I was on the fence about getting this game. When I did, I played a bit and lost interest quickly because of several things others pointed out in their negative reviews (One for example is the very good review written by the user Rellom) but let me tell you beforehand that DoI changed quite a bit since then.

Doors of Insanity is a roguelike deckbuilder in the likes of Slay The Spire.

Unlike in many other deckbuilders, you start with customizing your character. Even though the shop site advertises a "focus on character customization" you just can change between a man or a woman, choose one of a dozen faces, as well as the skin and hair color.

Instead of nodes on a map, you will find yourself facing different doors to enter, just like in Fate Hunters or a dungeon crawler. Choose one of up to three different doors to battle enemies, elites, heal, get into a random event or find a merchant or the witch.

If you played any other deckbuilder before, you will instantly know what to do. If not, the game will explain the basics very well. You have mana to play cards (attack, defense, skills), and that's about it.
Noteworthy are summons and that some cards cost gold to play instead of mana which opens up a whole new tactical layer. Summons aren't new to the genre but unique enough to make Doors of Insanity stand out in a line of 0815-deckbuilders.

Items don't just give better attributes but also change the looks of your character. Battles will grant you rewards, one of them being an item to choose from (shield, weapon, headgear, gloves, etc.). They will mainly give you more attack, defense, or HP. This is probably what they mean by character customization but you'll mainly take the item that has better stats and doesn't watch out for good looks.

There are over 70 different cards but no upgrades to them. You can also get different artifacts and encounter four different floors full of unique events, monsters, and bosses.

After every playthrough, you get crystals that you can use to buy artifacts, cards, or items to change the next run. You can also salvage a card after a run which you can then use in your next one. You also gain EXP after every battle. For every new level, you get a skill point that you can use after a run to spend on a better defense, attack, etc.

I tried to search for a game but no one played it (at the time I wanted to) so I can't say anything about that aside from the player base being not very alive.

• The game is addictive. Even though I've just played 4 hours yet, I was sucked in and don't wanted to stop playing. Other things, like the balance, the difficulty, and the content put me off after that.
  
• Battles are fun. They are fast and still tactical enough to give fans of deckbuilders exactly what they crave for.
  
• After beating the game, you'll unlock new difficulty settings.
  
• Overall progression gives you achievements to look forward to and also lets you unlock new bosses for example.
  
• The art style is very good. It just makes the game special.

• The difficulty raises a lot going from the third to the fourth floor. Before that, it steadily gets a bit harder after every door but this spike feels out of place and I can see what they wanted to achieve since you can decide to call it a day and leave after the third floor but who is going to leave in a roguelike and calls it a day? This is an unnecessary stylistic device hiding the fact that the balance doesn't fit. What highlights this, even more, is that the game is just too easy before that.
  
• There aren't that many different events or monsters. On my second playthrough, I already encountered a handful of events I've known from the first run. It certainly needs more content.
  
• While the art style is very good, I don't like the look of the main character. It looks out of place like in the memes.
  
• The UI is just bad and makes it look like a cheap game. The cheap-looking emojis don't make it any better.
  
• "Fast mode" isn't really that much faster.
  
• The music is unbearable IMO (You can turn the music off luckily)

Doors of Insanity is fun and addictive. It's what every fan of deckbuilder looks out for but lacks where it counts to make it really enjoyable in the long run. It needs more content and a better balance overall but with a bit more work, I'm sure this will turn into a gem.
I've played this game a few months ago for the first time and after playing it again now, I can already see that the developers are working hard on making this a great game.
If you've played a few deckbuilders before, you'll turn your back on it after a few hours so I recommend putting it on your wishlist for now and wait for a sale or even more updates.

It's not all bad, but there are enough things bugging and annoying me, to give this a thumbs down when we compare it to its competition, with the same price tags and early access attachments.

If we look past all the obvious bugs that comes with a early access game, and go to the core of the game play, is the phasing and progression feeling off.

