Epilogue – Death’s Door – Game Informer

Death’s Door is possibly the biggest pleasant surprise of the year. The Zelda-like adventure of a raven who reaps souls fighting monsters to serve a bureaucratic commission from the afterlife won many hearts and earned a review score of 9 out of 10. Now that the dust has settled, we sit down with the major game creators David Fenn and Acid Nerve’s Mark Foster to reflect on the success of Death Door, discuss the team’s design approach (like getting rid of the map), and their overall takeaways for the future.

Warning: This interview contains minor spoilers for the content of the Death’s Door endgame.

What has surprised you the most about the reception at Death’s Door?
David Fenn: I think people liked it so much [laughs]. Probably how universally people like him. Since all of our previous games were so much more divisive, I never expected to have a game where it seems like 90 percent of people are really into it. So it has definitely been great.

How did you approach the balance of humor in that game with a theme as bleak as death?
Mark Foster: I think the theme of death and its serious elements go hand in hand with those lighter and more comical things. I don’t know if maybe it’s a British thing or what, but the idea of ​​downplaying a situation to try to soften it is like something classic that we both have. [have] like he’s been raised and he plays the game all the time. The juxtaposition of light and dark themes, like having all the enemies trying to kill you, but then you have these little forest spirits spawning in the world and running, is a good example of that sort of thing. Comedy and stuff were just our personalities that came through in the game. We like to make jokes and stuff all the time. That was the main thing we wanted to include on any kind of overtly negative topics because the whole game revolves around death, you can imagine him getting into that kind of dark route. But having this kind of compensation makes it a bit more palatable when you also hit those notes from more poignant moments in the game.

DF: Yes, I think it also helps the player to stay a bit engaged and motivated in the world if there is a sense of light-hearted fun to carry them through this adventure, which touches on the darker themes.

Was there a time when the game was too dark and needed to be lit?
MF: I think it will always be a bit of a goof and it will have comedy clowning and stuff like that. I think this is how we really like to do things.

DF: I think the darkest things were always there in the sense that we wanted there to be twisted and weird ideas in the world to make it unique in that way. I think that’s probably something that we had emphasized from day one on our original release. But yeah, I think if anything, it’s probably more that as the game progressed, we stumbled upon the poignant elements of the game rather than [going] Really heavy with that stuff to start with and I had to roll it up. I think the light-hearted kind of style was what was most natural to us, and then the darker material came more of an exploration as we went along.

Many players love how Death’s Doors is a very condensed experience. How did you approach content planning?
DF: I think for the first year or so we wrote down every idea we had and started doing a lot of things. And then there was a moment where we sat down and we had a long discussion about how this world should be structured and how the game should be structured into acts and stuff. From that point on, I feel like we had our plan pretty close. And that really helped with the concise nature of the game, while also ensuring that all the best ideas that we had, that we were excited about, were all crammed into that relatively concise playtime.

What ideas didn’t make the cut?
DF: There are probably some. I think you were originally going to meet the gray crow a quarter of the game. And the top was going to be like a much longer journey from the beginning, and it would be surrounded by four fortresses on each side, like four separate levels. And then that was completely readjusted to focus only on the chapters that we wanted. And then the game follows the structure of having an introduction, three chapters, and an ending. I think that gives you a better sense of momentum than you spend a couple hours in the game before you get a feel for what the structure is. That is an example that comes to mind.

Why did you decide to exclude a map, and how do you design a level where players will feel like they don’t need it?
MF: For me personally, I don’t like maps in games. Recently, for the last two weeks, I have been playing Hollow Knight. A lot of people compared our game to him, and he had never played it before, so I thought I should give it a try. And it’s great. But the map thing, one thing I find myself doing with map games is just looking at the map all the time and not internalizing anything about the structure of the world because I know I can give in to the map at any time. . And I think if you don’t have that, it forces you as a player to be more aware of your surroundings and to take note in your head of the landscape and the monuments and things like that. And only points of interest where you can know where you are from. Games like Dark Souls do that kind of thing, which is perhaps a bit trickier to do in our game due to the isometric type of camera angle. But I definitely prefer that kind of style.

