Door of Shadows

Door of Shadows is a fairly typical RPG with a largely anthropomorphic cast. It details the exploits of an adolescent fox named Theo who joins a guild to follow in his missing father’s footsteps. He makes new friends through the guild, and along the way, uncovers a sinister plot involving hairless creatures from another dimension…humans.

Let’s Talk About Graphics!

For the most part these seem to be custom-made for this game. The most notable exception are the enemy sprites, which are a drastically different art style than the hero battlers or their surroundings. The art style is simplistic to the point of feeling crude. It’s not as though you can’t tell what you’re looking at, but the visuals are somewhat uninspiring. Most environments consist of flat-colored objects and surfaces. Character sprites are a little more detailed, but look stiff and blocky. This all contrasts with the monsters in battle, who look much sharper and more stylish. However, I wouldn’t say it hurts the game too much. It’s still playable and the artwork it isn’t hard on the eyes, so it’s easy enough to forgive.

Let’s Talk About Audio!

I’m unfamiliar with the source of this game’s music, but the sound effects seem to come from the RTP. The music chosen works for the environments and is consistent in style, so I had no problem with anything I was hearing. I wasn’t particularly impressed by any of it, but the audio is serviceable and doesn’t feel out of place.

Let’s Talk About Story!

As this is only a demo, I can’t comment on the story as a whole. So far, it isn’t too complicated. We begin on Theo’s first day joining his local guild, where he and his tiger friend Maxxe are given a task to prove themselves. The game has a mission-based format where the plot unfolds from quest to quest. Generally, the missions develop the characters through party interactions and backstory while advancing the tale.

Theo is your average young upstart who wants to prove himself and live up to his father’s legacy. Maxxe is a reliable friend, but cagey about his past and motivations. They’re joined by a flirtatious female wolf named Robin and an adolescent hare named Oxford who is the son of a revered scientist. They comprise the group for most of the demo, so they get the most characterization, though there are side characters who receive some development too.

Dialogue is handled well enough. There are occasional typos, but it’s not a constant issue. Some of the group’s behavior is a bit repetitive, such as how often Robin teases Maxxe (though it ties into something later). While I don’t have too many concerns about the text itself, I find it’s let down by the lack of character artwork. There are no sprites or face graphics to show us what the characters look like or how they feel. We only have their tiny overworld sprites to go off of. This makes it hard to connect with them and leaves a lot to the imagination. This kind of thing can be compensated for through the writing, but I don’t know if it’s strong enough in this case.

Anyway, as mentioned earlier, the group of anthros find themselves swept up in a scheme where evil humans are stealing powerful resources from their world, and the demo concludes near the point where stopping these interlopers becomes the goal. It’s a lot of content for what feels like an introduction, but it works as a premise for the RPG.

Let’s Talk About Gameplay!

I may not have had much praise for the other components of this game, but the gameplay is where it truly shines. Battle is the real highlight here, but there are some nice aspects of exploration as well. All areas are to scale, so there’s no overworld to speak of, and it has the usual mechanics of movement and treasure hunting.

That’s expected of RPG Maker, so here’s what sets it apart. For one, the game is fully compatible with the mouse as a means of control. You can use it to navigate the menu, which offers several customization options that can alter the in-game HUD for both exploration and combat. The game uses touch encounters that can chase you with competent AI that can find a path to you if one is on-screen. These are represented by colored spheres whose color indicates their nature. Red spheres will chase you when in proximity, but they turn blue and cease if you outclass the local enemies. Gold spheres are rare encounters with only a chance of spawning, but these won’t give chase either. You can also find chests that start fights for their contents, but this should only surprise you once, as those chests are always colored purple (as opposed to the usual red). Encounters stay defeated until you use a heal crystal that makes them respawn, but also serves as a waypoint. Your first quest reward gives you the ability to warp between crystals, so you can be free of past encounters so long as you don’t need to backtrack.

In combat, there’s an interesting flow to battle. You have a turn tracker that shows when the monsters and actors will get to move, so you can plan your actions and decide what enemies to focus on. This lets you minimize the damage you would take by finishing off foes before they get to act. However, it’s not a perfect forecast of every battle, as certain actions can adjust the turn order, causing battlers to move sooner or later than scheduled. It updates turn by turn, so you always have some idea of who will be acting soon.

In terms of skills, every character has a list of unique actions they can take, plus a wide range of magic abilities they can be tutored in. More skills are learned as each character levels up, and they are all diversified with unique effects. Very few skills are power-oriented and most of them have reliable secondary effects, so there are many useful options available if you have enough TP, which you gain from attacking and being attacked. That said, a lot of the extra effects are damage-over-time statuses, which are stackable for some harsh additional damage, but a bit repetitive due to their frequency.

MP spells draw from their own static meter and are learnable by any character with only two restrictions: you need a gem containing the spell and enough SP to spend on it. SP is gained from doing quests, so there’s a finite amount of it, but every character gets their own SP pool and they don’t miss out on SP even if they aren’t in the party when you do the quest. This means you can teach all your characters the same spells, which is really convenient for things like healing, but it may be a double-edged sword from a game design standpoint.

You see, since any character can learn any spell, it makes it such that the game must be balanced around anyone having access to specific abilities. For example, there are several de/buff spells that affect either the whole party or all enemies. If all your heroes know these spells, you can guarantee you’re able to cast them no matter who’s first in the turn order. That’s very handy, but for the enemies to remain threatening under such conditions, they need to have high stats so the de/buffs aren’t too potent, meaning it’s difficult to do without them. It also makes the characters less unique when they’re all capable of the same things, and the only spells not worth putting on everyone are those that do damage since most heroes are not proficient in non-physical moves.

To balance this out, I would suggest making gems single-use. It’s currently impossible to find more than one of each type, as the game will award money anytime a duplicate would enter your inventory, but if the gem was consumed upon use, it would make the choice of who to give it to more meaningful. Gem shops would also become more valuable, though I’d recommend nerfing the prices if that were the case. The economy in this game is already pretty real, and you can’t buy everything you want without some serious grinding. In this way, the availability of powerful spells like those de/buffs could be controlled so enemies don’t need absurd power to compensate.

That’s the only real gripe I have, though. Between the diversity of move options, wide number of statuses, and the turn tracker, there’s plenty to make battle engaging and there’s no ATB to drag things down. Mashing attack isn’t very efficient, so you’re best off looking at your option each turn and making informed decisions. If you’re unsure about something, the Scan spell is a free action for 1 MP that tells you all about enemy stats, weaknesses, and resistances.

Let’s Wrap This Up…

Door of Shadows is a game that has it where it counts, but needs more polish to really shine. While I enjoyed the combat considerably, the artwork (and therefore story) left me wanting. I know it’s not easy to make graphics, which is why I can cut it some slack and appreciate the effort that has already been put in, but I think the minimalism hurts the presentation and there’s more it could do to stand out. This might be a secondary concern to the choice of using anthros, as there is some stigma for this kind of thing, but to its credit, the game does not fetishize furrydom (mostly…?). I actually like that it’s tied into the plot of the humans being these strange, wicked invaders; I’m only noting that it can be a turn off for those averse to it. While there are areas it could improve upon, it is succeeding in its most important aspect, so it has a solid foundation to build from. For that, I give this demo a…

3.5/5


Does the guild have an HR department?