Dollhouse
is a short Explorer Horror game by DeyJay5 released in August of 2020.
It begins with Sophie, a hardworking mother of three children — Amanda, Darin, and Natalie — explaining the strange events of the past week to her neighbor Miranda. It all started when she was seeing her kids off to school, only for her to realize she completely forgot Natalie's birthday, and scrambled to get her a present. Luckily, a new doll store, Antionette's Dollhouse, had just opened a few weeks ago and its dolls were already selling quite well with the townsfolk, so Sophie bought one for Natalie as a present. Over the next week, Sophie was haunted by strange events in her house at night; Natalie's doll kept appearing in odd places, the TV kept being turned on (to nothing but static), and her phone got calls from nowhere.
Then her oldest daughter dies from suffocation, and the next day Natalie is nowhere to be found. Convinced the doll must be responsible, she goes back to the doll store, only to discover a giant dollhouse hidden behind it. She soon finds that Natalie and the other children have been taken hostage by Antoinette and her living dolls to be their playthings forever, and now Sophie must traverse the dollhouse and its traps to save her daughter.
Examples:
- Antepiece: In Chapter 2, Sophie has to play a game with a doll where she must roll a ball onto a red square, and she has to do this in a few rooms of increasing difficulty, but there is no penalty for getting it wrong besides having to press the button to reset the puzzle. The second half of the game introduces yellow squares that will kill Sophie if stepped on, but you still have all the time to learn how they work. This is to prepare you for Chapter 3, Escape, which consists of a section where you have to do three of these puzzles while being chased down by an army of dolls and thus having limited time.
- Big Bad: Antionette is the owner of the titular dollhouse where she and her living dolls hold Natalie and the other children captive, and whom Sophie is trying to rescue.
- Creepy Dollhouse: The main setting of Chapters 2 and 3, and an important location in the plot, is a giant dollhouse hidden within a new doll shop. It is absolutely gigantic, with many traps and dangers, is populated by evil living dolls, and is where the dolls hold the children they've captured.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: While Antionette is cruel to the human characters, she does love her doll creations like actual children. She is furious whenever Sophie kills them, calling her a murderer, and when they all get drowned by a flood, she's next seen sobbing and declaring her intent to end her life — right after she ends Sophie's in retaliation.
- Forgotten Birthday: The inciting incident is Sophie forgetting Natalie's birthday and quickly trying to find a present, leading her to purchase a doll from Antionette's Dollhouse, the strange new doll store. Said doll turns out to be sapient and malevolent.
- Mama Bear:
- Sophie is willing to brave the traps of the titular dollhouse, sneak around a patrolled school, brave the sewers, and personally kill the Creepy Dolls and fight Antionette one-on-one, all to rescue her remaining children and keep them safe.
- Antionette herself is a villainous version; she genuinely seems to consider her living dolls as her children, and when Sophie starts killing them, Antionette specifically starts going after Sophie, calling her a murderer. In the final chapter, the dolls all dying to a flood causes Antionette to utterly lose it and try to personally kill Sophie in retaliation.
- Police Are Useless: Though the cops make a good effort to keep the schoolkids safe from the dolls in Chapter 4, they prove to be no match for the dolls, with several dying to them.
