There aren’t enough superlatives to use with this Doors of Insanity Early Access review – I’m borderline obsessed with this game from OneShark and Another Indie, and find myself returning to a ‘quick run’ at every opportunity.
A deck-building dungeon crawler with rogue-like properties, this is insanely addictive, featuring intuitive gameplay, wicked character designs and a diverse selection of cards to play with.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as you’ll kit your adventurer out with apparel, equipment and artefacts to take your progress one step further than the last adventure. Is Doors of Insanity any good, though? Really? I thought I made it clear from the opener.
Doors of Insanity Early Access Preview
Your path to insanity begins with creating an avatar. Compared to the characters you go up against, the initial selection was unremarkable, but as you progress through the game, you unlock loads more faces that you can’t help but experiment with for each run.
When you’re ready, you select a room to enter. These range from a standard battle, an Elite enemy to tackle, a well to replenish health, a merchant for, well, ‘stuff’, a witch to sacrifice a card to and receive a random one in return, then a multitude of random doors that could take you anywhere.
The motivation in Doors of Insanity is being so many doors away from the boss. Once you beat the first one, the distance to the subsequent increases and so on. Standard battles are straightforward enough, but the random ones can bypass a fight if low on health. Then again, you may end up losing health that way, too.
Let The Battles Commence
The core Doors of Insanity gameplay is about the battles leading up to the boss. Health is scarce, so you’ll need to equip artefacts or cards to replenish it, but these are random too, unless you find a well, or locate or purchase health cards.
Each character has a base attack and defence stats and critical attacks that can double the damage you do – all improved by the gear you equip. While they don’t function as health, you also receive die that you can play as a defensive technique or an attack on the enemy, albeit a small one.
But the magic comes from your deck. You have a mana pool of six, and each card shows the cost in the top right. Once the mana is up, you end your turn. Cards in Doors of Insanity are won after battles, through random encounters, and purchased from the merchant.
Scavenging Artefacts
As you’d expect, there are buffs and debuffs that apply to both you and the enemy, and you can have passive ones too. In this case, it’s the artefacts that you carry into battle. Perhaps you’ll start each match with 20 absorb or heal 5HP at the end of every fight.
The Doors of Insanity’s art style has a 1930s-ish aesthetic like the old Disney films, mixed in with what Cuphead was able to achieve. Without a doubt, these enemy characters are superb, and depending on your loadout, your character looks like the mutt’s nuts.
With the incremental progression, each time and the sheer randomness of it all, Doors of Insanity Early Access never feels unfair when you die. With the permanent stat increases, you’ll note the difference in early levels, wiping out many of the baddies with a few hits.
Doors Of Insanity Early Access Summary
But if it gets too easy, and that’s not going to happen any time soon, you can increase the difficulty and recruit alternative bosses to continually make it a challenge. There’s also PvP, but I haven’t dabbled in that. Even though this is Early Access, I anticipate playing this for a long time.
