In today’s ID @ Xbox fiesta, you will probably have watched Death’s Door, a game in which a little crow with a sword plays a rocket-powered cathedral, among other things. This is the new game from Acid Nerve, the two-man studio behind the tense boss hunter Titan Souls. It is coming to Xbox and PC soon – “We are reaching the last stages now, just polishing and fixing bugs, so we hope it will be released this summer,” said designer David Fenn – and it looks extremely Good.
The premise – not that this kind of spicy action by the crow in the castle needs much beautification – is that the bird is a reaper, who has to go around collecting souls from people in a world where people and things no longer die naturally. You report to some tired bureaucrats, also crows, who need to continue doing this work of collecting souls in order to survive, but then one day one of their great souls is stolen, which is not good, and that’s it: laser cathedral. Chief frog. Waves of gelatinous bubbles and bubbling dangers in a world of strangely touchable Gothic plasticine.
Death’s Door – Reveal Trailer
His lineage of Titan Souls seems clear, obviously in those structured boss fights, big versus small, but also in the slightly sad tone between the action (I saw a slightly different stretch from the one above, with a little more combat – it looks very, very good ). And yet Death’s Door is quite different. “More or less the opposite”, in fact, as fellow designer Mark Foster says. Titan Souls was built around a unique and very specific idea: a “you only get one” game jam prompt that gave what Fenn called a kind of “indie elegance of textbook – where there are really no words, no user interface, everything is as efficient as possible. “
Death’s Door is “more or less the same philosophy”, says Foster, “but more: what could we do with a formula?” It’s really a Zelda game: health points, sword-based combat, those sticky superworlds and what appear to be dungeons, a real user interface. The point here was for Acid Nerve to see what they could do within the walls of the genre.
“It’s been really liberating,” says Foster, “because compared to Titan Souls especially, it was really stripped down, very specific – there’s no room to ‘move’ around there very much. We kind of explored everything we could with mechanics. Whereas, with that, you could take the Zelda formula and do a lot of different things with it: you could say that Dark Souls is derived from Zelda or that Hyper Light Drifter is. and we did what we thought would be cool with this formula here. “
Fenn loved it – “I really wanted it: Nah, let’s make an appropriate game, let’s make an inventory, let’s take a story where there may be characters who speak! I wanted to do this this time.”
It also changed the team’s emphasis a little. “I think the core this time is not so much a mechanic, but the kind of ‘vibration’ of this world that we created,” adds Fenn. “We put a lot of work into the scene to make it unique and distinctive, and to have a very consistent vibe in which it is a good contrast between dark and sinister things, but also humor and cute and endearing characters – for me, I think it is at the heart of that we’re looking for right now, instead of a mechanical core. “
“There was definitely still a process to find out how our structure fit into that ‘Zelda foundation’,” he says. “So it’s not like: there are eight dungeons from which you need to get eight magical things to defeat a boss or something. We still think a lot about the way our game is structured and the way it mixes between self-directed exploration, but also, at key moments, he tells the story we want to tell. There is still an element of our own unique structure that we add to it. “
This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Enable cookies to view.
The team also expanded slightly from the development of Titan Souls, with a shift from 2D to 3D, the most obvious change. “With Titan Souls we had just one artist who designed all the pixel art, and the 3D aspects of that I modeled myself,” explains Foster. “But they were all kinds of ‘hacked’ things – considering what this process has been: we have a conceptual artist who draws a thing, and then we have a modeler to model it,” and so on. “It’s a more complex process, but a lot of fun, I think.”
They have been working on it since 2017, or so, thinking about how to travel through doors. “At some point, Mark sent me this prototype where it was like a raven wielding a sword, and we thought ‘yes, this is it, we have it now,” Fenn laughs. “We just wanted to do things that were always a little surreal,” he says. “The other artist we brought in just sent us a bunch of sketches, and one of them was this walking cathedral, and we thought, Yes, this is going to come in.”
The fun shows, in other words. It is surreal to see a bird hitting a house, but it is also very exciting. Acid Nerve is extremely good at that sort of thing – we know that from Titan Souls, but also from deliberation, the way Fenn and Foster talk about it. And now they’ve expanded, turned upside down, built this extremely tactile, tactile looking worldsounding character, and I would really like to play it.