Still in your library
Death's Door, the crow who clocks in at the office
- Critic score
- 85
- Player rating
- 4.5/5
- Main story
- 9.2 h
- Genre
- RPG, Action
- Given away in
- August 2023
Given to Essential subscribers in August 2023, Death's Door is a top-down action game where you play a soul-reaping crow with a desk job. It is funny, it is hard, it is short, and it has probably been gathering dust in your library for two years.
The starting point is an afterlife bureaucracy: crows are civil servants there, each assigned souls to collect, complete with time clock and line manager. The day the soul assigned to you is stolen, you must chase it into a world where death no longer passes — and where everything that should have died has kept on growing.
That sets the tone: dry, dark humour, carried by memorable side characters, and a melancholy that settles in before you see it coming. The game is about the end of life and what you do with the time left, but it says so through a crow grumbling about management.
The combat is precise and lean: a sword, a roll, a bow, a few spells. Mistakes are costly, the bosses are real trials, but every area reads clearly and the checkpoints are well placed. The studio had already made Titan Souls, and that taste for legible, demanding confrontation is all here.
The world is a set of levels connected by doors, each with its own atmosphere and its own tyrant to dethrone, and it is full of shortcuts and hidden corners you unlock by coming back with a new ability. It is not an open world; it is better: a dense one.
About ten hours are enough to see the end, a bit more to understand the real ending. If you were subscribed in summer 2023, it is waiting for you. It is a game you launch without commitment and cannot put down once the first door is through.