The Doll Shop
Painting dolls and eating ramen in creepy adventure The Doll Shop.
As anyone who has ever been on Tinder will surely testify, romance and horror often go hand in hand. That might be why Atelier Sento’s The Doll Shop works so well, as it takes the dating sim genre and carves out its beating heart. In this beautifully illustrated point-and-click, you play as a dollmaker in a remote Japanese village that has been tainted by tragedy, and that’s currently being blanketed in endless snow. As with Atelier Sento’s other freebies, right away it’s the artwork that will draw your eye here. There’s a tangible sense of depth to the village environment, which features a thick stack of parallax layers and a roving camera that swoops around the dioramalike scene. When your insular doll-maker enters a building, the perspective flattens as the game transitions to ‘visual novel’ mode, but it’s still a gorgeouslooking game even when you’re just standing indoors chatting to the town’s residents.
There’s quite a bit of dialogue and several story-branching choices, as you might expect from a visual novel, but this is much more engaging on an interactive level than many games where you simply click the mouse button for a couple of hours. Between dialogue blocks you’re permitted to trudge around town at your leisure, taking in the melancholy atmosphere as you watch the snowflakes fall around you, and you listen to your footsteps crunching softly in the snow. This is a game about repetition, about the comforting familiarity of daily rituals, from your regular snowy meanderings to the delicate craft of your doll-making work.
There are few times during this roughly hour-long game when you’ll need to repair a broken doll, or attend to your butterfly collection, and each activity is a matter of carefully repeating an action, several times until your work is finally done. If it sounds dull, it strangely isn’t: You’re given a satisfying amount of visual and aural feedback as you use glue to seal a cracked face, or your paintbrush to erase all trace that it was ever damaged. As you progress, you begin to understand why someone would spend their days on such delicate labor—even as you start to question the protagonist’s backstory and state of mind.
Under the skin
While on the surface this is the story of a blossoming romance, the darker elements bubble to the surface. Like the best horror stories, Atelier Sento’s game is expertly paced, taking the time to establish a baseline of normality, before it’s overturned at the very end of the game. As you may have guessed, dolls play a part, but to preserve an element of mystery I’ll leave it at that.
The studio’s most polished game yet, The Doll Shop tells a fresh story in a well-realized setting that feels like it’s been torn from the pages of a horror manga. You won’t jump out of your seat, but you might squirm back in it as you see this creepy story through to its conclusion.
There’s a tangible sense of depth to the village environment