And then with the map, the benefit is that players can find secrets very easily because they say, “Oh, I just need to go here and I have a new power,” or something like that, but then that kind of takes away from the exploration and the kind of discovery you get from finding those things organically as you play. And I think our game was good enough not to force you to have to backtrack to use those powers. All of that was optional. So you can go ahead and play the main game and not have to go back too far, except you get the new power and defeat the boss, then you have to go find the next one. But all that happens through the central axis. So the things you can go and discover if you go back to an old area, you find them organically if you replay in the same sections. For me, that’s more interesting than just looking at a map and just checking the boxes. You know, just saying, “Okay, I could go here and see this flashlight that couldn’t be opened before” and things like that. So that’s the way I think David and I probably prefer. Games flow more organically.

DF: I like to think that the game is pretty guided from the beginning. And then just through the general way the levels work, you unlock various shortcuts in some way, which will help you master those areas. And then all the really deep exploration comes much later, when, on the one hand, it’s optional, but also, it’s like you’re already involved in that story and you’re already getting to know the world. So that’s a really nice time to be, like deep exploration and allowing yourself to explore everywhere, just from your own memory.

How did the post-game content come about? Were you worried that most people wouldn’t commit to him after completing the game?
DF: I think post-game stuff, and secrets in general, has always been the part of game-making that we’re most excited about. They are the parts that we put into the game just for our own enjoyment. In every game we’ve made, we’ve made these kinds of post-game items. The one in Death’s Door is quite inspired by a flash game. Pretty much the first game Mark and I worked on together, half the game was after the credits, and it was this big scavenger hunt where the world changed overnight and everything was mysterious, and we really enjoyed making that part of That. play. And I think part of the joy of that is the feeling that if only 5 percent of your players, like your biggest fans, are the only people who experienced that, then that will only make it feel even more special to them. .

Although I think with Death’s Door, we walk you through a bit more than we’ve done in the past because we show a little cutscene showing you the key on the floor and the Hall of Doors after the credits. So that’s just a little indication to tell you, “Hey, there’s something else in this world.” And then also the fact that after the credits, he reappears in the raven camp, so you can see that he’s not just saving him again before the final boss. Actually the whole world is in a post-completion state from then on, which is something I really like as well. That always makes the postgame more exciting for me when it’s appropriate to the lore.

MF: Another thing about it is that I think it’s okay that most people don’t see that content as well. We put in a lot of those fun things that we enjoy doing, like David said, but I think it’s okay to have it for people to play the main game, and if they enjoy it, then that’s okay. And then if they want to get into additional stuff, then they have that option. Even if they don’t, which makes the world feel so much deeper and bigger, as if there are always things to discover and more to do inside of it.

DF: Yes, it is nice when you finish the game and have decided to go ahead a bit. it’s good to have that feeling that there is more you could do in that world if you ever decided to return to it.

What was the most important lesson or lesson that you will apply to the next project?
MF: Now that everything is done, just think about what we want to do next and try and like it, I think maybe I’ll do some kind of post-mortem thing in the actual game and try to collect all my thoughts correctly. . Because I’m not really sure what to take off completely. It has been a really good and overwhelmingly positive experience for us. It was that weird thing of working on something that nobody knows about for three or four years, and then suddenly boom, it’s out there, and people can play and people enjoy it after that it’s super rewarding for us. When the reviews all came out at the same time, the game was coming out. In fact, Marcus, your review was the first one I read because it just came up, so I said, “Oh thank goodness, 9 out of 10.” [laughs].

DF: Yes, it was a very tense moment. I’m sure there are a lot of things that we have learned from development that we will channel into future projects in terms of things we want to improve and things like that. But in terms of our journey as a company, it has been a huge and overwhelmingly positive success. It is definitely the most successful game we have ever created. So I think at this point, we are exhausted from all the launch and all the post launch support and things like that. But I think my state of mind is that we can definitely be proud to have created a game that a lot of people like, so [I’ll] I’ll probably only be happy with that feeling for a while.

MF: Yes, and I definitely learned a lot along the way too. I think we will be better prepared for whatever we do in the future.

---

Death’s Door is available now on Xbox Series X / S, Xbox One, and PC.