![]() Oh sorry I meant The Forgotten City, a sort of thinky thinky talky talky investigative adventure game thing that didn’t get off on the best foot with its name and playing like something that got hacked off a reject Bethesda game complete with the traditional very off-putting fixed boggle eye contact conversations, and with looking like it was pieced together from the example art that came free with the 3D modelling software, but somehow it drew me in. So the next game I tried out was The Forgettable Title. Some interesting flavour to it but I’ll stop thinking about it the moment it stops troubling my digestive system. ![]() The Soulslike equivalent of a packet of Monster Munch. ![]() I mean, just three big bosses to find and then back here for the inevitable plot twist and dramatic climax, sure, I can rattle that out in one shift and be home in time for Thundercats. All in all, probably for the best that Death’s Door doesn’t outstay its welcome. You can mash attack or you can dodge or you can use a ranged attack and granted it’s impressive for a flightless bird to have any repertoire that goes beyond “eat seed” and “hop about” but it’s not the most nuanced gameplay in the world. I also once found a coffee place in Melbourne that did amazing croissant french toast and I’m fucked if I can remember where that was, too.” So I felt very disinclined to go hunting for optional secrets or extra weapons, especially since I plowed through all the story bosses with very little trouble using nothing but one of the first weapons you get in the game, because the combat’s the other thing that’s a bit flimsy. The environments just feel like competing labyrinths with different wallpaper and whenever I picked up a new ability that opened new areas I’d be like “Well, I did once see an area I needed this ability to get to. In a third person open world game if I’m trying to remember where the tower of bollock scraping was I can look to the horizon for its telltale spherical ramparts, but in isometric land I can only go “Oh it was somewhere in the easterly quadrant of this giant sheet of graph paper I can only see ten square yards of at a time.” And Death’s Door doesn’t have a map so no bollocks are getting scraped today. It makes it hard to gauge depth, the characters are so tiny on screen you can’t read the slogans on their hilarious souvenir T-shirts, and it’s too easy to get lost when the areas go past a certain size. Part of that might be the isometric look, which I think might be becoming one of my least favourite graphical styles, at least for action games. It’s just I find the gameplay to be generally a bit flimsy. There’s some fun dialogue to be had with interesting NPCs who have that Dark Souls quality of adding life and texture to the setting while being absolutely no bloody help whatsoever. It’s built a nice little world to take place in, it’s got that very indie-game art style you see in games like Ashen where it looks like everything’s made of folded craft paper. Anyway, Death’s Door is a game I would classify as story rich and cash poor. I think this is that “min-maxing” thing people always go on about. You probably can’t fly ‘cos you’re carrying the weight of a great big sword to do all the hacking and the slashing with. And no, you can’t fly there, despite being a bird. After your latest assignment gets stolen from you, you find yourself having to travel to the, erm, three corners of the earth to harvest powerful souls from big bosses in order to open the titular Death’s Door and complete your assignment. In Death’s Door, you play a little crow who is one of many crows employed by some kind of celestial bureaucracy, and your job is to venture into the world and capture the souls of the newly dead, who are generally newly dead because you just killed the absolute motherfuck out of them, but that’s quotas for you. Death’s Door being an example of that last one. And isometric hack and slash exploration games with RPG elements and Soulslike. Man, looking for indie games worth reviewing is like that one Monty Python sketch sometimes. We have a merch store as well! Visit the store for brand new ZP merch. Want to watch Zero Punctuation ad-free? Sign-up for The Escapist + today and support your favorite content creators! This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Death’s Door and The Forgotten City.
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