Its theme is neither frightening nor coherent, its puzzles are mundane and straightforward, player movement is disorienting and inelegant, and its visual aesthetic imitates the vision of a person with a dangerous blood alcohol concentration. Weeping Doll blunders its format worse than Digital Pictures’ full-motion video projects miscalculated the Sega CD.
A maiden voyage through Weeping Doll triggers a suspicion of hardware failure. Everything, absolutely everything in the game looks like a blurry mess. The PlayStation VR hardware, for its part, is susceptible to physical weaknesses. Oily skin can grease the lenses, heavy breathing or humidity can fog the viewing area, and an improper fit can create poor viewing angles. Weeping Doll, even with the hardware operating in ideal conditions, looks terrible.
Oddly, Weeping Doll looks better when viewed by spectators on a normal television screen. Muddy textures are slightly clearer, the jagged lines on edges are less pronounced, and items are visually legible from up close. Technically the game still looks like a product of 2001, but you can actually see what you’re doing. In virtual reality, however, every object appears as irreparably zoomed-in. It’s like playing with your face right next to the television, or, regardless of any inherent visual impairments, you have become farsighted.
Looks are not everything but at the dawn of virtual reality they are kind of the thing. People make a significant financial investment in hardware that was designed to facilitate visceral and exciting experiences. Weeping Doll grants the ability to look around inside of a room, but can’t manage other ideas to compliment this very basic feature.
Basic player movement is another race where Weeping Doll trips across the starting line. The game is presented in first-person, although the slightest movement of your head in any direction corrupts the field of view. It’s tough not to see fleshy polygonal bits of your avatar protruding from the periphery. You don’t actually move, in first-person; you control a static ghost of your avatar that can move up to five feet at a time. You then teleport to that position. This is neither smooth nor elegant, and trying to combine it with an intended direction creates a disorienting reaction. Restricting camera rotation to 90-degree increments is another puzzling move, as is dubbing in the same click clack noise effect every time a step is taken.
Teleportation as a substitute for true movement has been implemented in games like Batman: Arkham VR and a number of HTC Vive titles. It’s a workable solution to a common problem; motion with head movement in VR tends to make people sick. Teleporting around is the cure. Even though other titles are first-generation experiences, they still feel light years ahead of Weeping Doll’s method of character movement. It’s uncomfortable and weird, as if it was built in a vacuum where other VR games never existed.
Weeping Doll is presented as (judging by the cellular phones in use) an early 2000’s ghost story. A married couple had twin girls, but one was born with a threatening birth mark on her face. Her parents presented her with a similarly scarred doll to keep her company. Very little in the way of narrative or motivation is provided, other than to suggest the girls’ father wasn’t a fan of slight facial imperfections and responded by being cruel to his “lesser” daughter. The player controls the maid, who, judging by her evaluation of the situation and slight familiarity with the family, is a highly functioning amnesiac.
Here is Weeping Doll’s description from its official press release: Weeping Doll is a dark, story-driven psychological mystery where dolls come alive, fueled by the negative thoughts of their child owners. Players must solve difficult puzzles in eerie surroundings as a tortured girl’s doll takes revenge on her parents—and things only get scarier from there! I only include this because it describes the entire game. Sentient doll comes to life and takes revenge on the parents is the climax of Weeping Doll. There is nothing beyond this point and it does not get scarier from there. There isn’t much of Weeping Doll to spoil and I have no idea why it was revealed in the synopsis.
Basic operation of Weeping Doll involves traversing from room to room inside of a large home. Each room is an escalating series of light puzzles. To get out the first room, you must move a plant and find a key. To get out of the second room, you must pick a hat up off the floor and place it on the hat rack. Objects that you’re able to pick up are highlighted in white and, outside of an odd hammer and a shoe, are all used as solutions inside the areas they are found.
The spirit of a girl (or the actual girl, or the spirit inhabiting a doll — this information isn’t clear) slowly leads the player to other rooms around the house. One room requires a basic combinations of objects to escape while the other demands the player assemble a picture of the living room from twelve tiles scattered inside another room. All of these actions reveal keys that are used to open other rooms in the house. Sometimes doors close on their own.
Resident Evil and Sweet Home established haunted mansions as plausible spaces for interactive experiences. Esoteric puzzles were excused (and eventually ironed out of Resident Evil) as breaks between carnage and violence. Weeping Doll, however, consumes its thirty minute run time only with nonsense puzzles. There is no break in pacing because Weeping Doll doesn’t have enough substance to constitute the need for pacing. It’s over and done and, unlike Gone Home, seems indifferent to visual storytelling. “Dolls are creepy, can you believe what happened here” is Weeping Doll’s entire story.
There is also the lingering suspicion that Weeping Doll was not completely finished before it was shoved out the door. A kitchen, a dining room, and a series of bedrooms exist for no reason. Dialogue looks like it was written by a non-native English speaker, and the vocal performance sounds culled from first-takes. You’re presented with a large inventory to store items, but it’s only used once to retain an out-of-sequence key. Several doors upstairs are never opened. Peeking through holes in the wall is hilarious for reasons I’ll let you experience for yourself.
Weeping Doll’s basic operation is also prone to grievous errors. Trying to unlock a door with the incorrect key results in the player throwing the key (or whatever’s in their hands) on the floor. Usually I was able to pick it back up, but in one instance the key disappeared. This key was required for progression, so I went to the menu and reset the game from the last checkpoint. Upon doing that I was greeted by my lost key floating in the air and invisible to my touch. I had to restart Weeping Doll from the beginning. This was not what I wanted to do.
Weeping Doll is accurately surmised through its quiet fart of an ending. You enter a room, listen to a voice repeat the synopsis of the game, a trophy pops, and nothing. I didn’t even know the game was over until I found a newly unlocked door in the house and found a plaque with Weeping Doll’s publisher and a bunch of portraits of what I assumed to be the development team. There is no catharsis, no satisfaction, and no reason that accurately states what your character is even doing there. You’re just there presumably for the rest of eternity. It was not the intended effect but this is the scariest fate I can picture for the only objective character in Weeping Doll.
There are several rational arguments for Weeping Doll’s weak performance: It’s only $10. PlayStation VR has only existed for two weeks. It’s close to Halloween. It’s less than an hour of your time. None of these are viable. Kitchen, Resident Evil 7’s demos, and Here They Lie are more effective at creating horror. Two of those are free.
The early days of virtual reality feel like the rise of more powerful consoles and computers in the early 90’s. A development studio named Digital Pictures used this power to create interactive movies, eventually releasing full-motion video titles like Night Trap, Double Switch, and Slam City With Scottie Pippen to the Sega CD. This was a dramatic miscalculation that ruined the reputation of the console and suffered a severe pushback from the gaming community. People were looking for games, not garish reinterpretations of Dragon’s Lair.
It’s a different time and a different place, but Digital Picture’s incredible folly is the same bet Weeping Doll is placing on virtual reality. It wants to believe that placing objects in different places is a suitable call to adventure. That watching a key hover out of your hand and magically open a door is a satisfactory use of the hardware. That a premise is an appropriate substitute for a story. Weeping Doll is operating on the assumption that players want to relive late 90’s game design through poorly constructed virtual reality. I cannot imagine a person who actually believes this.