To begin with, you will always start with the same 9/10 cards in a new run. I thought to begin with, that the purgatory system would add more and more unique cards, so every player had their own starting hands. I was wrong, it only add 1 new option after each run, and delete the older option. I do not like deckbuilders who force us into using basically the same set of cards every single run from the get go. That is the biggest mistake from the developers, and I doubt this is a mechanic they are gonna change. If so, it would completely change how I look at this game, be course that single thing alone, add so much more diversity.

They tried to give the game diversity with the gem shop, where you can add more cards, gears etc etc. to the runs, but those things are not equipment you start with, but instead find in a new run. You still start with the same set of cards every new run no matter what, but might after 100 of hours of runs, have a very diverse selection of stuff in the runs. But getting to that point, will take far to long.

I had 9 normal doors in a row. With almost the same set of monsters to kill. That is just boring. There are simply to many doors with just normal monsters, compared to events, merchants, witches, or what ever else they could put in. Killing the same stuff over and over, that many times in a row, is just lazy game progression to me. In my furthest run, which was 39 levels of doors, I had 1 elite door, 2 merchants, 1 well & 2 witches, the rest was normal doors, and that is counting that on many of the levels you get 2 or 3 doors. So go figure how device it is, when it comes to actually choosing something. Choosing between 3 normal doors, is like giving me the option to pick between my 3 white shirts in my dresser.

The gear is boring, in the sense, it is just a stat booster. No set bonuses, or anything unique about it. You can't even sell all the tons of useless gear you get, to make it feel worth your while taking it, instead of just skipping. Again, lazy game design if you ask me, if I compare it to other games in the same genre and what they have done with gear, and how it interact with other mechanics.

I really hope they turn this game around with updates, as it is quite obvious how much time went into make some really nice aesthetics, cool music, and graphics for a game like this. But for now, do the game feel really weak and thin in its core. And again, there are plenty of bugs, more then I'm used too, I'll allow that, in any sort of early access. My review is only based around the core game play and how it made me feel.

This could of course all change, and therefor also my review. Time will tell, if this stands.

With Doors of Insanity, publisher Another Indie sent a new card battler into the race for players' favour. Developed by OneShark, the game sends us into purgatory to fight the monsters of hell. It is in Early Access, with the developers planning to be ready for full release in about half a year. First we put together a deck of 10 cards and off we go, entering the first room through a door. Here our first opponent is already waiting for us and the first card duel begins.

The game is extremely easy to understand and is regularly commented on by our hero, so that even beginners can find their way around immediately. So we play our cards until we run out of mana, then it's the opponent's turn. After we have eliminated the first enemy, we choose a loot card, collect any items we may have found and choose a door to enter the next room, and on we go. Magic cubes can be used in attack or defence, food restores life points. After a few rooms, a crunchy boss awaits.

The overview of your hero is kept clear and simple: Besides your life points (which do not regenerate automatically between fights), your character has values for attack, defence and a chance for critical hits (in percent). From round to round we have more cards to choose from and (hopefully) better equipment to defeat our opponents. If we die, we start over, but we get to choose a card beforehand to add to our deck at the beginning of the next game. With remaining crystals, we can buy equipment at the beginning of a new run and (permanently) improve our character with experience points, so that we have a stronger and stronger hero at our disposal over time.

Conclusion:
With 70 cards, Doors of Insanity is a relatively manageable card battler and not a heavyweight like Slay the Spire or Monster Train. The battles are quick and easy, but a lot of fun. The graphic style is inspired by the very old Disney cartoons, similar to Cuphead.

I want to like this game but can't recommend it in its current state.

The style of the game is great, it's got humour and a great aesthetic, but it's currently style over substance.

In terms of a deckbuilder it feels very shallow. There doesn't seem to be a strong potential of synergy between the cards, so most turns feel boring with very little interesting decision making.

There are currently no different classes/characters, not sure if this is coming but coupled with the lack of interesting interactions between cards the game gets stale really quickly, there's no real identity to your character and every run just feels the same. The gear is generally just basic stat boosts and there seem to be very few relics that make a big difference to play. The ability to level up your character is a nice idea, but it's essentially just the same as gear, basic stat boosts.

