Disclaimer: I received a free copy of Damn Dolls from publisher QUByte Interactive as part of 420MacMan's #IndieSelect last week. The game was given and received without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and that experience be shared through social media channels. All pictures and words included in this article, unless otherwise noted, are my own from my own experience playing the game.
Systems: Windows, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: April 22, 2020
Play Time: 1 - 2 Hours
Damn Dolls is a short first-person survival horror game where you do not so much solve puzzles to work your way through a haunted house as you make your way through a haunted house and try to avoid instant-kill gotcha moments and dolls. Although what specifically dolls have to do with the story is not made clear.
The story leading into Damn Dolls is a simple one, and really is not harmed by it nor would it be harmed without the opening story. The text probably could have used a little bit of English proofing but it is easily understood what the developer Rodrigo Riquetto was getting across. You are the friend of a girl who recently went missing in the vicinity of the old house that according to local folklore is haunted after a number of people in the area went missing, presumably killed by a man named Rodrick who was then murdered by a mob of citizens but his body was never discovered.
My first gripe with the game is that you cannot invert the y-axis camera, so I felt somewhat encumbered throughout the game, more so when aiming and running straight without looking up at the ceiling or down at the floor became necessary to survive. I will always bring this up as an issue for games with me because it honestly feels like an easy enough option to integrate into games made in the Unity Engine, but I could be wrong. Or it is just something that some developers do not consider because they do not play with an inverted y-axis or think that because their game is not a flight sim, why would someone play this way.
So you start the game in a darkened living room armed with a gun and five rounds of ammunition. Why you have a gun is not made clear, but according to
updates made to the Steam version, the choice was made to start the player with ammunition although you do not need to use the gun until after the first "part of the game." In this first section, you find that there is a floating doll blocking the only hallway leading out to the rest of the room and if you try to sneak around the floating doll, you will instantly die. When you respawn, you start back in the main living room will your gun and all five rounds of ammunition, even if you tried shooting the floating doll. Although, thankfully as you progress through the game and you die again, and you will die multiple times, the game does implement a checkpoint-like system starting you with however much ammunition you last had the last time you killed a doll.
Killing dolls is something that you kind of end up stumbling upon as apart from the fact that you start the game with a loaded gun and you find boxes of ammunition lying around like a Resident Evil game, there is no real indication that you are supposed to shoot specific dolls. There are times while exploring the house that you hear a scare-chord and out of the darkness some horrific-looking doll comes bounding towards you. And with the exception of the blue clown dolls, there is no visual indication that shooting a doll has any effect until the thing stumbles forward when it dies.
Again, with the exception of the blue dolls, most dolls take around 4-5 shots to kill, which makes me a little worried that you could accidentally waste ammunition to the point where you are no longer able to beat the game because the blue clowns block areas such as locked doors and keys required to proceed through the game. I briefly thought that maybe the game would start you over with five rounds of ammunition if you had fewer than five rounds when you died, but there was one instance where I respawned with only four rounds.
There are a number of legitimate scary moments in this game and not all are cheap GOTCHA moments which at first are fun until you respawn (see above). There are moments when a door might open after you pass it by revealing something harmless inside or there might be a scare-chord as you enter a room to find furniture on the ceiling. Stuff like this is unsettling, but it is the GOTCHA deaths that this game really throws at you. In one specific instance, early on in the game, you find a group of candles on the ground and the game allows you to interact with the candles, "Press A" text on the screen, and everything. If you do "Press A" when on a candle you get a jump scare, a scare=chord, and an instant-kill screen showing you what looks like a fleshy burned doll.
In another instance, you open a dumbwaiter and a box jumps out and eats you, mimic-style. After examining the area and the dumbwaiter, I did not see anything that gave any indication not to open this specific dumbwaiter as the previous two you opened were full of world-building atmosphere. And then you restart back in the living room.
While not a bad game per se, I do wish that there were more puzzles to solve similar to the first puzzle with the floating doll in the hallway, but even that was not entirely clear as finding the "original doll" to burn was difficult as it was in an out of the way area that I was only able to find with a walkthrough. But after that first puzzle, the rest of the game was finding out where to go next, what the tell was for when a doll was going to try and kill you, then killing that doll (most likely after respawning a few times), maybe finding a key and hoping that you still have enough ammunition or find more before you come across another murderous doll. The survival horror aspect of the game, having enemies to kill with very limited ammunition was pretty well done to a certain extent but I still think you could accidentally get yourself into a hole where you do not have enough ammunition and must start over.
I guess I feel comfortable saying that this was an alright game. I was thankful it was short because having to constantly respawn in the same room and traveling throughout the house all over again, oftentimes re-collecting the same three boxes of ammunition, again and again, got a bit old, as well as worrying if I had wasted too much ammunition to beat the game. And the constant high-pitched laughter that you could hear throughout the entire house for the entire game got old quickly as well. Yeah, Damn Dolls had its good moments but were overshadowed a bit more by all of the things I would have changed.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
No comments:
Post a Comment