The Doll Shop Reviews
The Doll Shop is a hand-drawn narrative game by Atelier Sentô, an interactive comic that tells the story of four days in the life of a solitary doll restorer in a snow-covered Japanese village, amid the disappearance of a little girl and the return of a childhood friend. What works is the writing, more layered than the demo let on, and a psychological horror that rests entirely on terror, with no jump scares and nothing graphic on screen, yet reaches an extremely high level of unsettling. The watercolour art direction, meticulous in every detail, is the other great strength. The only shortcoming flagged concerns the mechanics: compared with other narrative games, repairs and exploration take up little space, a limitation that is understandable in a work built on illustration and story. Multiple endings, usually a weak point for those who write them, here shed light on different sides of a complex protagonist without compromising the solidity of the plot. It is aimed at those looking for narrative depth and aesthetic taste rather than elaborate mechanics, and its story is hard to forget, both for how it presents itself and for everything rotten it hides beneath.