Where Dolls Hang Trailer Spooks Insider Gaming 28 Games Later Horror Showcase

Steelkrill Studio has prepared an absolute doll of a game for us all. Dolls are small, harmless, inoffensive inanimate objects, which should make the ‘horror’ aspect an afterthought.

Cue Where Dolls Hang to make these toys perpetually terrifying. Mixing psychological horror with survival elements, as you aren’t safe here, the title references its material, and as a detective, it’s your job to see what’s up—aside from the vertical dolls.

What Is Where Dolls Hang?

Please check out our exclusive Where Dolls Hang interview, featuring a lengthy chat with Steelkrill Studios founder Ryan Poretlli!

Features

VHS Films & Movies
- Discover VHS tapes hidden throughout the game, featuring real classic films that you can actually watch in-game. Find a working TV and VHS player, insert one of the tapes you’ve collected, and sit back to watch movies such as Night of the Living Dead and more. Search carefully, as some VHS tapes play a key role in the game’s story and may reveal important clues about what happened.
Camera & Investigation
- Equipped with a camera, you’ll document the strange events and discoveries you encounter. Search abandoned locations, inspect your surroundings, and collect clues that gradually reveal what happened here. Not everything you discover will provide an immediate answer. Some pieces of the story only begin to make sense as you venture deeper.
Survival Horror
- You won’t always be able to confront what is hunting you. When something begins stalking you, you’llneed to run, hide, and use the environment to survive. Hide inside lockers and other hiding places, break line of sight, and listen carefully for whatever might be nearby. Sometimes the best way to survive is simply not to be seen.
Puzzles
- Throughout your journey, you’ll encounter puzzles and obstacles standing between you and the truth. Search your surroundings for clues, find important items, interact with the environment, and solve puzzles to continue deeper into the mystery. Some answers may be hidden somewhere you would rather not explore
Light Survival Elements
- Resources are limited, and survival requires making use of what you can find. Crafting is intentionally simple and focused on keeping yourself alive. Find resources that can be combined to create healing items, allowing you to recover after dangerous encounters. You’ll need to carefully manage what you have as you continue your journey.
Dynamic Environment
- Rain can mask the sounds you make, making it harder for enemies to hear you—but it can also reduce your visibility. Stepping on glass can also make noise and will make the enemy draw attention to you. As darkness falls, familiar locations can become far more threatening.
Across the Sea
- At one point during your journey, you’ll need to take a boat across the sea, leaving the safety of the shoreline behind as you travel towards another part of the mystery. Surrounded by open water with nowhere to hide, the journey offers a very different kind of isolation from the forests and houses you’ve explored before. And reaching the other side doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve reached safety.
The World
- Your journey will take you through forests filled with hanging dolls, abandoned houses overtaken by mannequins and porcelain figures, caves, isolated beaches, rocky coastlines, and forgotten structures. Mannequins stand silently in dark rooms. Porcelain dolls watch from shelves. Hundreds of dolls hang from trees and ceilings.
Narrative Premise
- You arrive searching for answers. Equipped with your camera, you begin documenting abandoned locations and disturbing discoveries as you try to understand what happened in this strange place. What initially appears to be an abandoned region filled with dolls gradually reveals something much darker.