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 diorama-
like 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 gorgeous-
looking 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 toA
s 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 doll-
maker in a remote Japanese village that has been tainted by tragedy, and
that’s currently being blanketed in endless snow.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 itwas 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.NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A story-focused horror
game set in a
beautifully illustrated
Japanese town.
EXPECT TO PAY
Free
DEVELOPER
Atelier Sento
PUBLISHER
In-house
REVIEWED ON
AMD A4-6300, 6GB
RAM, GeForce GT 610
MULTIPLAYER
None
LINK
http://www.bit.ly/DollShop83
A well-told and original
horror story from Atelier
Sento that makes the
most of its evocative
rural Japan setting.VERDICTLIVING DOLL
Painting dolls and eating ramen in creepy adventure THE DOLL SHOP. By Tom Sykes
There’s a
tangible sense
of depth to the
village
environmentThe Doll Shop
FREE GAMES REVIEW
There are very few
people left in the village.The protagonist is a
keen lepidopterist.This doll has a smashing face.