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Doors: Paradox – Before The Room, there are Doors

When is a door not a door?

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Imagine The Room but on a smaller scale and you have Doors: Paradox.

In spite of the success of The Room and its various sequels, there are very few imitators. The likes of The House of Da Vinci and Escape Academy are solid, but there isn’t exactly a glut of them. Doors: Paradox takes the concept of those games and narrows down the scope into enjoyable, bite-sized puzzle chains and applies a bright, fun colour palette.

If you aren’t familiar with the likes of The Room and Escape Academy, the concept is that you’re trapped in a room and you need to solve a series of puzzles to escape, or move deeper into a complex. These puzzles often involve you picking up and manipulating objects in the room, many of which have hidden panels and secret switches, to advance the puzzle. They’re often fun and do a lot with an otherwise small environment, and even manage to squeeze in a story.

Doors Paradox
Each door has its own unique style. Impressive considering how many stages there are.

Doors: Paradox also has a story, but it very much feels ancillary. You seem to be solving puzzles to follow a mysterious black cat that knows about your life to date. You seemingly weren’t a very nice person and this is some kind of purgatory. Unlike The Room, which had a very interesting story of Lovecraftian creatures and realms beyond our understanding, the tale here is something I kind of ignored. Everything is told through hidden notes that can be found in each level. I found these easily enough but didn’t care much for the story.

Much more enjoyable were the puzzles. Each level presents you with a door floating in space. Your job is to find a way to open the door and move on. This should be simple enough, but every door has various points of interest around it, from simple things like cabinets to open and find new items, to computer screens that can be tampered with to reveal a secret code. Everything links together too, so you may find a crank handle on a bench that can be used to wind a bucket down a well to get water that could then activate a water wheel. Due to each stage being brief, clocking in at five to ten minutes each, it’s rare that you’d find an item that you don’t know how to use for long.

Doors Paradox
The bonus levels at the end of each chapter are particularly challenging.

Navigating these areas is easy enough, with you using the right stick to rotate the door, left stick to move the pointer, and A to interact or zoom in. Almost everything you need to complete the puzzle is on the screen right from the off, with you just needing to find it. Some things need to be slotted into place, whilst others need to be rotated or slid around. Manipulating your way through puzzles feels fairly intuitive. If there’s a dial to spin, it makes sense to grab it with A and then rotate it with the analogue stick. When dealing with one of the many sliding tile puzzles, you should grab and slide as you’d expect.

I will say though, that the controls could be a pain here. I can’t comment on the PC version where you’d use a mouse, but on Xbox the controls sometimes simply didn’t work. There were cases where my pressing A would simply not allow me to slide something that I should be able to, or wouldn’t lock into the right part of a combination lock no matter how many times I tried. This was very frustrating and resulted in my needing to restart more than a few levels over my play time. I also noticed that most of the achievements didn’t pop when I completed them. That isn’t something that bothers me personally, but achievement hounds might be more than a little irritated if this isn’t rectified.

Doors Paradox
I hope you like sliding tile puzzles.

With those complaints out of the way though, I’m happy to say that most of the levels in Doors: Paradox are really quite enjoyable. There are over fifty in all, including some bonus challenge ones if you find all the hidden collectibles in a chapter. Each has a unique visual style, from steampunk underwater contraptions, to London phone boxes. The developers have tried to play into these themes with each level too. The bank vault stage has you needing to work out puzzles to allow you to switch off lasers guarding a drawer with a key in it, whilst one set in ancient Egypt needs you to work out how to raise a sarcophagus. I love how much thought was put into the theming here, and whilst a lot of similar mechanics are used throughout, the way they’re given a thematic twist for each level kept things fun.

The visual element helps a lot here. Each level looks great and has plenty going on. A Tesla inspired generator has electrodes sprouting out of the side, and a Da Vinci style door will include mechanical inventions and paintings. There’s been plenty of effort put into this side of Doors: Paradox, and the developers should be commended on creating so many different themes for each of their short levels. The sound design doesn’t get quite the same treatment, but there’s some nice ambient sound in a lot of stages, as well as some satisfying clicks and clunks as puzzle pieces fall into place and locked panels open.

Doors Paradox
Puzzles link into each other well, with each solution clearly moving you to another one.

Doors: Paradox is a very enjoyable, albeit slightly buggy at time of writing, puzzle game that’s easy to enjoy in small sessions thanks to each stage being fairly short. It’s accessible to newcomers thanks to a solid hint system, and challenging for veterans in those more challenging unlockable stages. Whilst the control issues are irritating, the individual stages are fun to solve and feel satisfying to complete, and there’s always the treat of finding out what thematic puzzles the next stage will introduce. If you don’t like sliding tile puzzles though, you may find some of the stages a bit irritating.

Doors: Paradox is available now on PC, Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, and mobile platforms.

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