Death’s Door
Acid Nerve // Revolver Digital
PC, Switch, Xbox, PlayStation
Last July, an independent game came out of early July managed to capture the attention of users and criticism, and has even managed to sneak among the best Indies of this 2021 in the prestigious. The Game Awards. It is Death’s Door, the latest development of Acid Nerve, a title that drinks from your predecessor Titan Souls to polish, improve and perfect your best facets. Although Titan Souls worked as a Boss Rush in its structure, with Death’s Door we have been able to see how the study has taken a step forward in order to extrapolate its puzzles, combat and movement (and even some enemy) to Some environments where crossings between bosses charge greater importance.
We put ourselves in the meats of a crow-shaped mushroom that has the task of collecting souls for the headquarters of the mowing commission. Although in principle our only work consists of recovering the soul of a monster that does not want to leave life voluntarily, it soon becomes the need to collect the three giant souls necessary to open the Death’s Door that gives name to the title. From the same arrival at the headquarters we can begin to see one of the aspects that have captivated those who have tried it, and it is an excellent visual section with a colorful drawn style (except on the barracks itself, where we see everything in Black and white) and chili, which stands out both through its scenarios and in the characters, something that looks especially at the bosses. The way to relate to the world of Death’s Door focuses on a series of ingenious puzzles, either to advance or to achieve some extra object, which give identity to its own universe and can be solved by means of some systems with the That we can interact thanks to its magic and tools. As for the fighting themselves, it has some particularities that bring you close to soulslike, although its control scheme is only halfway (curiously, the light attack is on the square button or equip and strong attack in the right trigger) and without Penalty for loss of souls when dying, which in addition to having the same name will also serve to raise any of the four attributes of our character.
However, and even starting that there is a certain variety of weapons that provide different ways of playing, it may be missing more deeply at the time of facing this type of situations, since arriving at a certain point the fights end up Being something more repetitive and schematic of the account, which does not happen in the bright fights against the bosses. In any case, Death’s Door remains solid in most of its facets, and thanks to that it has been raised as one of the games, even above the independent, most important landscape of the year.
✍ Oscar Gómez
Cloud Gardens.
NIO
PC, Xbox.
Something has happened in the world, a terrible event that has made humanity disappears from the face of Earth. The time has come for nature to take its courses and that trees, flowers and vines claim for themselves the parking spaces of supermarkets, the signs of the highways and the walls of our homes. Cloud Gardens brings us to different liminal spaces in which the footprint of the human being is only present because we have not yet managed to erase it at all and invites us to fill in beauty through flowers and moss, ivy and garlands, who grow magically with the blow of our mouse.
It is a relaxing game. A degree in which we can dedicate to each space both or as little as we wish and in which our only objective is to achieve aesthetic satisfaction through the creation of postcards since the end of the world. It has something poetic, and some perverse too, use the technology to imagine a land that is much more beautiful just because we have abandoned it. It has something of ironic combat anxiety through the experimentation of a pleasant apocalypse. But Cloud Gardens does not reflect those contradictions. The game is based on stillness. In immobilize that can only be achieved when nothing remains to be observed.
✍ Marta trivia
Inner Tao.
Lucas Les lo, Sergi Skater
PC.
There is a stream, the think puzzle Games, which in recent years has not stopped giving us good reasons to have an eye on it. It is a sufficiently underground term to look for the origins of the denomination to be too large to this small text; It is enough to point to the Increase Influence (Stephen’s Sausage Roll, English Country Tune) and its puzzle script, to the Discord server in which, since mid-2018, the community of the think Puzzle Games is gathered and one of the first references to That denomination that I have found in a site MAINSTREAM : that of Corey Martin, creator of the recent Bonfire Peaks, on the Xbox blog, following the launch of Pipe Push Paradise. Sonoran and his derivatives have been there all his life, as he will know anyone who has ever had a cartridge of 32 in 1 for Game Boy, but something has crystallized around this new label, under which you can find titles so recommendable as A Monster’s Expedition, Baba is You or this Inner Tao.
Inner Tao is a meditative puzzle play, it is read in Steam, in which the goal is to place moving parts in a series of points arranged on the grid. To push them, they have some like two Tacitus, one white and another black, among which alternate with a button press; White can only be moved by the black areas of each level, and vice versa, or on the pieces of the contrary color when they can not be pushed.
Of these basic rules come the thirty-peak levels that make up inner Tao, tiny and humble but in return it does not make you lose a second: beyond the first level, which serves to understand by practicing the goal of the game, every puzzle It is an intelligent and interesting design exercise, delicate and discreet as the Sound band of Sergi Skater, a ambient as a sober as the puzzles themselves, who barely need three colors to say much without speaking more than the strictly necessary.
✍ Víctor Martínez
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