Death's door does so much right - as if I needed more convincing, it is further evidence that indie games really are the future! Back them, fund them, share them, buy them, give them a chance, because they deserve the attention and support!

Death's door was an instant buy when I found it because conceptually it is such an easy sell, deriving its inspiration very clearly but very effectively, rooting its core design closely around dark souls and classic zelda, but with a uniquely gorgeous art style and charm. I love almost everything about it, I love the fast paced and satisfying combat, I love all of the different locations and I particularly love its well handled themes around the cycle of life & death and what it means to have purpose. Death's door wonderfully juggles an overarching sense of melancholy with a great sense of humour and a whimsical sense of exploration & discovery. Despite wearing its influences on its sleeve, i've not really played anything quite like it and that is a space that indie games fill time and time again with increasingly novel ideas.

I would like to have seen maybe a bit more enemy variety and I do wish there was some way to heal mid-combat, this felt sorely missed in the late game which has some lengthy and really challenging fights. Also, the widely zoomed out perspective and sometimes unclear levels of elevation did occasionally make parts tricky to follow. Even so, these things are small nitpicks, at the end of the day this game is fantastic and with its short length, multitude of secrets, pretty varied possible playstyles & awesome aesthetic appeal, I reckon i'll be coming back to play it again sometime!

just in time for Persona 3 Reloaded, Skrud the Tarnished has become Elden Lord and saved The Lands Between. do you have anything you'd like to say, Skrud, to the people reading this review?

"Hello."

great stuff, Skrud, thank you. while piloting the beastman and warrior skrud and whispering into his brain via an earpiece, i too became quite familiar with the lands between, and their mysticisms and danger. you spend 89 hours in a game and you're going to end up quite familiar with it! elden ring is the aftermath of a huge family drama where all the members of said family are immortal demigods whose whims can change the very fabric of reality. if they have a falling out its a pretty big deal! the influence GRRM has taken from middle earth is very clear if you're familiar with anything outside of lord of the rings itself, and it's very cool! much the same way that middle earth builds on old english myth to create figures of legend, elden ring's demi gods feel like mythic heroes. we talk a lot about figures that haunt the narrative, and while maybe haunt is the wrong word in elden ring the figures of its mythology exist throughout the world before they even appear. the golden lineage of godfrey, including godwyn, godrick, and of course, godefroy (lol), is by itself fun and interesting lore than elden ring dripfeeds you as a reward for your efforts in looking around and talking to people and remembering. there are no boring massive text entries or journal entries or computer terminals that act as unseemly, tedious game interruptions to forcefeed you lore. the fromsoft method of giving you tiny pieces of lore when you choose to engage is better i think, at least for this kind of game. even knowing everything thats happened and who all the players are, there is still this atmosphere of being in the age of heroes or whatever, or grand deeds happening with great figures who are more than just the individuals they are. it's dope. if you wanna call that backstory and worldbuilding, it owns, and i love it. the story that plays out itself isnt really there in some ways? its just kind of your tarnished wiping out these dudes one by one as you go because they're in your way, and there's something very funny about that. there is a story in that you are going to become the new elden lord, and there are some small decisions you have to make around that which can affect the endings, but the most part is you are living through the aftereffects of a story, and the entire game is just the conclusion. it's kind of strange, but i like it. i think a cohesive plot with very integral characters would hurt the atmosphere and vibe of this world. its size and quietude are important, because they allow the lands between to be majestic, which it must be more than anything else.

unfortunately i think the lands between themselves were, while not disappointing, maybe slightly underwhelming? don't get me wrong, this game is stunning. skrud, if you were to describe The Lands Between, what would you say?

"You're beautiful."

alright well he's a little confused but i think you get the point.

"Apologies."

