You are a crow working to enforce the rules of death. Nobody has been dying as of late and it seems they’re all going mad because of it. Being alive past one’s expiration date only serves to mutate the soul into something that’s almost unrecognizable from what we used to be. Death is natural, and while it can be sad, there is beauty in letting go or being free from the shackles of life.

You’re initially tasked to hunt down a soul that should have been reaped long ago, but you come across the original reaper of that soul. He tells you that the ominous door he stands beside is where that soul is, but to open it there are three other souls that need to be reaped first. What follows is a journey through catacombs, snowy mountains and fishing villages, solving environmental puzzles, unlocking abilities and improving your stats. Enemies will get in your way as you try and make your way to the bosses of their respective areas. Each has their own attack patterns and you’ll need to dodge and attack at the right intervals to defeat them. There are some hidden collectibles for the completionists, but many are simple enough to access once you gain certain traversal abilities. It’s almost a metroidvania in this aspect, but without as much backtracking.

Throughout the land, you’ll be using Doors to return back to the Bureau where you can upgrade your stats using the souls you’ve collected. Whether you choose to slaughter every enemy you come across or not will impact your effectiveness in combat, but the option to bypass most basic enemies is there. On occasion, there are horde rooms where you’ll need to engage with the combat systems, and of course boss fights, but it’s optional for the most part. You won’t do as much damage or be able to take many hits without collecting some souls, however, and some of these enemies are quite difficult. You don’t lose anything for dying, which is nice, but you will have to retrace your steps to get back to where you were. It’s enough of an incentive to try not to die without being overly punishing. Healing is a process though, so you’ll need to budget properly. To heal you’ll need to plant a seed and harvest its flowers. Seeds are one of the collectibles you can find throughout the map, but once you have a general sense of where they’re hiding, you can amass a good stockpile if you’re careful. A way to circumvent it, however, is a trip to the bureau. Going through one of the doors to your office fully heals you. Doors and healing pots aren’t usually close to one another and if you see a pot, it usually means a boss or horde room awaits. To avoid backtracking you’ll need to use the healing pots properly as well as learn enemy attack patterns and to keep from running out of resources you’ll have to scavenge for them and utilize them sparingly. It urges the player to explore the world in a way that’s immediately beneficial, rather than being a checklist of meaningless objectives. (Though completionists will definitely have their own kind of fun here.)

Each part of the story features a unique perspective of the situation. The first boss you need to take is researching immortality. She turned a guy’s head into a pot, and he helps you through her area so you can take her down. You learn a bit more about his backstory with her, and while it’s not anything groundbreaking, it’s a concise story that adds some weight to the situation. Also, after defeating each boss, a mini funeral is held where a character speaks on behalf of the deceased. Some of these helped contextualize the decisions of the bosses and were sometimes chuckle-worthy. Which is something I haven’t mentioned until this point, the game is pretty funny. It takes a lighthearted tone at appropriate points to relieve the tension as the concept of “death” can be pretty heavy otherwise. While this could minimize the impact of the game’s more emotional moments, it balances the humor with the seriousness properly, so this is not a concern.

Death’s Door is charming above all. It’s challenging and somber at times, and humorous and simple at others. The artstyle and the way it talks about life (and death) is comforting. Life is meant to end; we need to be put to rest. While it’s worth the effort, it’s tiring. Death isn’t something to fear, it’s something we must embrace and the living should treat it with reverence. I’m surprised a game as relatively simple and short as it is to have such a broadly understandable message. I appreciate it for what it has to say, and would recommend it to any who desire a short experience packed with meaning and a decent challenge.