These door monsters are something else. They’re huge, stony things that hold up the strange flat planes of their upper arms to seal off passageways, but will then stand and stretch and move away when their demands have been met. It’s not the scale that makes them feel like such an expensive and luxurious bit of detailing, though. It’s the gentleness with which they move, padding off into the wider world, giants generating their own quiet rhythm as they go. They are towering, but they feel like they have been based on delicate observation. For all their size there is something gloriously minute about them.
I’ve been thinking about the door monsters of Darksiders all week, because I cannot work out whether I think Darksiders is Double-A or Triple-A. It’s right on the cusp, isn’t it? It’s laid across the fault line. Category questions like this are so often tedious, but the more I think about Darksiders, the more I’m drawn in. For me, Darksiders helps to illuminate what makes Double-A so very, very special.