the world is beautiful, and its legacy dungeons and crafted areas are my most favourite because that's clearly where the vast majority of design and thought has gone into. its not that i dislike limgrave or whatever, but when almost all of the openworld areas themselves are just grass with trees, it is a little underwhelming i guess? limgrave and liurnia just look basically the same. altus plateau is limgrave but yellow and annoying to navigate. caelid and gelmir admittedly are totally different biomes, but still feel mostly just flat to go through. navigation on torrent is fine but it sort of makes you go "whats the point of this being open world" if all youre doing is waiting for the next legacy dungeons? the caves and tombs and all of that too all feel so similar to each other in terms of aesthetic and gameplay loop that they end up being mostly uninteresting, even the good ones. and dont get me wrong, elden ring had no choice but to re-use assets and do this sort of thing to be a game of this size. it is quite literally just impossible for open world games these days to have nothing but completely unique crafted experiences throughout and still have this scope. it aint possible! and it probably wont be, like, ever? but i think im burned off the back of BotW and TotK to just kind be done with that kind of open world thing. especially when the boss is a boss you've killed before except he's stronger now, or there's two of them, or he's got rats backing him up or whatever. it's just a bit forgetable? the legacy dungeons on the otherhand are crazy. going through stormveil for the first time made me feel like i was playing dark souls 1 again. i lvoe that there's no loading screen or anything to entering stormveil, and i love just how big it feels. you can tell stormveil was made with love and care because it feels like they built a castle, then turned that castle into a level, instead of making a level around a castle. its so sick, and has so many good enemy encounters, and fun bosses. when you do encounter these crafted unique moments they always end up being the best parts of the game. the haligree, raya lucaria, volacno manor, there literally isnt a bad one. (although the boss of layndell being morgott was lame seeing as i'd fought margitt twice at this point) it obviously has me excited for the DLC, i just hope that the areas outside the legacy dungeons have a bit more unique flavour to each other. another thing. wouldn't mountaintop of the giants felt more like a mountaintop if we had, i dont know, climbed a mountain to get there? the map make the area look way bigger than it is and i think actually climbing it, seeing literal vertical progresion, would've been dope as fuck.

"Please help."

oh skrud you don't need any help! you are a powerhouse of strength and every enemy crumbled underneath you. and that was a slightly disappointing feature of my experience with this game's combat, in that it was so unbalanced for me. the nature of this game being as open as it is, with as much flexibility as it has, balancing is kind of an impossible thing to do, so i cant even properly criticise it. but for the fact i levelled strength for this game didnt grind at all, it is silly just how easy i found this game. not to say i totally steamrolled it, but getting astel on my first time without full health, without full flasks, with no summon, and still just winning outright doesnt feel like the intended way to play. i think im pretty good at this game, i still managed to beat morgitt and godrick on my first tries before i was overlevelled, but it got a point where it was just silly how strong i was. the only times i felt adequetly challenged in the legacy dungeons were stormveil, and the haligtree. every other one was kind of a cakewalk and that's a bit disappointing. especially because combat feels fun as heck! there are so many cool and interesting weapon types, crazy customisation with incanations, the wondrous physick, ashes of war, spirit ashes, and so on. it was fun from start to finish, but i think it couldve been more fun. i debated re-speccing some of my strength levels in arcane or mind just to make the game harder, but that inofitself removes some of the fun because progression is also a facet of enjoyment! taking that away wouldve made me lose enjoyment too, so i continued to get stronger and stronger. malenia was the only boss to give me serious trouble, outside of the first two evergoals i did: darriwhil and the crucible knight. every other boss was one to three attempts - usually one.

i'm excited for the DLC because i suspect it'll just be harder than the basegame, and skrud cant really get much stronger than he already is, so maybe that'll give me a good challenge and make me scream my flipping head off! anyway, cheers for reading the review. any final words skrud?

"Thank you."

So when this is good, it's REALLY good. The stuff in this game that I liked I really liked. I think that Mae is an awesome character, and the exploration of her state of mind at this point in her life is handled near perfectly in my opinion. Unfortunately there's about 8 hours of game surrounding all of the good stuff. I think that this feels very nascent in that in 20 years time we might look back on NitW as a game that paved the way for much more effective and fully formed works of art, it's very clear that games as a medium are still in their kind of, experimental phase in a lot of ways? and that makes complete sense considering they've only been around for the last 40-50 years compared to films and books which have been around for a whole lot longer. I think this game is worth playing but it is also very frustrating in a lot of ways.

I liked this game a lot. I completely missed the first two puzzles and had to do them at the end (it was a requirement for the game to be over), and doing them at that point felt pretty unnecessary which affected the pacing quite significantly. Now I know that I was the one that missed the puzzles but, if your game opens with a message saying 'this narrative experience doesn't hold your hand' but you still make it a requirement to do certain things in the game, despite those things being pretty easy to miss (at least they were for me) I think that is quite a big problem! I don't know what the solution is, I would've been happy if you could miss every puzzle that it was possible to just walk by, then if you're really fucking confused by the ending, you just play it again and then hopefully end up finding what you missed, or you stay confused, after all you were warned at the beginning that this was a narrative experience that doesn't hold your hand!!!! I know that all I've said so far has been critical really but it's because I really, really liked this game. I thought the puzzles were strange and engaging, if a little obtuse sometimes. My favourite puzzle was definitely the house one where you had to memorise the layout of a house, that was awesome! I really liked the way the location felt a mixture between very real and believable and also totally uncanny. I heard that this game was influenced by Twin Peaks but not in a way that is purely referential, and I think that is true! I could be talking less vaguely about this game but I would like to avoid spoilers because I actually really liked where this story went. I'd like to play more games like this. :)