Death's Door Review (notstarboard)
I had a great time with Death's Door! I did encounter a number of frustrating bugs, performance issues, and other irritations, but it's still an easy recommend to anyone interested.
Pros:
* Fun combat.
* Great music (Ceramic Manor theme is so darned good). The section where they synced up the pistons to the beat was incredible!
* The forest spirits are the cutest
* I thought hunting for collectibles was a lot of fun in this game. The difficulty was such that you don't need a guide unless you get impatient and I liked knowing exactly how much of everything I still needed to find.
* Great lighting and reflections. This is really shown off in the nighttime section in the endgame.
* Some unexpected humor and lightheartedness for a game about reaping souls with conspicuous blood effects
* Engaging characters. Your playable character is the only exception.
* Decent story. It's not overly complex, but it doesn't have to be to tie the game together well.
* Fun endgame content.
* Lots of nice little details. For example, I love that the shiny things you collect are visible on the desk right from the main menu! It's also just wholesome playing a crow that likes shiny things <3
Cons:
* The setting to turn off the controller's vibration did not work, and worse still, it kept getting stuck on. My controller would be vibrating on the pause menu while the game wasn't even focused. It was super obnoxious.
* BIzarrely high GPU usage (~65-70%) and consistent, irritating stutter at 1080p/60 for an isometric game with low system requirements. Using minimum settings didn't mitigate the issue and neither did turning off vsync as suggested by the developers. Turning off vsync also cranks your GPU for no reason, so that isn't much of a workaround regardless. I have an RX 6600, which is ~5x faster than the minimum GPU (R7 260X) and ~75% faster than the recommended GPU (RX 580). Perhaps it runs really horribly on AMD hardware, as the RX 580 absolutely wipes the floor with the recommended Nvidia card (GTX 1050), but this sort of performance just isn't reasonable.
* No borderless windowed mode.
* Inconsistent boss design. For a couple of them, too much of the difficulty comes from the isometric perspective. Some endgame bosses also seemed balanced around a player who had taken a different upgrade path than I did.
* I thought it was cheesy that every single chest, all of which were story essential, was a mimic. It is not "avarice" for the reaper to take the only path offered. The player doesn't even need to open the chest for the mimic cut-scene to play, so it was a pretty "stop hitting yourself!" sort of "gotcha".
* The ground panels that require a ground pound to open took me several hours to figure out because they didn't work the first time; I can only assume I was too far off center. Making the landing area more forgiving on those would have been a good idea.
* If you press the dodge button while charging a spell, you should still dodge. Oftentimes (all of the time?) you won't.
* With the hook shot, you can't just hold down left trigger and continually hit B like you can with other spells. This caused me to walk off cliffs a bunch of times before I finally got over the muscle memory.
* Steam achievement progress is bugged for multiple achievements (e.g. Weapon Master, Reap What You Sow)
* When trying to use the dash strike with the greatsword, if my dash was just barely on cooldown, the game would lock me into an unskippable stationary heavy attack. Just about every time this happened against a boss I took a hit, and since the dash strike is by far the most effective attack in the game, I ran into this a lot.