Weeping Doll

Weeping Doll had a lot of potential, and it’s genuinely disappointing that it wasn’t able to follow through with it. This one you can’t chalk up as developer teething pains with VR; this game would be every bit as flawed, regardless of the platform it was on.

There’s nothing all that scary about Weeping Doll; any sort of creepy imagery just tends to fall flat and the game’s voice acting can, at times, make the game feel more comedy than horror. The game’s lack of an ending didn’t disappoint me, it just left me bewildered. The headset came off, I shrugged my shoulders, and just moved on.

In the end, horror aficionados will probably prove the harshest audience for Weeping Doll: the potential for VR horror has already been seen in various demos and titles, creating a deep hunger for more fleshed-out and frightful experiences. Weeping Doll’s attempts to startle or unnerve players fail harder than a PG-rated horror movie on ABC Family.

Going into Weeping Doll I was hoping to experience a horror game in the glory that is VR. Sadly, Weeping Doll didn’t deliver much of anything, except a simple puzzle solving game that feels undercooked.

The muddled mismatch of time periods could be forgiven if the writing wasn't so woeful and the voice acting so unintentionally amusing.

The sad thing about Weeping Doll is that the concept could have generated some excellen VR games. Taking tales from across Asia and adapting them in to spooky VR experiences, a virtual reality version of Ringu, for example, would be brilliant. However, the execution for Weeping Doll is poor, from the laughable dialogue to the puzzles which can be solved in a matter of seconds. When rated next to the brilliant Here They Lie for PlayStation VR, Weeping Doll just doesn’t come up to scratch.

Weeping Doll is a brief presentation of experiments that do not work in virtual reality. 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.

Weeping Doll's one of those games where you can see the intentions of the developer, but the end product just isn't very good. The muddled mismatch of time periods could be forgiven if the writing wasn't so woeful and the voice acting so unintentionally amusing. There's the nugget **** idea here, but like an action figure with its appendages in the wrong places, it's been sloppily assembled.