Weeping Doll

Weeping Doll is a horror experience from TianShe Media revolving around a spooky doll, and it did one thing particularly well during our playtime, which is that it didn't make us want to puke, which is relatively unusual on PSVR. This happens because of two reasons: firstly, the game does not support freedom of movement, which eliminates the motion sickness aspect, and secondly, it's a measly 40 minutes long.

Weeping Doll is comparable to Gone Home, though without any of the interesting narrative elements, and if you have played Fullbright's enigmatic adventure game then you'll know know that without the story, there isn't much left to take an interest in. The entirety of Weeping Doll is set in a dark house with fireplaces, antique furniture, and generic dolls scattered here and there. It's a bit of a horror puzzle game that never offers puzzle design that requires much thought from the player, nor does it provide scenes that frighten even a little bit.

As the game is so short, it's difficult to talk about the story without spoiling things, but it involves a family you never meet that consists of a father, a mother, and twin daughters. One of the twins was born with a birthmark on the face, resulting in the parents for some reason deciding to lock her in a hidden part of the house and forgetting that she existed. It's then the player's task, in the role of the house maid, to find out what happened next. There is no rhyme or reason behind the story, however, and the developers could not come up with a more tangible reason for the parents to lock up one daughter than the fact that she had a mark on her face. The resolution that reveals what finally happened to her is just as poorly developed.

You move your character around the house by placing a cursor where you want to go, teleporting her there, a solution for VR movement that we have seen used in other similar games before, and it works here, but it is a little boring (although, on the bright side, we experienced zero nausea).

Then, of course, you interact with specific objects in your environment. Very early on in the game you learn how to pick up gadgets with your left and right hands, and how you place things in your inventory. You will get to open doors, find keys to unlock doors, place the items where they belong, and that's basically it as far as the mechanics go.

The overall context varies but the plot does not, and voice acting goes from being mediocre in some cases to poor in others, so it's difficult to find any sort of emotional handle to hold onto in the story. Not only this, but the whole thing is shoddily written, incomprehensibly complex, and still manages to be uninteresting.

Weeping Doll's story, which is nonsense, never engages, the puzzle design is inadequate in terms of both quantity and quality, the atmosphere is verging on non-existent, and it never manages to approach anything close to the horror-filled atmosphere that the developers were obviously aiming for. The graphics are capable and there are no jump scares as seen in many other horror games these days, but these positives don't save a game that fails to bring about anything other than drowsiness. Dolls alone are not enough...