Doll Dress Up

Genre: Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Doll Dress Up, released on Nintendo Switch in 2024, is a game, or perhaps app, where you do exactly as the title says, and dress up cartoony “dolls”. It may not surprise you to discover that this isn’t really the sort of game that appeals to me personally, but as I try to do in this sort of situation, I try to keep an open mind and look at this with an eye for how well this game will appeal to its intended audience, which is pretty clearly young children. So if you’re the parent of a young child who you think this game might appeal to, read on to see if it’s worth picking up!

The presentation here is mostly decent, with cartoony static doll designs (all girls), reasonably detailed outfits, and somewhat cartoony backgrounds, backed by lighthearted but not especially noteworthy music. There’s absolutely nothing particularly great here, but I suppose overall the presentation is fine.

However, there is one element tied into the presentation that I can’t help but feel is really questionable and out-of-place here. Every time you start a new doll to dress up, the doll looks disheveled, dirty, blemished, and touting some pretty nasty-looking facial growths (I’d call them pimples, but they seem too big for that). What’s more, your first task in “dressing up” the dolls is to treat these blemishes, including using a needle to draw out all the pus from the growths.

Yeah, gross. And while I’m sure some youngsters will find this gross stuff amusing or fascinating, for others it may well take them out of the entire experience.

After this, the dressing up goes more or less like you’d expect, though this game makes the bizarre decision of making your cursor controlled by the right analog stick, leaving the left stick to do nothing during gameplay. Also, you will independently decide each different article of clothing to put on the doll (apart from underwear because this isn’t that sort of game) as well as eyes, hair, makeup, and accessories.

Here is my next major complaint – while you have multiple different types of clothing to choose, and some interesting choices within each (including options that border on copy infringement properties like Hatsune Miku, Cardcaptor Sakura, Harley Quinn, and Wonder Woman), you don’t really have many options to choose from for each article of clothing – maybe one or two dozen tops, unless you buy paid DLC. Oddly, this limitation seems forced, since different dolls have different clothing options, a pointless limitation given that all dolls are in the same pose and have the same body shape.

Finally, when you finish dressing your doll, you can choose a backdrop for it, and are forced to take a photo of the finished result. After this, your selections are scored and rated and… oh, what’s that? Ah, yes, your choices are apparently judged after the fact, based on criteria that the player isn’t privy to. And in a title seemingly built on giving kids the freedom to make artistic choices, I can’t help but feel kinda’ depressed that this game might turn around and essentially tell the kid “sorry, but your fashion sense stinks”. To be fair, I don’t think it actually would do this – with one doll I tried piecing together the most garish mis-matched outfit I could, and then with the next doll I made absolutely zero changes to the default clothes, and the game still gave me a high score for both, so I suspect this element is just for show.

At only $5, Doll Dress Up isn’t a pricey game, but even so I don’t think I’d want my young kids playing it. The combination of grossout stuff, limited content, awkward controls, and unnecessary judgment all make for something that seems far less joyful and carefree than buying an actual doll to dress up. Or, if you’re a cheapskate, just printing out paper doll stuff for your kid to play with – you can probably find more variety, and your kid doesn’t need to worry about being judged on their ability to match their shoes and accessories.

tl;dr – Doll Dress Up is, as the name indicates, a game where the point is to dress up dolls. Unfortunately, even for young kids who this might appeal to, this game has problems – a terrible lack of content, awkward controls, grossout moments forced on the player, and players having every one of their outfits “judged”. The result is a game that just seems to have far too many issues, and I suspect youngsters interested in this would be better off playing with actual dolls.

Grade: D

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