Weeping Doll (PS VR)

Editor's Notes

Digital PS VR version reviewed using a DualShock 4 controller.

Introduction

Developed by Chinese studio TianShe Media, 'Weeping Doll' is one of the first horror games to be released for PlayStation VR. In it, players explore a haunted mansion filled with dolls from a first-person perspective. Players will have to interact with objects and solve puzzles to uncover a mystery.

It also marks the third virtual reality release from publisher Oasis Games, who put out 'Ace Banana' and 'Pixel Gear.'

The Game Itself: Our Reviewer's Take

'Weeping Doll' has a spooky enough plot, as players take the role of a maid who shows up to a mysteriously empty house. As luck would have it, it's not completely empty, and players have to walk through a huge mansion that is filled with dozens of strange looking dolls in order to uncover the mysterious circumstances surrounding this work shift gone wrong.

'Weeping Doll's first five minutes were by far its best. After a brief overview of the game's controls (I used the left analog stick in conjunction with the cross button to teleport and used the triggers to pick items up), I received a mysterious phone call warning me of mysterious "weeping dolls." Ever oblivious, the main character shakes this off and wants to tidy up the house she's been paid to clean since it looks like a mess.

During these first few minutes, the tension was building. I was waiting for some sort of jump scare to come, and pretty much was psyching myself out as I often do during horror games. Sadly, after hearing a baby crying a few times, I realized that there was nothing that was actually scary here. There's no disturbing imagery besides a few poorly modeled dolls, and I was just left bored.

The actual gameplay just has the player roaming the house and solving different puzzles in rooms in order to go unlock other rooms. The puzzles aren't terrible, but they also won't have the player feeling like a genius for having figured them out like 'The Witness' or 'Professor Layton.' Instead, most of the puzzles are as simple as collecting doll parts and then placing them on a display. It's not exactly stimulating or exciting to do.

It doesn't help that a lot of time simple processes are made more difficult due to the game dropping items instead of using them. I was able to choose what I wanted to interact with by moving my head around, and while this generally works, players have to be right on the object for it to work. This is a bit weird considering each room only has three or four interactive objects, and several times my character would drop a valuable key instead of opening a door with it. Once I had to restart from the last checkpoint as I couldn't find the key on the floor.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that the house just isn't interesting to explore. Unlike 'Gone Home,' which was filled with lore and items that made it feel like a real house, 'Weeping Doll' feels like a rather empty video game environment. This could've been a decent locale if the focus was on combating ghosts, but it's all about exploration, and it falls flat due to it. 

While I was able to establish that a lot of the game was just plain bad early on, I was really holding out hope that the narrative would deliver. 'Weeping Doll' does most of its storytelling by displaying flashback cutscenes delivered as a stylized painting with voice-over giving backstory to the house's previous residents. It did enough to keep me interested for the two hours or so it lasts, but that's sadly where the story really falls flat. There's barely an ending as the climaxing scene just stops abruptly without any sort of resolution. Despite being led to a room with the game's credits on the walls, I wasn't sure that I had actually finished the game until I checked the trophies and was told I had completed it. That is not how a game ends on a high note.

That premise being solid and then not being delivered upon is what ultimately makes 'Weeping Doll' so disappointing. A good horror game could've been made using this setup, but the execution here is so dull and pedestrian that every aspect of the game falls flat. The puzzles aren't clever, and I was never the slightest bit scared after the initial five minutes of play. Not once was my heart racing, and that's shocking considering I've quit games like 'P.T.' after 10 minutes due to being too scared to continue.

If anything, the game seems to be hurt by virtual reality rather than helped by it. The realistic-looking visuals often look blurry due to the lower fidelity of the PlayStation VR headset, and the game rarely has the ability to set the player up for scares as the teleporting makes the player's movement totally unpredictable. That's not to say that 'Weeping Doll,' would be any more effective as a traditional game, as it would still be a boring affair, but perhaps more could've been done by a developer that is clearly still figuring out what works in virtual reality.