Tricky Doors

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS

Tricky Doors is a Free-to-Play Graphic Adventure released on the Nintendo Switch in 2022 after previously releasing on mobile devices some time prior to that (sorry, I’m having difficulty tracking down that information). It follows in the footsteps of publisher Five-BN Studio’s prior Free-To-Play release, Lost Lands: Dark Overlord both in its form of monetization as well as in its gameplay.

Where Lost Lands featured a story of sorts, Tricky Doors dispenses with that to focus purely on the gameplay, which has players searching through sparsely-animated 2D hand-painted images to find objects to collect and interact with in the vein of traditional “point and click”-style adventures. This game doesn’t have Lost Lands’ dated pre-rendered cutscenes but features a similarly “mysterious” instrumental soundtrack.

As for the gameplay, once again the sort of experience you’ll have here will depend largely on whether you’re playing the game in handheld mode or docked mode. In handheld mode, the game’s touchscreen controls work perfectly, letting you simply tap the part of the environment you want to examine or interact with, and the game responds how you want. The puzzles here are good but nothing extraordinary, and much of the game centers around clicking on the environment around you to look for clues, although there’s a nifty hint button to point you in the right direction if you get stuck.

In docked mode, however, this game becomes a huge pain. Here, players control a cursor that moves agonizingly slowly, and menus that should be easily accessible need to be clicked on, or have odd button assignments. What’s more, this is yet another one of those games that refuses to allow players to use a Pro Controller for absolutely no reason – nothing this game does requires the Joy-Cons’ unique features, yet you’re forced to use either those or the touchscreen.

And once again, this game’s monetization comes in the form of its hint system, which requires “coins” for hints, and with players being able to pay real money for those coins. For clever players (or those who look up guides online), this means that Tricky Doors will be completely free to play, though of course the game’s creators are no doubt banking on your impatience and/or inability to search for hints online when you get stuck so you’ll give them your money.

Honestly though, it’s not the monetization that truly bothers me here, it’s the gameplay. It is just such an ordeal to even play Tricky Doors unless you’re doing so in handheld mode using the touchscreen, and there’s very little about this game that’s so compelling it’ll suck you in, unlike numerous other entries in the genre on Nintendo Switch. I suppose for the price of “free”, it’s hard to complain too much, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this game either. If you’re a Graphic Adventure fan looking to expand your library and you have the self-control to not spend your way out when you get stuck, this game may be worth downloading, but it’s far from a highlight within the genre.

tl;dr – Tricky Doors is a free-to-play Graphic Adventure where players try to search rooms for objects to solve puzzles, and have the option to pay real money for hints if they get stuck. It’s not a standout game within the genre, and the gamepad controls are terrible (though the touchscreen works well enough). However, if you’re a Graphic Adventure fan who has enough self-control to not spend money just for puzzle hints, this may be worth the free price tag to keep you entertained in between other, better games.

Grade: C-

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