Get to the Orange Door. This kind of directive builds tension, like hearing Dutch from Predator resounding you to get to the chopper. It’s that kind of directive that action is built off of, and I think Get to the Orange Door is channeling exactly that kind of action energy.
This game hasn’t left my head since I spent just a brief few moments with it at PAX East. A simple concept, GTTOD has had many brief and free demos around, now in early access on Steam (completely unknown to me until researching this preview). It’s a game being posted about around Reddit enough for it to get to me through a secondhand recommendation, making its way around just enough to grab me with that incredible idea.
I mean only to say: it’s insane to me that GTTOD hasn’t exploded everywhere for some reason. The whole game is taking a first-person shooter training level – the course that equips with you on how to wall run, how to shoot, how to get around, and ready to drop into combat – only slightly larger in scope, and to beat this as fast as you can.
It feels like either an idea visited before, or something so simple it just may work. Playing it, I felt the latter coming to fruition. Even going through the level I saw twice, feeling very reminiscent of a Titanfall training room I’d visited before, I felt the compulsion to just do it again. To run again, only make this jump better, pull this corner in tighter, defeat this enemy faster. I saw a vision of leaderboards and replays, over and over again, in the future, and I really felt something special in this demo.
I didn’t get to talk to a developer. I had just missed them. Even with how short it is, it sank into me. It was a bit too floaty, with wall jumps that were very loose and hard to control. These were just control anomalies that brought things into a haze instead of clear focus. But hearing that this game is still coming together has it never leaving my mind. I think the concept here is so tight and novel that if things click with a final version of Get to the Orange Door, I’m confident in what is to come.
There was an actualized look to the game, in full Tron-like neon 80s with blaring electronic music in the background, blaring, with tension ever-building. The incessant need to run forward is just pushing in all around you. The barely distinct enemies are machines in a polygonal look brought to 3D and just as blocky as you would want for deathbots, yet they still fit the mood created by the other aspects of the presentation perfectly. It’s a mood that permeates the nagging feeling of being incomplete that was the main aspect bringing down the demo. It’s clear that there is so much passion in this, and what I played was proof that this could come together and be something special.
It made me believe in Get to the Orange Door. The demo was short, but enough for me to be in. If you’re at all curious it is on Early Access, and if there is more to this, I’m excited to see it when it releases and all these ideas come together.
