Life-And-Death Doors [FTL]
There are few games that require you to manage doors so carefully. FTL is a hardcore rogue-like spaceship sim that puts you in charge of an intrepid crew fighting against the elements of outer space. On your ship, you’ll have to manage oxygen, ship controls, engineering, shields, and even door controls. Why do doors matter so much?
Because you can open your doors to the vacuum of space, draining the oxygen. Depending on how you open doors in your ship, you can kill any boarding parties that appear by exposing them to the vacuum. You can lock doors so enemies have to bust them open, or you can sabotage enemy doors, forcing them to all open at the same time. Using doors to strategically funnel enemies (or oxygen) is a powerful strategy in FTL, and it’s super fun. Not something I’ll normally say about opening / closing doors.
Color Coded Game Design [Metroid Prime]
Super Metroid codified a new genre of games — the Metroidvania. These games are notable for nonlinear design, set in large environments where you make incrementable progress by discovering new methods of traversal. Instead of giving you keys to open doors, the Metroid games gave you new weapons — depending on the color of the door, you’d immediately know whether you could progress or not.
Blue doors are the most common. Any old blaster shot will open a blue door. Things get more complicated when you encounter Purple Doors, Green Doors, and Yellow Doors — requiring missiles, super missiles, and super bombs respectively to open. Doors were simple transitions, but by making doors easy to recognize (and easy to place) the designers effectively created a simple gating method that any player can understand. There’s a reason why this door mechanic continued into all modern Metroid games, most notably in the more-modern classic Metroid Prime.
Grab your keys, we’re unlocking more doors. Check out more of the best doors in gaming on the next page.
