Serves me right for buying a horror game before Christmas month.

[indigozeal]

I bought The Last Door from $5 on Steam hoping for an atmospheric Lovecraftian pixel-art adventure game. I got a game that forces you to make a character go through every painstaking motion of hanging himself (gathering the rope, climbing a chair, hanging the rope over a rafter, tying a noose, watching character clutch helplessly at his throat as he chokes to death) in its very first section, which blares LOOK AT ME LOOK AT HOW FUCKING EDGY I'M BEING with all the subtlety of an elephant. It also has a protagonist who has to be laboriously yet ever-so-gently prodded to take usable items (absolutely refusing to do so on the first click) and who moves at a speed that recalls that Evil Tim Castlevania 64 LP line about being so slow you're mocked by layers of sedimentary rock. Then there's the puzzle where you pick up a dying, bloody, nearly-pecked-to-death crow, its anguished cries echoing throughout the soundtrack all the time your crazy fucking protagonist has it in his inventory, and "end its suffering" by putting it in a cat food bowl and letting it be further mauled and ripped apart by the household feline.

Then I hit the Options out of extraordinarily ill-advised curiosity and discovered four short playable side-stories. I chose "Wanderer in the Fog," which lets you play as a Dr. Kaufmann interviewing a patient who dreamed of being "trapped in the fog" in a "land that loves silence," and who proves her story's veracity by producing a tarot card, WHICH WAS THE SAME CARD FROM HER DREAM, and on the card is FUCKING PYRAMID HEAD.

So it's back to Soul Blazer! It's the game that keeps on giving!




That's not the protagonist speaking.
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