Death's Door: Umbrella Undertaking

Today I've finished my second run through Death's Door, a game that I can't praise enough, so let's go for an extra round here. After my review this will be a little bit more about my personal experience with the game.

During my first playthrough I failed quite a bit, especially early on, because I was too spoiled by Zelda games, where you often can just mash at enemies. Another problem was using the Rogue Daggers, which can perform up to six hits in a row. So, my mindset often was that of going in for a series of hits, but this usually gets punished quickly by enemies like the Brutes, those hammer-wielding armored knights. I was simply too greedy during fights and this caused quite some frustrations on my end.

I became much better at the game once I've started using the Thunder Hammer weapon, where your focus is really about landing one or two hits, before you retreat. The combat in Death's Door really is about timing and playing smartly. Let the enemies take out each other for example. Use enemy fire against them. If you play it smart, then you will survive. And this can make the game quite addicting, where you want to prove yourself again and again.

But what's left after fully beating the game are all the Steam achievements (or PSN trophies and so on), where most of them come with 100% completion anyway. But there is the "Academy of Umbrellas" achievement (probably a reference to Umbrella Academy), where you're supposed to beat the game with only ever using the Discarded Umbrella weapon. It has the same stats as the Reaper's Sword, but only does half as much damage, so this is a self-imposed challenge, where I've never really done anything like that in Zelda games. I've never used the Cursed Ring in the Oracle games for example. But since the combat in Death's Door was so much fun in the end, I was up for the challenge.

The way it works is that you won't be eligible to get this achievement if you ever swing any other weapon. Even just pressing the attack button once right at the beginning will make it go away. There is an indicator in the weapons menu, where the Discarded Umbrella will have a glowing red background as long as you've only ever used this weapon:

This even works on the Nintendo Switch despite the fact that there aren't any achievements available on the system. But you can still do this for the bragging rights, I guess.

Anyway, after beating the game once this felt like just the right difficulty to do it all over again with an increased challenge. There is a good learning curve in Death's Door and once you've mastered its combat the game can be a little bit too easy at times, even with battles that felt really hard at first. Actually, I rarely ever died when compared to my first playthrough, where I had seen the "DEATH" screen quite a lot, but using the umbrella still kept me on the edge and also forced me to truly master the later bosses.

With spending souls at the Soul Vault my priority was the Strength skill to boost the umbrella some more, where at maximum strength it can finally take out the weakest foes in a single hit. I suppose with maximum strength the attack power is double at the end, where the umbrella will do as much damage as the sword at the beginning of the game. Anyway, the little spider enemies will take two hits and that's comfortable enough to grind more souls in the mini-dungeon beneath the Lost Cemetery:

This place filled with enemy cocoons is perfect for grinding, where you can get over 100 souls without much effort in a short time. There is a door back to the Hall of Doors near the entry and exit, so you can quickly reset everything and start over. But going through this mini-dungeon with the umbrella can be quite annoying when those critters still tank too much, so you really want the strength stat maxed out first for this.

As mentioned in the review, it's one of my biggest gripes with the game that you can't max out all stats simply by completing the game, fighting all enemies you find, and collecting all soul masses. And it's not even close, where you will have to grind thousands of souls at the end to truly max out everything. Or you simply don't care, where I also didn't bother during my second playthrough. But going through the mini-dungeon a couple of times was still helpful with upgrading some of the attributes here and there to gain a small advantage.

In any case, I wouldn't advise going for this achievement on your first run, because it's a lot more fun to experiment with the different weapons. I was also really missing their flashy weapon effects, both with visuals and sounds. Of course an umbrella is supposed to be weak, so it makes sense that it looks and sounds weak, but it's just not the same without the more powerful punch that you normally have. So, I probably wouldn't do this again the next time when I play the game, probably on the Nintendo Switch then, where I've pre-ordered a physical edition release for my collection.

As for the Steam version I was already playing with the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, which worked fine and was really comfortable. It will suck that I have to change the controls on the Switch via the system settings, because I had changed the button layout on the PC somewhat.