Damn Dolls

I have a friend who constantly accuses me of being too negative. He says that "games are meant to be fun" and tells me that I'm being too critical when it comes to bad games. Of course, the truth is, he spends most of his time playing good games that don't need to be raked over the coals. He's not putting in the hard work that goes along with playing the worst of the worst. If he were to play even a few minutes of the recently-released Switch game Damn Dolls, he would see things from my perspective. He would throw all that positivity nonsense out the window and embrace the hate that comes from playing a truly terrible game. And believe me, you're going to be hard-pressed to find a truly terrible game that is worse than Damn Dolls. We have a lot to unpack.

This is the story of a girl named Ana who goes missing at a creepy old house in the middle of the woods. Word on the street is that this house used to be owned by a local toy store owner who many believe kidnapped and murdered innocent young women. Unable to prove these allegations in court, the locals took the law into their own hands and pummeled the man to death. Fearing the worst, Ana's best friend, Suzi, has decided to search the house for clues to her whereabouts. You're not going to like what she finds.

If that setup feels a little bare on details, don't worry, you won't have to remember any of it. The truth is, the story we're told at the start barely connects to the game we're about to play. In fact, the horror elements might be more effective if you just ignore the stuff about missing girls and vigilante justice. All you need to know is that you're stuck in a house with a bunch of killer dolls. That should be scary enough.

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Damn Dolls is a first-person horror game where the goal is to explore the house and find the items you need to continue the investigation. This mostly means picking up keys that will unlock new parts of the home, though it's just as important to grab the flashlight and all of those extra bullets laying around. There aren't really any puzzles to solve, just keys to pick up and spooky rooms to explore.

The challenging part is that just about anything can kill you. Get too close to that weird floating doll in the hallway and you die. Step on the candles and you die. Pop one of the balloons in the party room and you die. Open up a birthday present and you die. Do pretty much anything in this game and you die. This is all about trial and error. Die enough times and you start to figure out where you can go and what you can do, all while hopefully making progress towards the vague goal you're supposedly working on.

The truth is, Damn Dolls is the kind of game you could probably beat in under ten minutes once you've memorized the path. The game only has a dozen or so steps, most of which involve going to a room and collecting a key, then going to a different room and collecting a key, which sends you to yet another room to ... look, you get the point. Once you know where the keys are, you'll have no problem running through the house and dodging dolls. It's at this point where the game stops being scary and becomes mind-numbingly tedious.

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Actually, on second thought, that happens almost immediately. If it's not the constant dying and trial and error gameplay that doesn't wear you down, it will be that never-ending doll laugh in the background that will do the job. Or the doll traps that don't work. Or the crummy gameplay that makes it difficult to do even simple things, like picking up bullets and opening doors. Or the limited bullets, that can literally make it impossible for you to beat the game. Or maybe it's the ending, which is so abrupt and unsatisfying that I honestly thought it was a joke at first. Or maybe it's all of these things adding up to one of the worst gaming experiences I've ever had. In the two hours it took me to beat Damn Dolls, I never once had fun.

The even bigger problem is that I was never scared. It wasn't fright I experienced when I would accidentally die for no good reason, but rather frustration and annoyance. It was pure hatred I felt when I came up one bullet short and couldn't beat the game without starting over. It was embarrassment for the developers when I saw the blurry graphics and repetitive textures. There were a lot of things I felt while playing Damn Dolls, yet fear was never part of it. The best part of the game is deleting it from my Switch and knowing that I'll never have to play it ever again. Now that's satisfaction.