There's no pathing which is another aspect that takes away from making interesting decisions. The first area feels like it's setup to be 80% normal battles, so a large part of your initial experience is just clicking on any random door because there's no discernible difference. By your third run this gets pretty tedious.
Lack of pathing, no health reset after end bosses and what seems like a low encounter rate for healing events also means you need to play very defensively which leads to drawn out battles that really emphasise how bland the cards are.

Other little things like not being able to preview rewards you get offered in events means more blind clicking, and so far a lot of the events just feel more punishing than rewarding. Most of the time you either take damage to avoid a reward, or you choose a reward option that is really underwhelming and seems to always come with a drawback that doesn't make it worthwhile. The balance of the game feels off to me in general.

There's a dice mechanic that seems just tacked on, maybe I haven't come across the cards that really take advantage of the dice, but it is rarely impactful. The dice add a bit of damage or armour to a turn, but that's just another binary decision without much depth. The cards I've seen that interact with dice so far just add more or reroll them.

There are typical polish issues that you get with Early Access which is fine, but some things are fairly grating, like the twitchiness of selecting a card or the sometimes difficult to read font being used on the cards. Battle interactions tend to lack impact and don't feel satisfying.

Overall this is an avoid for me. The price it's being offered at isn't that much lower than other popular roguelite deckbuilders that give a more satisfying experience.
It's a shame that all this style isn't being backed up by good gameplay, I hope they can turn things around and make this an interesting game.

Huge potential, way too buggy for a full release.
Baddies will say that they're doing X damage and will do X+Y instead.
Cards that claim they will do extra damage or block when conditions are met just straight up won't work some of the time.
Card that claims that it has a random cost turn to turn will randomly change cost while it's still in your hand.
Card that claims that you require "20 absorb" to use cannot be used unless you have more than 20 absorb and actually COSTS 20 absorb.

Stick with the game they very obviously were inspired by until the bugs are ironed out.

Reading a review is not enough? Want to see some footage? Check the link and watch some game footage for yourself and decide if this game is worth your time:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU2tUl7hZTU


Doors of Insanity is a rogue like deck building game, using a cartoon like artwork and a really smooth gameplay and animation. This is the first Deck building game created by OneShark who have already published 5 games, going from clicker games to RPG Indie games, so plenty of experience for this kind of games.




You are in Purgatory, now go kill stuff and become the new Satan! That's actually the story, but let's be honest story isn't the focus on deck building games the gameplay is.


And wow the gameplay is some Art here, lets start with something i personally really like in deck building games: Summoning units. This game does a good job with the summoning. You have only 4 slots so abusing is not possible and in my current play through I have met 5 unique units with different mechanics for your play. The Units can't be killed, so no baby sitting is necessary. The Artwork is done with a lot of love. You can equip your hero with new items and artifacts and every item is animated. Every card triggers are also animated, going from simple jump kicks, to rolling attacks and transforming into a werewolf, it feels unique while playing and the gameplay feels smooth. The only issue I faced is the RNG difficulty spike. You do not regenerate life in this game after battles or after the stage end boss. You have to get regeneration charms and cards to live for another day and this can be sometimes tricky. So e.g. there can be 3 levels in a row with high level enemies(not elite) who will attack you with 40 damage per round. In the worst case its death, in the best case its low life and death next round.


+ Plenty of cards to choose from
+ Unique Boss and elite monster
+ Bosses have unique mechanics you have to counter
+ exp gain for further playthroughs
+ crystals(obtained via fighting in game) to buy new cards, items and even alternative bosses for the game.
+ a unique dice game mechanic to add absorb or damage during the fight.


