My Haunted Doll Reviews

Short creepy little game! Enjoyed playing it and got it on sale at $0.49, very cheap!

57 cents for a game like this is a steal. Wonderful scares with simple graphics and story telling. By this game, it is a steal.

I'd previously tried the developer's platform games (with mixed results) and, seeing one of their top-down ones on sale, decided to give it a spin. I enjoyed my time with it, even if the game is short and not exactly amazing. The plot is simplistic. The game makes the unfortunate decision to explain 90% of it in a an introductory exposition dump that makes a Medieval prologue look positively cagey. The rest is mostly covered in a couple of other text screens between later levels or at the end, and just a little bit in the game itself. You play Mary, a buxom blonde who runs a county museum of random antiques out of her house and is an avowed skeptic. She never develops as a character. Mary buys a cursed doll (as the analytical consumer might glean from the title) and has to get rid of it while wandering the floors of her sprawling mansion as would cause a 19th-Century robber baron to lament the wanton excesses of contemporary museum curators. You make Mary walk around and automatically interact with things. The game starts off slow, enough to put off some players, because each floor is so huge and you have no indication of where to go. This slow pacing actually provides an eerie burn. Scares are few early on, and you spend so much time wandering that you get to wondering WHEN something will happen. The scares do ramp up later, eventually becoming so frequent they lose they're impact. In a couple of stretches you can't seem to go move than four yards without another poltergeist flowerpot startling/smacking into Mary. The jumpscares tend to hover at a conscientious level of restraint. The sounds and sights are enough to make you flinch with a little spark of alarm but not so loud or overwhelming that they have you tearing off your headphones and cursing the developer. Only in a few places can you actually die, and the game autosaves and lets you select levels so you won't have to replay too much. Mary now and then finds herself in the obligatory Alternate Realm™, where loudly cackling clown puppets with murderous intent materialize near her, and towards the end the doll herself comes after Mary. The developer specializes in bite-sized horror games, and this one will take you about 30 to 45 minutes to complete. The game engine is functional, and 16-bit-style graphics work. With the meager plot (the doll's history and the multiple entities within her are mentioned but never explored) and simple gameplay, it has limited replayability. I got it on sale for $0.55 and thought the price fair. The developer has imagination and a clear passion for horror. It would be neat to see him tackle a longer project, one that took a few hours to play through, had a deeper story and characters, and could fully exploit the gradual buildup and payoff. "My Haunted Doll" asks for a bit of indulgence (extending to its error-filmed but perfectly understandable text) and won't attract the average gamer. Those who like short, older-style horror games with restrained scares may find it, not a must-play, but worthwhile. Especially on sale.

this was a lot of fun, i also played "The Chills" by the same developer, and i quite like it. The writing hurt my soul a little bit, but i think it was a translation lol

The scariest part of this game was that I paid money to play it. The second scariest was the fact that despite it being September 20th, Mary decides to PURCHASE HALF A DOZEN FRESH PINE TREES TO DECORATE HER "Museum" (More like a converted hotel in her failing small town) TO CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS. ALSO SHE PUT BEDS FACING THE WRONG WAY LIKE A MANIAC - I KNOW IT WASN'T THE DOLL. Overall this game took 25 minutes from my life and jump scared me 3 times. I give this a September 20th/October 31st