by flotsam
Despite an interesting puzzle or
two , this is a rather short
and rather bland experience.
Welcome to Seven Doors. Behind this door, seven
challenges are waiting for you that we have prepared specifically to
test your skills. We're waiting for you behind the last door... If you
arrive... Now, if you are ready, you may begin... The Door Is Open. Good
Luck.
So starts the game, the door indeed opens, and you
enter the first room.
Each of the seven challenges is contained within a
different room, a short corridor joining one to the other. The objective
is simple; solve the challenge in the room, collect the “key” to the
exit, and move on.
The first challenge is surprisingly simplistic,
occurring in an empty library. The next six are varying degrees of
interesting and not very.
Three can kill you, one through a bunch of spinning,
chopping, stabbing, squashing bits and pieces that you have to dodge
through a combination of timing and careful running (plus a jump), the
other two through simply going the wrong way. You have to navigate the
room, and a wrong step will kill you. Trial and error is the stock in
trade, although there might perhaps have been some method in the chess
room. If there was it eluded me after several attempts, so trial and
error it was.
If you die, you start again at the entrance to the
room, except for the stabbing room, which has two parts and successfully
getting through the first will mean you don’t have to do that part
again. You can’t save at will, so I was pleased to see the autosave
after eventually getting through the first part.
The other three rooms are better, none of them hard
but far more puzzly. The Egyptian themed challenge is easily the pick,
and is rather good. The other two are variations on the same not too bad
riddle-solving theme, and both taking place in the most visually
interesting rooms.
Speaking of which, while the game doesn’t come
together to create any sort of atmosphere, I did like some of the
visuals, and the starkness of some contrasted well with the abundance in
others. The corridors were appropriately utilitarian, and the death room
suitably bloody.
Seven Doors uses the keyboard to move around and the
mouse to control the camera. You have freedom of movement, although the
confined rooms constrain your meanderings. There are one or two objects
to find apart from the keys, a few more to move around.
Sounds and a musical score, and a starting and
finishing voice-over round things out. The end is a bit cheesy, but
perhaps suitably punctuates a barely there “story”.
The Steam page says it provides between two and three
hours of gameplay, but even allowing for numerous deaths by misstep, you
may very well not get near two hours.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz
RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB
Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
December 2020
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