- difficulty spike due to RNG
- no life regeneration after end boss fight, favoring a defensive play rather an aggressive one.
- it feels a bit grindy after 3 hours.
- the game has a few bugs that need to be worked on
- PVP is a bit bugged currently




Doors of Insanity offers an addictive game with a really impressive artwork and animation. Every run feels different and due to the buyable stuff you can worship gods, fight alternative enemies and go to hard and impossible mode. There is a lot to do, but the game can feel a bit repetitive and unfair due to the RNG. So who will like this game? Do you like games like H.E.L.L shuffle, Slay the spire ? Do you need a game to drop in some time and forget the world ? Then this game is for you, there is a lot of time to spend on this game, and it keeps you on the edge without knowing where the time has gone.


I recommend checking the AWG group for more detailed reviews

For one the whole "lol so random" aesthetic just seems trying to hide that they couldn't get a cohesive artstyle going.

But the real issue is the balancing. You start with 200 hp, attacks do around 20 damage and your block is around 20 block. The word "around" does a lot of lifting there. Because everything is uneven values. You are supposed to use "dice" to mitigate the difference between what 2 mana worth of block gives you and the enemy attack but it never quite works out.

And then there are horribly bad cards. Like 10% Crit chance for 2 turns for 2 mana. This is a joke and shouldn't even be in the game.

You have defense and attack buffing equipment but defense lowers damage by 1 and attack raises it by 1 which again if the base damage is 20 for all attacks it doesn't matter if you have 2 or 3 defense. But most gear only gives 1 or 2 def. Also this card: gain 2 def for 1 turn for 2 mana.

Then there are summons that for only 2 mana sometimes can deal 20 damage per turn aka they are a free attack each turn (the defense summons only give you 6 block though so why even bother taking those?). I won my first pvp game by not buying any equipment and getting summons and voila the opponent that had full armor died in 3 turns.

The game doesn't have a slay the spire like map but instead just tells you how many rooms to the boss and otherise nothing. "When Stanley came to a set of 3 open doors he choose the one in the middle because they were all regular fights so why even bother having 3 doors?"

A big OOF.

I was looking forward to this game after playing the demo, but I don't think I can recommend the game in its current state. Hopefully things will change and I can update this review to a positive after the game has made more progress through early access.

The best thing about the game is its style. From its weird mix of psychedelic and 1920s Felix the Cat cartoon kinda graphics, to its thumping, off-beat retrowave style music. I love everything about the style of this game.

The gameplay is unfortunately lacking. A big part of it is just lack of content.
- There is a very limited amount of relics. You will constantly be obtaining the same relics every single run.
- The card pool is very limited. I was hoping a ton more cards would be unlocked through this game's meta progression, but it looks like I've almost unlocked them all, which is really disappointing.
- There are not a lot of room types. Often you will be faced between the choice of 3 doors that are exactly the same over and over. The other room types that don't consist of battles often don't feel all that rewarding either.
- Equipment is really basic and uninteresting. Weapons offer damage and crit chance while armor offers defense and HP. A new piece of gear is either going to be better or worse in one or both of these stats. There are no bonuses to the equipment outside of these basic stats, meaning you are going to choose the one with the highest stats. There is no decision making.
- Card, relic, and event balance needs to be looked at.

The two biggest things I think this game needs to improve on is the card/relic pool and room variety. There needs to be deck archetypes you can build into, but right now that all feels kind of lacking. As it is now, runs start to feel repetitive, offering very few decisions and you'll be running the same cards far too often.

I recommend checking back later.

I would be lying if I said this wasn't "Slay the spire but...". That being said, its not trying to hide the fact that it takes inspiration from STS. Its proud of it, and its doing everything it can to improve on that formula. You have 6 energy instead of 3, but this lets them do interesting stuff with 1 energy cost cards. Cards do like 25 damage base, but this lets them mess around with incremental bonuses and debuffs. There is additional RNG involved in the form of crit and damage-ranges, which I think is a big frowny-face, but not much to do about it.

Long story short, its a love letter/remediation of slay the spire that has tons of style (which rocks) and some of its own ideas, some of which work well, some of which kind of suck. All in all I had a fun 7ish hours with it, which was enough to beat it twice. I'll return once there's more content, and hopefully more than one class.

The game is fun but its way overpriced, I played for about 4 hours and theres already nothing more to do. Also during my short time playing I encountered so many bugs