Short Version: It’s very, very boring. I finished the whole thing, got all the trophies in about an hour and felt absolutely nothing throughout my experience. It’s a nice proof of concept, but the execution felt so empty and poorly done that I can’t recommend this to anyone, not even for the novelty of VR as a selling point. Save your money and look for a better narrative-based VR game elsewhere.

Long Version: Daaaaaamn Oasis Games! Back at it again with another title for PlayStation VR! This time, it’s a horror game called Weeping Doll, featuring a maid in a house and a mystery to uncover. Similar to Gone Home, you take control of a lady in a relatively empty high-class home, in which you need to figure out what happened during your absence. This would all sound really exciting if it weren’t for the fact that this entire game felt incredibly, cheap, boring, generic and empty. I truly hate to be the bearer of bad news when it comes to games, and I always try to be as positive as possible. However, when I played through Weeping Doll, I came out of it upset and underwhelmed.

Maids Don’t Get Paid Enough For This…

When speaking to the fact that it’s a PlayStation VR game, I have no complaints. The head tracking and the technical aspects of the game are solid and work how they are supposed to. It truly does feel like you are inside an abandoned house as you explore different rooms and solve some light puzzles to progress. In addition, there are a few set pieces in the game that genuinely sent a crawl down my spine, especially close to the end. Unfortunately, that’s about as much as I can say without pointing out everything else that I didn’t like about it.

I said that there are “things I didn’t like about it,” but I don’t really feel any sort of animosity towards it. It’s not like the game is broken or is unplayable in some way that doesn’t make the game function. What I mean is that everything that I see in this game is so bland and uninspired that left me not feeling anything at the end of the day. Similar to when I reviewed Samurai Warriors 4: Empires, I don’t know what’s worse: knowing precisely what’s wrong with the game and feeling strongly about what needs to be fixed, or playing through a product that functions, but is just so bland that you feel exactly the same as when you started, meaning that the game didn‘t do anything for you at all. Within all the things that I did in this game, I came out of it feeling absolutely nothing over this experience.

G-G-G-G-Ghosts!?

As you play the game, you can traverse the environment by placing a ghost of yourself somewhere in the room you are in, to which then you can teleport there. You also have an inventory where you can keep items in. This inventory manifests as cube-like slots all around you, giving an enormous amount of space when you’ll actually just need about 5 – 6 slots for your entire less than an hour journey. You can grab items with each of your two hands (controlled by the Dualshock 4. There is no PS Move support in this game, so the triggers control each hand) and combine them with each other as well. This would be an interesting mechanic, if it weren’t for the fact that you only do this once for a single puzzle, and then the game never brings it up again.

This is one of the biggest problems with Weeping Doll: They do everything half-assed. You always seem to do something new once and then never see it again, without exploring what could be done beyond that at all. Even the characters involved in the story are mostly seen through flashbacks presented as floating, monochrome slideshows in front of you whenever you interact with certain objects. Even those have problems as well, for you will always see them go super blurry for a couple seconds before they fully load into view. Even when you see these flashbacks clearly, you will still be underwhelmed at how poorly done the voice acting is, along with the incongruence of seeing Japanese people speak in British accents as if they came out of a Harry Potter movie tie-in game or something.

10 Bucks For A Quick One

Even when factoring the story out the equation, the game is still a massive bore. Most of your time will be spent trying to solve incredibly easy puzzles and taking in some of the most generic horror aspects ever, such as listening to a little girl sing a song, or dolls showing up everywhere without heads, or literally any cliché that involves the idea of little girls doing creepy things, which is possibly one of the most overdone horror tropes in history. This makes the game not only boring, but frustrating knowing that they would resort to such a played out resource in the horror genre. After realizing that it only took 30-40 minutes to beat the whole story, I spend another 20 trying to get all the trophies, and then deleted this game, because I’m sure I’ll never want to play it again, especially if one hour is all that it takes to complete the entire thing.

In the end, Weeping Doll feels like a small proof of concept for something that was suppose to be much bigger. Even with it’s small price tag of $9.99, I think your money will be better spent elsewhere. The atmosphere is nice and the use of VR can be effective, but the actual contents within it are bland, boring and done better in many other forms of media. The voice acting, along with the music, story and gameplay is forgettable at best and is not even worth the 30-40 minutes that it’ll take you to complete the entire thing.