Death's Door and Tunic were in a bundle and that made me feel bad

09 Dec, 2024

It feels... unfair to play Death's Door after finishing Tunic up to the secret ending¹.

I'm gonna be critical of the crow's little adventure for a while, and I'm feeling bad about it — I decided to use it as inspiration for this blog's name as an apology of sort. It's a fantastic game, with better combat than Tunic, an inspired art style and fantastic character designs, much more interesting levels and a coherent set of tools that connect puzzles and combat seamlessly. The music's fantastic. On an individual level, each element feels superior to its Tunic equivalent. And yet it doesn't hold a candle to it.

It's not just a matter of "oh, Tunic is more dedicated to its secrets" or it having a different goal. I mean it is, there's clearly different goals at work here, but the fact they were sold to me in a bundle made it inevitable not to compare the two. Tunic comes across as by far the most coherent, a unity of design and intent that made it come across as a fantastic work of art — while Death's Door... I can't shake the feeling of going through the motions of a video game while playing it.

I'm not gonna post pictures from Tunic to try to keep spoilers to a minimum, so let me put it this way: Tunic constantly makes you think "... this was this thing's purpose the whole time!?" while Death's Door constantly makes you think "Oh, finally found the tool for that thing." Sometimes it's extremely blatant too — I wonder what the cracked glowing wall blocking this optional path is about – but I was able to understand every single one of them before even facing the second boss. At this point, all I have left is going through the motions of getting the related item.

There's a fantastic GDC talk by Tunic's main guy Andrew Shouldice that explains this way, way better than I could here (and with way more spoilers) so I'm not gonna regurgitate what his frankly incredible voice already spoke over there, but his main point is — Tunic was specifically designed to avoid that feeling of already noticing where the surprise's gonna come from, using several tricks to distract players from making that connection. I'd highly recommend getting Tunic (it's real cheap atm) just to be able to watch this talk unspoiled, a lot of it is utterly brilliant stuff.

Death's Door didn't do any of it, and the result is that I'm feeling like I'm just following a plotted path. The fact the game is extremely formulaic in its structure (overworld -> explore dungeon -> get dungeon item for traversal -> defeat boss -> use item in overworld to open new dungeon -> repeat) really doesn't help, and I feel awful about that. There's an immense level of artistry at play here², and all I can think about is how I already know everything that's going to happen until I've cleared all (already pointed out to me at the start) dungeon bosses.

Still, I'd say I'm halfway through the game so far – there's still a chance this is all accounted for and I'm about to eat crow (no pun intended) once the developers pull the rug from under me. I don't really feel it coming, though – but I'm more than happy to be proven wrong.

Mando out.