Have you ever wondered what happens when we die? Where do we go? What does it look like? Are we there alone? Well, wonder no longer because I just got back from a visit to Purgatory in 8Doors: Arum’s Afterlife Adventure, where I learned that the afterlife is a lot like regular life – Businesses are understaffed. Prices are rising. Infrastructure is crumbling and government officials are corrupt. The sewer system is poorly planned. Construction projects are large-scale and never-ending. Working conditions are perilous at best and the library is so underfunded, it can’t keep the lights on… 

8Doors: Arum’s Afterlife Adventure is a linear Metroidvania set in a mysterious, macabre world featuring death, disease, and a cute lil’ frog that sits on your head! (Sometimes, you sit on his head too.) You play as Arum, a young girl who’s the lone survivor of a mass-casualty event that killed everyone in her town, including her dad. She travels–er, sinks slowly underwater into Purgatory in search of her father’s soul. There, she explores eight interconnected areas, battles over a dozen bosses, and uncovers a deadly plot poised to devastate the worlds of both the living & the dead – a plot that, as the protagonist, it’s Arum’s destiny to upend. 

It’s fitting that 8Doors is set in the afterlife because prior to its initial release, efforts to crowdfund the game died several times. After getting the Steam Greenlight back in 2016 as a narrative adventure game made in RPG Maker featuring a potato-chip-eating pigeon, a giant fly in a diaper, and a character named “Swag,” 8Doors moved to Unity, then Kickstarter in 2017. Three failed campaigns later, it was September 2020. It would take another year and a half for Rootless Studio, the small indie team that developed the game, to finally debut 8Doors on PC in April 2021. Releases for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStations 4 & 5 followed in April 2022, then 2023. The developer’s indie status is part of what sent 8Doors into my Steam cart. Another part is the game’s inspirations. Rootless Studio is based in Seoul, South Korea, and as such, 8Doors’ foundation is rooted in Korean folklore. 

The game is most influenced by the myth of Princess Bari. According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Literature (pages 24-26), her story is “a vivid expression of the desire to overcome male-centered worldviews & human mortality, and the limitations of this desire.” To clarify, none of those themes are actively present in 8Doors unless you count playing as a female protagonist as “overcoming male-centered worldviews.” Arum and Bari’s adventures are very different, but the game’s cultural influence can still be felt. It’s best seen in the visuals (no pun intended). The graphics are hand-drawn and adhere to a strict set of parameters. All of 8Doors’ assets were created using only three colors: black, white, and red. I’m not sure why the developers decided to make their graphics on Nightmare Mode, but the restricted palette elicits careful, purposeful use of each color to striking results. 

Red is often reserved for the damage-inducing: Arum’s weapons, enemy attacks, burbling poison water, plants that want to eat you, and Jungho the map salesman’s backpack. (He won’t hurt Arum’s health, but he will hurt her wallet.) Shades of black & white work together to create detailed landscapes and beautiful scrolling backgrounds, like the gray-green overgrowth of Misty Forest, one of my favorite places in Purgatory. My other favorite places are anywhere that doesn’t trigger the game’s terrible screen tear. It’s the stuff of a slasher movie villain: unpredictable, unkillable, and inescapable. There’re no Vsync options!

There’s also the smaller issues of usable platforms sometimes blending into the background art, and that about half of Purgatory’s eight zones look very similar. But if you’re drawn to the art style (a little pun intended) and can tolerate a kind-of-clunky 2D platformer, then I’d recommend 8Doors. Many screenshots I took while playing made it into my slideshow of video-game-themed desktop backgrounds. (That may not seem like a big deal, but it is.)

The soundtrack isn’t as memorable as the graphics, but it’s a pleasant, complimentary companion to them and takes inspiration from the same cultural influences. Throughout the game, you’ll hear about 30 different songs. Among them are mysterious & percussive exploration tracks, tense & urgent boss battle themes, and the grand, regal melodies that play in Purgatory’s most important places. The DLC soundtrack also features a few upbeat bonus tunes that only appear in one of 8Doors’ three endings or not at all. They’re significant tonal departures from the rest of the songs, but they’re also my favorites. The title track, which plays over the end credits (AND IN THE OPENING OF THIS VIDEO) is another highlight, as is the main menu music, but it’s missing from the DLC.

After a while though, the soundtrack starts to blend together like the graphics. I enjoy each individual song, but some are almost interchangeable by the end of a long play session. Still, there’s plenty to praise about the music’s ability to establish moods and themes. That’s especially important because other elements that should do those things, like storytelling and writing, are 8Doors’ downfall.

