunities to heal; however, the game isn't looking to be as punitive as its Soulsian contemporaries, and so the penalty for death is immaterial. All you ever lose is time getting back to where you were.

The game's presentation is really something else too, though it can be a little jumbled with its tone. While the eccentric enemy designs owe much to animators Studio Ghibli, especially its pottery-obsessed oba-chan The Urn Witch and the kodama-like forest spirits, the typical level geography has a much sharper and cleaner look that helps highlight points of interest and allows enemies and their projectiles to stand out all the more in contrast. Musically, it has a fantastic, atmospheric soundtrack by David Fenn (who also worked on the mechanically and tonally similar action-adventure Indies Titan Souls and Moonlighter) that perfectly suits whichever environment it's in, with a melancholy seriousness that is often at odds with the game's silly sense of humor. (But hey, that didn't make Secret of Evermore any less of a banger either.) Despite being primarily about death and the inevitability of same, Death's Door can't help but humorously flesh out its antagonists by having them pop up for the occasional taunt while you're exploring their lands, and the reaper HQ that'll you regularly visit (as it's both the fast-travel hub and the upgrade store) has some mind-numbing bureaucratic 9-to-5 office job energy which feels especially germane to a colorless world frozen in time.

Overall, I'm really into Death's Door. The ebb and flow of the frenetic combat is a highlight, but aficionados of exploration-heavy action-adventure games should appreciate the game's attention to detail and the clever way it uses its isometric perspective to hide things from view, including its enormous health- and magic-improving shrines. Forgoing the usual map system is certainly a choice, though while the level design can be twisty and folds back into itself often with unlockable shortcuts none of its levels are so expansive that you'll stay lost forever without guidance. Most locations have directions to the next area, if not so much in the way of landmarks to use to retrace your steps to where you needed an ability you didn't have the first time through. You learn to keep a notepad file open nearby with cases like these, and there's an in-game hint system of sorts for the more integral collectibles to find (most are balls of soul energy that go towards your stat upgrade purchases and are relatively inessential). The few NPCs you meet, hostile and friendly, are amusingly written and many eventually congregate around a café run by a very normal fisherman, which is also where you receive the aforementioned hints. Between the penalty-free deaths, the fast travel system, and the copious amount of shortcuts it's easy enough to make meaningful progress on a constant basis and for as frantic as the game's combat can be it's so carefully streamlined that it's simpler than even the Zelda games from the '80s, for better and worse. Decent length too: I'm about six or seven hours in and am approaching the last of its three major antagonists. I'll definitely be seeing this one out and, barring any huge difficulty spikes towards the end, will almost certainly be a retroactive addition to last year's GOTY list.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

CROW GANG!