Day 176 - The Dollhouse
SPOOKY MONTH!, Horror, Short and Free ·
Skeeter’s Take:
The Dollhouse is a short narrative horror experience about the player exploring a strange place called (go figure) “the Dollhouse”.
The Dollhouse is a monolithic cube shaped object with a door - it’s almost reminiscent of the Kaaba. The player is contacted by a mysterious unknown person via a walkie talkie. This third party encourages the player to enter the Dollhouse to help with the “Protocol”. What is the protocol? Too many questions, just do what you are told. The mysterious person on the walkie talkie informs the player that they will be silenced for the duration of the protocol. Get cracking! It’s time to get inside that Dollhouse! Ahh, here we are. Welcome to the grainy black-and-white hallways that compose the Dollhouse. Feel free to explore. The player can only move forward through the house and hallways, but they are given great agency and control via a “Look Behind” button that allows them to turn around and look down the hallway behind them. The voice on the talkie suggests this is to help keep your sanity and wits, but in reality, it seems like this feature does nothing. I played through twice, and the second playthrough I didn’t “look behind” a single time and nothing changed with my ending.
As the player explores the narrow and bleak hallways, they will come across a few rooms that contain odd looking mannequins:
The voice instructs the player to play an audio file in each of these doll-filled rooms. Each audio file tells the subsequent chapter in the story of a silent boy who wanders through the woods and finds a mysterious place. It’s the player.The boy is the player. The story is about you and that story is as esoteric as the rest of the game:
Eventually, the player will reach the final room: The Throne Room - the room of the Queen. The queen has quite an intimidating appearance, towering above with a mannequin-body dress:
In this room, the voice on the walkie talkie reveals that the whole goal of the protocol was to get you to this point. The voice manually overrides your audio player to play the final 2 chapters of the story. The story wraps up with the queen demanding the player to kneel in front of her. She places a “silent crown” on the player’s head as the game fades out to “The End”.
This is a tough one for me. I won’t complain about the nature of the “gameplay” - it’s interactive fiction. It tells you exactly what you are getting on the tin: A virtual pop-up book. Only you click on objects instead of pulling tabs to interact with them.
When it comes to horror, I’ve always felt that it was important to leave things vague and mysterious. I like the idea of the audience filling in the gaps with their imagination. Especially since I think fear is very specific to each person, and it’s part of what makes horror such a personal genre. The balance between letting the audience know too much or too little must be hard to strike. I can only imagine the amount of work that goes into writing a good mystery. Imagine hiding clues so the audience can figure it out themselves if they wanted, but not too many clues or too strong of clues to make it obvious. It would take a ton of work, foresight, planning, and finesse.
I feel like my favorite kinds of horror approach the genre similarly. Junji-Ito is a good example (I know, I’ve talked about him before - I should find other horror examples, but I’m on the fly here cut me some slack!). He tends to create scenarios and monsters where the audience can understand their effects (i.e. human shaped holes in a cliff beckoning people to uncontrollably enter them) but is able to keep the mysticism and mechanics of it all extremely vague.
Why are people entering holes they feel were “made for them”? Who fucking knows! Who fucking cares! It’s happening and that’s all that matters!We don’t need to know that little Linda Clark and her friends summoned a Demon using a Ouija board and that’s causing the strange holes to appear and the only way to beat him is to bring a bucket of plaster and fill them in. No. The holes exist. The holes beckon. There is no greater reason. They just do. And there’s something really terrifying about that. It’s very eldritch.
Anyway, back to The Dollhouse. I love that The Dollhouse is trying. I think the devs clearly had a very strong idea with what this game is trying to say, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. I mulled the meaning around for a while. I had ideas, but none of them quite seemed correct. The cuck photo was pretty overt, so I was theorizing a tale of infidelity, but the in-game story is too esoteric, and doesn’t lean into those kinds of themes. Plus, the other mannequin rooms don’t really look like they are telling that story. My running theory is perhaps the mannequins were created by the queen and were once normal like me, and this person on the radio makes sacrifices to this mysterious queen every so often to keep it satiated. Again, that’s my best guess based on the limited information I have. I don’t know. I am kind of an idiot, so maybe I’m just overlooking the most obvious themes or hints, but I think that the fact this is a narrative based game that is this esoteric gives it shaky knees. I just need something to latch onto, and while I loved the art direction of this game I just can’t make heads or tails out of what it’s trying to say. This is one of those rare instances I would have loved to have just a little more explanation. Again, I think it’s difficult to pull off. I commend The Dollhouse for trying. I think it’s important to remind people that I’ve never created anything. I haven’t come close to creating a game like this. I’m just some idiot writing on the internet daily. I feel like The Dollhouse is so close to being really good and I want to love it. That’s part of the reason I wrote so much. I’m not trying to discourage anyone from creating - just giving my thoughts. Please take me with a grain of salt and vinegar. Please don’t stop creating. There’s a very cool vision here. I will be interested to see what these developer(s) come up with in the future.
If you’ve figured the narrative out, feel free to call me a dumbass and email an explanation to iamsamcain@gmail.com
Have a wonderful day or night my friends.
Recommend: PH 6 - slightly acidic
Replay Percentage Chance: 5%
Time Played: 12 minutes
Sam’s Take:
We play games of an extremely wide quality level for this project, so I think it’s important to clear up that while I have criticisms of this game, it is absolutely a real game. There is clear artistic vision, there are new ideas, it’s a real game. Sometimes I feel like I forget to mention that and end up praising a game like Pig that barely functions, and being more critical of a game like Creature Packets, which actually brings something new and exciting to the table. So before I go and start trying to dig through some of the issues I had with The Dollhouse, know what tier we are in. It is the real game tier, nothing about this game is lazy or broken.
Unfortunately for me, there’s just nothing happening in The Dollhouse that makes it stick in my brain. It’s uncomfortable and interesting enough while playing, but I’m so detached from everything that it was hard to connect with the protagonist, and after it was over all I could feel was a “huh, interesting”. It’s labeled as “interactive fiction”, which is a totally fine thing to be, but since there aren’t any gameplay elements to create an interactive connection, and the story is too vague to make a narrative one, it all bleeds into just creepy sounds and creepy images. They look good, they sound interesting, and I wanted to pull something out of them, but could not. I wish I had more concrete advice or a real answer as to why this didn’t work for me, but it’s difficult to convey the absence of something. You’d need to be a good critic to do that. Fuck.
Recommend: It’s 6 Minutes, do what you will.
Replay Percentage Chance: 2%
Time Played: 6 Minutes
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