Door is a game by svgames, with a demo up on itch.io and a full version of the game available on Steam for $6.99. This article is based off my impressions from the demo.

You start out surrounded by four doors, though you can only go through two of them for the demo. Each door leads to a set of doors with a basic puzzle to figure out which one to go through, and that one leads to another set of doors and so on and so forth. This is wrapped up in a colorful, simple environment with atmospheric music.

Puzzles start out simple, with panels saying stuff like “go through X door” and the doors will have placards. It’s initially straightforward stuff like simply going through the door with 1 on it when told, then going through a door with a circle on it if given the same hint for a set of doors with shapes on them. Later puzzles are more complicated, requiring you to pay more attention to the environment.

Going into this game, you may expect that it’s one of those puzzle games where you build up knowledge from previous puzzles to solve later ones. However, the puzzles in Door are largely self-contained or feel like puzzles that can stand on their own without the others. For example, there’s one puzzle with multiple signs, with the first saying that some signs lie. This sets up the expectation that you may have to figure out which signs tell the truth in the future. Turned out though, this rule only ever applied to this puzzle and all the others ones are legitimate.

The problem of puzzles being self-contained is that it leads to some puzzles with solutions that seem to come out of left field. A notable one is the puzzle whose hint is “door number ERROR,” whose answer is to always go through the fourth door, which seems like a nonsensical progression from the previous doors and in fact seems nonsensical in general, because there isn’t much in the room that hints at the answer being the fourth door. There were some puzzles that I thought were nice, but they get mixed in with some annoying puzzles, some of them giving little to go off of.

Part of my annoyance stemmed from the fact that picking the wrong door locks you off from moving forward or back, forcing you to reset at the beginning of the chain of puzzles. Locking the path ahead is something I get, but the game keeping you from going back is annoying because you can’t go back to re-examine your choice or surrounding environment to see why you got it wrong.

I actually did think about getting the full version of the game, though. I thought that maybe some of these issues were addressed in the full game and $6.99 felt like a fair price for a puzzle game and hey, I need to play more puzzle games. However:

I don’t know if it’s a false positive or not, but my computer is already crummy enough, so I’m not taking my chances.

From looking at Steam, the general consensus on Door is mixed, which is a consensus that I agree with. If you plan on picking up a puzzle game, I recommend checking out the demo to figure out if this is something you’d be down for.