Weeping Doll Review – Playstation VR

Oasis Games has published a few titles for Playstation VR and Weeping Doll adds to their line-up of games. Developed in the Chinese region by TianShe Media, Weeping Doll tells the story of two sisters, one born with a birth defect on her face and the other quite “normal”. Without going into details, the sister with the birth mark on her face is mistreated whilst the other is given all the love and attention.

Your job as a new housemaid is to uncover the mystery of a weeping doll and what it represents in terms of the family and their dark secret. There’s even more sinister goings on as the story unravels and in VR you get to play detective – kind of. To begin, Weeping Doll is a cheap game coming in at under £8 and offers around one hour of playtime. It’s a one time play game with no incentive to return once the mystery has been solved. It’s very easy to suggest this is a horror game but frankly it’s about as scary as a Scooby Doo cartoon – although lacking the humor here.

Your task is to move around the mansion interacting with objects and solving some very minor puzzles. There’s some decent atmosphere here but unfortunately the mansion is devoid of much life and a complete solitary experience. The story is conveyed via way of still images which pop up when interacting with particular objects and there’s the narrative of the maid as she spells out what needs to be done next. So for example a locked door requires a key which happens to be “hidden in a flower pot” nearby.

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Movement is handled via way of teleportation, so a ghost image of the maid can be placed and then you blink forwards to the chosen location. It’s a bit fiddly but does a fine job of reducing motion sickness. You can turn your view on the spot but this is handled by snap movements using the right thumbstick on the controller and again is a method for reducing motion sickness. It’s a shame more conventional controls aren’t available for those who have the stomach or VR legs for it as this would have helped immersion quite a bit. Another let down is not being able to interact with objects using the move controllers which seems like a missed opportunity and would have greatly enhanced the player’s immersion.

In terms of visuals the graphics appear quite detailed at first glance but tend to look way too blurry on the Playstation VR for some reason (the Rift and Vive versions should fare better in this regard). The short view distance should mean the rendering could have included higher texture details and with no characters to render taking resources the expectation for something more visually pleasing could have been achieved. Considering some of the other VR games on the system it’s a shame the game’s visuals are lacking despite some decent design such as creepy dolls placed in awkward positions and various themed rooms.

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Audio is of a low quality though with the narration being under par despite conveying the story well enough. A lack of emotion in the narrator’s voice dispels any sense of fear or intrigue and feels more like a bedtime story for the under 10s. There’s little in the way of sound effects aside from some awful clicking sounds of the housemaid’s footsteps which becomes the prominent sound throughout.

As mentioned there’s no reason to replay this game once beaten as there’s not much to do outside of interacting with few objects and solving a handful of puzzles. Once the story has been told there’s simply nothing else to find. Perhaps some hidden collectibles could have prolonged the experience but as it stands you’ll get an hour of play out of this game and that’s it.

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Weeping Doll sounded like a decent VR idea on paper but the reality is it’s pretty dull and uninspiring for a VR game. You can get immersed into the mansion setting but there’s just too many negatives which bring the experience down to its knees. In some ways it feels like a tech demo of how to render a mansion in VR as the supernatural or creepy elements are extremely low key. As a story telling exercise it partially succeeds but the execution could have used more polish. As it stands and in consideration of the low price it’s hard to recommend this game unless you’ve exhausted all other avenues and are crying out for something else to try.

Score 4/10

Written by: Rob Cram

Rob Cram has hundreds of video game reviews, thousands of articles under his belt with years of experience in gaming and tech. He aims to remain fair and free from publisher/developer influence. With his extensive knowledge, feels his gaming opinions are valid and worth sharing. Agreement with his views are entirely optional. He might have a bias towards cyberpunk.