Review: Doorways: The Underworld

Doorways: The Underworld is the latest chapter in the Doorways saga from Saibot Studios. It can be played as part of the Doorways saga, or as a stand-alone title. If you want to pick up this game after this review and are concerned about missing something, you can check out last year’s hands-on playthrough of the first two episodes. I didn’t play the first two chapters, but since The Underworld is supposed to be able to stand on its own, it should be treated as such.

The basic gist of the story is that you are a Doorways agent, sent after a psychotic killer that other agents couldn’t handle. You’ve seen the worst of the worst and you, and only you alone can catch them. To find them, you will use psychic abilities and see through their eyes. Underworld tasks you with hunting down a demented doctor, performing gruesome experiments on human patients. I’ll discuss more on the story a little later.

I will give credit where it is due – Doorways does some things pretty well, however in each of those instances it also shoots itself in the foot and slits its own throat. It’s as if Saibot was on course to deliver a great game, but they overshot the runway and made a crash landing. The wreckage could still be considered a horror game, but probably not the best iteration of one.

The game is decent enough to look at. It’s dark, and when combined with its sound and voice acting, really sells that feeling of dread and fear that horror fans pine for. The game is a little too dark unfortunately, and I had to crank up the brightness settings just so I could see where I was going. This caused me to see that there was a lot of stuff in the environment, but it didn’t really do anything. Some papers to find, but nothing else. I have to mention that you don’t have any hands or arms here – items just sort of float in front of you and instead of a flashlight, you have a headlamp. I see that neither as a pro or a con, I’d rather have floating items than poorly animated arms flailing in front of me (no one does arms and hands right). But to have an environment with so much stuff, yet still feel so empty, is kind of a downer.

Immediately noticeable when I first fired the game up was that it used sound effectively to – again – sell that feeling of dread. However my feelings towards it turned from admiration to admonition by the time the first level as over. That’s about how long it took for me to discover that the ambient audio doesn’t really match with what’s happening onscreen. And while each level’s audio is different, there’s a defined loop in each level, and it all sounds the same. There are certain peaks in the audio, where the intention must have been to send chills down your spine and make you think something was about to happen, but it never does. There’s that slow build-up, but no payoff. Even the voice-acting, as well done as it is, sounds a little hamfisted at times.

The game is a horror puzzler, but the puzzles consist of little more than irritating key searches. A good key search never hurt anyone, but not if that’s all that it is. The game is devoid of combat, so you’re forced to rely on stealth at certain times. I foolishly believed that this meant the game was devoid of enemies entirely, leading me to charge headfirst into the first enemy I saw and die rather hilariously. I thought it was a hallucination. Player idiocy aside, gameplay amounts to little more than these key searches, and hiding from that one enemy in each level. It’s padded out by making you traipse across the level once or twice before you find a paper or something that details that areas’ specific enemy, then you go back to trek across the level again (because the key you have is for a door/lever/switch on the opposite side of the map) and SURPRISE! That enemy is now lurking in the hallways!

Once you use that key you’ve got, you may have to go back and find another one, or it’s time for a chase sequence! The first chase sequence that I experienced, I thought was really well done, but I was significantly less enthused the more I saw it repeated. If the enemy catches you, a little cutscene plays without much other fanfare. You’re killed instantly, which is sad, because I wanted to see more of these enemies.

Doorways has some good ideas, but they just don’t seem to be used to their potential. Those psychic abilities? Might as well be non-existent, I still don’t even know how they’re supposed to work, actually. The story? I mentioned that I would speak more on it, but there’s nothing more to say. No exposition provided as to who you are and why you’re doing this, who the doctor is and why she’s doing this, nothing outside of a piece of paper.

The final nail in Doorways’ coffin is that there’s nothing in the game that makes you want to keep playing it. There’s no pull to make you keep trudging down those dark hallways, it made playing the game a chore. To rub salt in the wound, the whole thing culminates in a long chase sequence with one of the most unsatisfying endings I’ve ever seen. Credits roll. That’s it – not even so much as a heave and a sigh to say that it’s over. Is it? I don’t know.

Doorways: The Underworld is available on Steam as part of the Doorways saga for $11.99, or you can buy Underworld as a standalone for $4.99. You can do better.