Close beta sign ups open now
“A horror game that pays homage to film noir with an intricate Stephen King like narrative” is how the description on the Steam page for Dollhouse starts, which could mean basically anything, but I kind of like that. The above trailer doesn’t do a whole lot to explain the actual game, instead offering puzzling lines like, “Forget a remembered pasted or remember a forgotten future.”
What I do know from the trailer is Dollhouse features four-player cooperative and competitive play, an invisible pursuer, investigating within a time limit, procedurally-generated campaigns, and multiple playable characters.
Steam’s description page for Dollhouse sheds a bit more light on the actual story:
“The story centers inside the mind of Marie, a detective trying to unravel her past. As she progresses further into her mind she realizes that she may not be who she thinks she is. Dollhouse’s narrative adapts to the player’s decisions based on what memories the players kept or deleted to define who they are. All this is happening inside a world that reinvents ways players perceive horror in both singleplayer and multiplayer modes utilizing suspense over jump scares.”
Sounds ambitious, as many indie games do, but at least it seems to be going for something fresh; no survival, no jump scares, more narrative. The gameplay sounds equally interesting as “you cannot win or lose… you can only try to craft a story you believe in. You are being chased by your own conscience, however the twist is that you can see through its eyes to create an interesting dynamic of cat and mouse.” Do you understand what that means? I don’t, and I’m okay with it.
Dollhouse will be released on PS4 and PC in 2015, and a closed beta starts soon that you can sign up for here.