I’ve played the game enough times to see all three endings, earn all 44 achievements, and capture all the footage I wanted for THIS VIDEO/THE YOUTUBE VERSION OF THIS REVIEW. I’m still struggling to articulate 8Doors’ main themes, other than a run-of-the-mill message about courage, love, and teamwork overpowering evil. Also, fire safety – Purgatory has more extinguishers than dead people. (And yet, no one could prevent a massive fire that occurs early in the game…) Your goals are clear: find Arum’s father and figure out what’s amiss in the afterlife. The ideas presented along the way are more aimless. In part, the confusion is the fault of a poor English translation. It doesn’t render 8Doors unplayable, but it’s stilted and overwritten. It also misgenders characters during key cutscenes, misuses pronouns in ways that change sentences’ intentions, and spells some names two or three different ways.

Translating is painstaking and pricey so I don’t want to nitpick, but the writing is borderline bad. It’s repetitive and bloated, two things that could be annoying individually but are absolutely maddening when in combination. NPC dialogue updates often throughout the game. Problem is, everyone’s dialogue updates at the same time and for the most part, everyone hangs out at the same place – So if you want to get the full story, you’ll need to make several trips to a ghost hotel where characters social distance while waiting to collectively unload 15-20 minutes of monotonous dialogue. An overabundance of half-coherent afterlife lore is introduced in these conversations, but a lot of details are just partially explained (at best) and/or only mentioned once. As a result, their sole impact is clogging up the script. Meanwhile, more basic (less interesting) information, like how unusual it is for a living person to be in Purgatory or how difficult it will be for Arum to find her father’s soul, is relentlessly repeated.

An upside to the overwhelming amount of dialogue is that it leaves plenty of time to take in the character designs, one of 8Doors’ best features. Among others, there’s the gamer Klap, the stylish squid-woman Okee Sae, shy, skittish Chorom hiding behind her bangs, and an alligator you know is a security guard because his name is “Guard” & he’s wearing a security uniform. Even minor characters you may only interact with once are memorable. They make sense. A mole controls an underground mine; a fish protects Purgatory’s prophetic lake (and fishes in it to see the future). A giant talking circle works the front desk at the ghost hotel–wait… There’s a lot to love about the way these characters look. Peoples’ (or circles’) personalities are instantly conveyed via clothing and facial expressions.

The only exception is Arum herself. She’s stoic and silent, less of a complete character, more of a vessel through which 8Doors is played. Some of my favorite games from the past decade feature emotion-deficient protagonists, like Hollow Knight and Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but in 8Doors, there’s an unbridgeable gap between NPCs’ cartoony reactions and Arum’s staticness. She’s almost lifeless in comparison. (Ironic considering she’s the only character in the game who’s actually alive.) Throughout her entire adventure, Arum experiences one emotional shift. Right after the opening cutscene, she changes into an outfit that gives her more confidence and her expression goes from defeated to determined… But in her dead-eyed defense, Arum is the only character who doesn’t have dialogue, which is when everyone else cycles through their most expressive animations.

Or maybe Arum is aloof because she knows that the story she exists within is predictable and poorly paced. Throughout most of her adventure, Arum’s antagonist is a bureaucrat named Oxy. That may seem like a spoiler (and it should be), but it’s not because Oxy is obviously evil just by the way he stands! After Arum meets him, about 15 minutes into the game, an omniscient cutscene plays that confirms his evilness, as does another a short while later, and a third after that. The omniscient perspective guarantees that the player learns things before Arum does, so while she and the rest of the cast are still questioning whether or not Oxy is a villain until near the end of the game, you’ve known what he’s up to almost the entire time. The cutscenes are also all basically identical with no buildup between the three. Oxy wants total control of Purgatory. Whenever someone calls him out for being OBVIOUSLY EVIL in his pursuit of that, he gets mad and lies a lot. That may be how real-life villains retain power, but in 8Doors, it makes for a predictable plot through 99% of the game.   

As for that 100th percent, at the very end of Arum’s adventure, literally during the final boss fight, it’s revealed that Oxy was never the biggest baddie in Purgatory. That dishonor belongs to a different character, one Arum thought was her friend! Though the reveal itself isn’t all that rewarding and doesn’t affect the story much, it does add an unexpected layer of replayability. I didn’t notice during my first trip through Purgatory, but there’re several hints about the twist ending. It was satisfying to replay 8Doors and realize that clues to its biggest reveal were carefully baked into the script. That these hints are so well-hidden almost makes a case for all the excess dialogue, because everyone has to offer as much rambling, unhelpful advice as the big bad does or else their behavior would be highly suspicious. Still, how well-constructed can a twist really be if it has no impact on the game besides adding three phases to the final boss fight?

