Since mid-2024 i've been maintaining a spreadsheet of games where you play as a bird; that whole time, i've been meaning to go through and play and write reviews of as many of them as practical. I want to review these both as games - how much did i enjoy them, are they generally worth playing - and as bird games, which is harder to define my criteria for. Look, i'm bird therian, kind of, it's unclear, and not that important, the point is that getting to play as a bird in games is special to me, and i especially care about how well the game represents the bird experience. That's what i'm looking for here.
I will admit i love when a game has some nonsense high concept, something immediate and interesting to differentiate it from everything else in its genre. So i actually want to draw attention to the previous game from Acid Nerve, the developers of Death's Door: the 2015 Titan Souls. Titan Souls is very high-concept: it's a boss rush where you have one arrow and one HP, but thankfully every boss also dies in one hit. Dodge roll and evade attacks for long enough to line up a shot on the boss's weakpoint juuuust right and take it down. I quite liked Titan Souls! I think anyway, i last played it in 2021 and i was fundamentally a different person back then so i don't really remember. I did get the game's true ending, and my track record of actually getting to even the regular ending of anything is terrible, which implies that i was pretty invested in it.
In any case I was very excited to see what of Titan Souls the team brought into Death's Door, which seemed to be a far more traditional game. You know, you explore an overworld (with enemies everywhere), you upgrade your stats, you find new weapons and hidden trinkets, there's the occasional boss fight. I actually got got by an incredible bait-and-switch here because I bought the game and then played it six months later, having forgotten everything that was on the Steam store page. The first 20 minutes of the game's story had me expecting another boss rush like Titan Souls: ah, you work at this place where you "reap" the souls of the living, you get assigned a soul to collect, which is a boss fight, presumably then you bring the soul back, you get another assignment - ah, no, your first soul is immediately stolen from you and that sets off the whole adventure. This is not a spoiler because it's described in the paragraph of text at the top of the store page.
Anyway, despite there being non-boss stuff now and the bosses having the large health reserves you'd expect, they kept the Titan Souls emphasis on punishing mistakes. Though you now have a generous four health instead of just the one, there's no healing in combat, so beating any boss is a demonstration that you can reliably dodge all its attacks... while still getting damage in. Titan Souls, i think, was more interesting in how it encouraged taking on risk; when the boss goes down in one, you might want to - and often had to - put yourself directly in harm's way for the chance of making the one perfect shot. Here, the boss fights are more of a straightforward dance: learn the timing and the steps, beat the boss.
Oh, they also give you a bow and arrow again, which is a joy to use - the subtle invisible aim assist that I'm like 90% sure is there is much appreciated. Ultimately this is still a game about combat and the combat is pretty good! I had a good time with it - i had minor gripes at points about the 3D-ness of the game making some hitboxes unclear and sometimes you'd kind of slide past an enemy while trying to hit it, but really, i had fun. Oh, and the music is great, and the art is pretty (the style on display is fantastic, i especially loved the boss title cards), and the story is relatively coherent.
...but still i am lost on whether to recommend this game. Sure i enjoyed it, but it felt like nothing special. I think i am driven by novelty, far more so than the average person: what i really want out of a game, out of any experience really, is for there to be something new, something unique, something i've never experienced before; like, say, an interesting and novel high concept. Personally, i would have felt somewhat less content with having played Death's Door had i not been intending to go write this review and make it part of a bigger project. I keep thinking of this review for the board game Rummikub, where the reviewer Tom Brewster introduces his new three-star rating system:
Three stars for anything that's essential and unmissable, two stars for everything that's worth your time for whatever reason, and one star for everything that is downright bad, but also could be described as "alright", or "decent", because you've only got so many hours in the day to consume media, and none of them should be spent on the subpar. Because you're worth it.
I fear that Death's Door for me, like the rating Brewster gave to Rummikub, might be a 1.5 star game. Whether it's worth your time is going to depend on what you value for it.
Well! You play as what appears to be a hooded crow, which, aside from its inexplicable ability to wield weapons in its wings, is depicted as pretty much a normal bird of its kind. You have all these cute little bird mannerisms in cutscenes - my favourite is a gag where you're about to eat a meal with chopsticks, before tossing them aside and just going in with your beak. They did an amazing job on the character animations; the cutscenes, and that half-hopping walk you do, and - though i can't explain it - the way you swing a sword or dodge roll or whatever looks just like how you'd imagine a bird would do those things if those were things birds did. I adore the main character in this game, it's a fantastic little bird to embody, and it has the honour of making me write bird transformation fiction directly inspired by it.
However there is one glaring omission which is that you simply cannot fly, which is not diagetically explained at all so far as i can tell. Now, this makes sense from a design perspective, the game would be fundamentally different if you could, but it still did occasionally feel a little strange to be stopped by a metre-high wall or take one damage from falling into a pit. Like, c'mon, i'm a bird, this shouldn't be an issue. So it really feels like they went all out on the aesthetic qualities of being a bird, but ultimately did just that; the fact that you are a bird does not actually matter to the game or its story. Not that I fault their choice of aesthetic at all! I mean, i like birds, obviously, and it feels about right to have Death's bureaucracy staffed by crows - the choice of a hooded crow for the main character (calling to mind the Grim Reaper's traditional hooded black robe) is a nice touch. It's just not quite there as a bird game for me.
At least those trinkets you collect go into a section in the menu titled "shiny things", which i appreciated.