Last month, we reported on Death Hall, a new platformer from solo developer Tom Janson. Considering his previous works, we had pretty high hope for this new release, and now that it’s finally here, we’ve got to say: Boy does it deliver! The game spent 3 years in development, and it really shows with the level of polish that is present in every nook and canny.
The entire game is presented in a portrait orientation with an incredibly straightforward virtual button setup for the controls: Basically there is a jump button, and left and right arrows to move the character around.
Death Hall official trailer
Your task, as with many other platformers, is to reach the end of each stage alive, which is a lot easier said than done as there are a lot – no, seriously, A LOT – of traps and hazards that you must navigate. Spikes of all types, swinging wrecking balls, as well as a huge roster of creepy-looking enemies, are all there to get you.
You’ll have 4 “hearts”, which means you can get hit 4 times before it’s game over. You can regain lost hearts by jumping off of enemies, but do be careful while doing so, as they will not just stand still while you bounce on their heads. On top of that, all the levels are randomly-generated, so they will be different every time you come back.
And then of course there’s the Monster – a huge red ball of death with a mouth full of deadly sharp teeth and a tendency to pop up out of nowhere like he owns the place, which he probably does. Naturally, being the meanie that he is, the guy is not happy about you trying to escape his … Death Hall, so he will burst out from walls or rise up from the abyss at certain points in the levels and start chasing you. As if having to overcome tons of lethal traps are not challenging enough, you now have a moving meat grinder hot on your heels. So yeah, you can imagine that this is one hell of a tough game – almost literally given the grim, hell-like setting.
And that’s absolutely not a complaint. Yes, you’ll die a lot in Death Hall, but you’ll love every second of it. All the mechanics just FEELS right, from the weight of each of your jump to the speed of your movement to the force behind the traps. Additionally, there are apparently a lot of secrets hidden in the obscure corners of Death Hall as well. So long as you don’t mind the portrait orientation, Death Hall is definitely one of the best platformers you could find on mobile right now.