Yeah, the final fight is four phases long, with no options to save your progress or restock your healing supplies in between. In a sprawling JRPG or a FromSoftware title, a four-phase final boss might feel earned, but in a game that can be completed in a few hours (if you don’t mind seeing the worst of the three possible endings), it feels like a prank. And given 8Doors’ shallow combat system, not the fun kind of prank either… Throughout her adventure, Arum accumulates seven different weapons. Each comes equipped with a basic attack and a special, more powerful move that automatically triggers after you press the basic attack button enough times in a row. Arum can dodge too, but that’s about as involved as the combat gets. 

So little variety means that switching between weapons doesn’t change Arum’s fighting style. As a result, most players will probably end up (voluntarily) using less than half of the seven weapons. The rest are so slow to swing, it’s like attacking at a snail’s pace to a snail. Enemy attack patterns aren’t any more varied. Each mob has one or two moves to spam. Most foes are instantly stun-locked when Arum strikes them and almost every enemy can be beaten via the same technique (if you can call it that): Attack from one side, then dodge to the other and keep attacking. Repeat. There are additional skills you can unlock, like the ability to attack faster or dodge without a cooldown, but nothing actively changes or adds to the combat system.

Lots of mobs that respawn as soon as Arum leaves a room + battle mechanics with little depth = repetitive combat. Taking on endgame enemies is no different from fighting early ones. It just takes longer. To feign difficulty, mobs are sometimes placed at the entrance to secret areas or at the bottom of long drops so they can steal a surprise attack before ever appearing on-screen. Of course, boss battles are meant to up the difficulty too. On Steam, 8Doors promises 21 bosses, but it’s closer to 15 once you subtract a handful of minibosses and a foe you’re forced to fight twice. Visually, the bosses are awesome, but the combat remains repetitive. You’ll notice multiple bosses use the same attacks. You’ll realize that almost every battle is two phases with little to no change in moveset between them, but those that deviate (chase sequences and the awful four-phase final fight) are somehow less fun. I did get that heart-racing rush whenever I beat a boss, but were the battles exciting or was I just excited to be done with them? (Maybe a bit of both…) 

A third of the boss fights are optional, but if you skip them, then you’ll stick Arum with her worst possible ending. Still, it’s undeniable that removing seven bosses helps better balance the game, partly because combat becomes less repetitive and partly because Purgatory gets smaller. Most of the afterlife’s eight zones are massive, much bigger than the exploration experience they offer. 8Doors is advertised as a Metroidvania, but the game is missing one of the genre’s most critical components: motivation for players to explore. 

There aren’t enough collectibles to find, puzzles to solve, or secrets to uncover to justify the giant map, and there isn’t enough explorative freedom. 8Doors is a linear Metroidvania. (I tried to sequence break, but was thwarted every time.) Plot developments are tied to specific areas and characters within Purgatory, so Arum has to visit them in a set order for the story to progress. Instead of organically discovering new information & places as she wanders the afterlife, Arum is told exactly where to go & when. The entire game follows the same structure: Someone suggests that Arum search for her father’s soul in a certain spot. When she arrives, her dad isn’t there. Someone else names another place he could be and teaches Arum or her frog familiar Ducroak a new ability they’ll need to get there. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Ribbit. 

But I still enjoyed roaming Purgatory simply for the opportunity to exist in the serene landscapes (and because I’m susceptible to collectibles, even so-so ones like in 8Doors). Other times, I had fun traveling not as Arum, but as Ducroak, who can turn big like he ate Super Mario Mushrooms, perform all the same moves as Arum (plus a few more), and fight with the game’s secret eighth weapon, his frog tongue. But the more thoroughly you explore, the emptier the world becomes. If it were half as big, it’d feel fuller. As is, Purgatory is enormous for enormity’s sake without the content to fill it out. When I play a Metroidvania, I want to feel like I’m choosing where to explore (even if I’m not), and in doing that, like I could find anything at any time. 8Doors tries to evoke that feeling by supersizing each area, but too many rooms have nothing in them except more-of-the-same platforming sections, mobs, and spikes reskinned to fit the theme of whatever area you’re in.

Exploring Purgatory’s enormity would also instantly be more fun if the map were more inviting. Instead, it’s unintuitive. Players can’t drop their own pins – The only map markers available are pre-placed and mostly track collectibles. If you want to remember where a certain character hangs out or the location of that ledge you couldn’t reach, you’ll need to remember. The provided markers are small pictures of whatever collectible they represent, but nothing’s labeled. Until almost halfway through the game,  I thought one icon represented a weapon upgrade like Pale Ore in Hollow Knight… It turned out to be something called a “Mirror Fragment…”

It doesn’t help that, bluntly, Purgatory is not a nicely laid out place. It’s geographically disorganized. Separate areas don’t collectively jigsaw together to create a compact, connected afterlife; they expand outward in several directions, instead. As a result, most areas are surrounded by swaths of nothingness and only attach to one or two other places in Purgatory – The map is interconnected, but barely. You can’t even zoom out far enough to see the whole thing at once! That’s mostly the fault of one area in particular, a mine that’s located (for a flimsy story reason) underneath the rest of Purgatory… alllll the way down here… The spread out layout makes for some weird world edges, too. A few times, I hit invisible walls where it seemed like there should be so much more beyond them (or at least something) to explore. 

Some areas are also designed to be purposefully confusing. A late-game sewer level is full of security cameras, but when Arum wants to use the footage to find a specific room, the crocoguyle who controls them tells her that the sewer is such a maze, it’s impossible to tell where they’re installed… So then what’s the point of having cameras? And why’s the afterlife need plumbing?? 

Individual rooms in other areas are similarly maze-y. Hidden shortcuts exist, but they’re more like collectibles than they are means of faster travel. Finding a shortcut adds to your completion percentage and sometimes, there are multiple that connect the same two rooms in slightly different spots. The only true fast travel option is the game’s eponymous eight doors, but there’s only one in each area. Basically, it takes a looong time to get anywhere in the afterlife and if you want to retrace your steps with new abilities (as is the Metroidvania way), prepare to spend more effort traipsing to wherever you actually want to start backtracking from than finding new content once you’re there.

But if you while away enough hours wandering Purgatory’s labyrinthine landscapes to remember their layouts, if you learn to dodge the onslaught of spammy mobs, if the terrible screen tear decides not to rear its poorly optimized head, and if the game doesn’t eat your wall jump input because it’s still full from last time, then for a moment, you might get to experience the full potential of Arum’s moveset. When everything goes right, she floats through each room with a satisfying flow. The sound effects of her dashes & double jumps combine with the background music and the audible swings of mobs missing their attacks. Together, they create a second landscape, an orchestral one. 

That synergy may happen too sparsely, but it’s proof of 8Doors’ concept when it does, and shows what Rootless Studio may be able to achieve in their next release. Still, it’s hard to heartily recommend this game to anyone who doesn’t love the graphics when it has so many problems, even if I enjoyed my playthroughs despite them. It’s doubly harder to recommend 8Doors at full price ($19.99 on Steam & GOG) when one of its most obvious influences, Hollow Knight, is bigger, longer, more uncut, and five bucks cheaper! But just because I’m not in a rush to recommend 8Doors to the folks at r/Metroidvania doesn’t mean that the game has no audience – It includes a variety of features that ensure it can be enjoyed and accessed by all types of players. The Nintendo and PlayStation ports are available both digitally and physically. If playing on a PC, a max resolution of 1920×1080 and other low requirements mean that a powerful system isn’t necessary to run the game. You can also use either a keyboard or controller; whichever you choose, everything is remappable. 

There’re two difficulty settings: “Normal” and the easier “Story Mode.” Players who want a challenge can look to the achievements, which include tasks like finishing the game without dying or without using upgrades, and completing a three-hour speedrun. You can also play the entire game using Ducroak’s frog tongue as your only weapon, even against enemies you should fight from a distance! (There’s no achievement for that one, just the personal satisfaction of knowing you used your time to do a silly thing.)

8Doors is not a perfect game (or even a great one). It’s got a general clunkiness, Flash animation-style cutscenes, a bare-bones map, boring combat, and bugs both big & small that’ve never been fixed (none of which I encountered in any of my playthroughs, but some Steam reviewers weren’t as lucky). It’s not an innovative or important addition to the Metroidvania genre. If it weren’t for the impressive art and mythological influences, 8Doors might be forgettable. But as a first game from a small indie studio, I’d still call it a success. It’s ambitious. It’s artistic. It has an authentic point of view. If the developers fixed small technical issues, upgraded the map, and polished the script, they could help the game find a second life, just like Arum does for her dad. 

Score: 67/100 Thuribles