In short
The Doll Shop by Atelier Sentô, the French comic-book duo, is a hand-drawn narrative adventure released on Steam for PC on 12 October 2026, and the review of the full game confirms its quality: a psychological horror story set in a snow-bound Japanese village, built on terror suggested rather than shown, with multiple endings, essential restoration mechanics and watercolour illustration meticulous in every detail, at the price of a limited gameplay.
Four days in the mind of a loner, barricaded in a small snow-covered world: a tale with unsettling undertones, drawn and written with great skill.
The first task The Doll Shop gives the player is to restore a doll’s face. The protagonist, a young craftsman who lives alone in a snow-covered Japanese village, has on his table an Ichimatsu doll with a black bob and a floral kimono, its white face blotched with stains, and a box of watercolors to repaint it, because a customer, Mrs. Fujimoto, asked him to put it back in order.
Around Halloween one often expects mild, almost adolescent horror with a lighthearted tone, and a game its authors present as both a love story and an horror story suggests exactly that. The demo lasted about half an hour, stopped at the point where the story changes tone, and showcased mostly the illustration work, while the full version also allows judging the story and the writing, which turn out to be far more layered than the demo implied, and not only because of the presence of multiple endings.
The Doll Shop is a hand-drawn narrative game by Atelier Sentô, the French comic book duo formed by Cécile Brun and Olivier Pichard, released on October 12, 2026 on Steam for PC. A little girl has disappeared from the village and, around the same time, a childhood friend returns from the city, wanting to reconnect with him after many years apart. The story unfolds over four days, during which the protagonist seems to face a choice between his dolls and the chance of a new life beside his rediscovered friend, and the decisions made in dialogue determine which of the three endings opens up. Reaching one of them, without touching the optional content, takes from two to three-plus hours of play, if you linger in certain spots and, above all, if, like me, you stop to contemplate the illustrated panels.
The climate in which these choices mature is dark and surreal. In the preview I noted that in the demo the violence stayed off-screen and that in that atmosphere it was hard to expect jump scares, a point in favor for those who, like me, don’t appreciate these somewhat trite strategies. The full game confirms this impression, and the unease continues to arise from the atmosphere and the details suggested rather than from what the game shows.
This review covers the full game. I have gathered every spoiler about the endings and secrets in one section, “Endings and optional content (spoilers)”, which opens after the halfway point of the article. The earlier sections do not reveal how any of the three endings plays out. Those who want to stay unspoiled can read the demo preview and come back here after finishing the game.
A Good Horror Story
Psychological horror is today the form that convinces the most, and the genre has long since stopped relying solely on splatter and sudden jolts.
The genre fans know and have long established the golden rules for writing a good horror story, and it was the King of Thrills himself, Stephen King, who spoke about them in his 1981 essay Danse Macabre. To be effective, horror must unfold in three stages. First comes terror, the highest and most refined level, in which nothing is shown but everything is suggested: it is the part that engages the psychological dimension the most. Only afterwards comes horror, when the threat takes increasingly concrete shape until it shows itself in full. Finally there is revulsion, where disgust and gore shift the weight from the reader’s mind to their stomach and, in our case, the player’s.
A good horror story, then, should pass through these three stages in sequence to be complete and satisfy the palate of genre fans. Many stories, however, can reverse this order or focus on just one of these aspects and still be effective, if they are well written, if there is intelligent direction behind them and, above all, if the characters are not made of tissue paper.
Any story should have memorable characters, with depth and complex structures, so that one can grow close to them, sometimes to the point of identifying with them, and consequently feel empathy. The more the level of empathy grows, the more the moment when something happens to them manages to move us emotionally. Horror is pure emotion, even when one seeks a rational explanation behind the extraordinary events that occur, as in the recent and highly successful Stranger Things or in the historic and timeless Alien.
The story of The Doll Shop is built entirely on terror, the highest step of King’s ladder. Atelier Sentô constructs the horror progressively, and for most of the story it remains on the psychological plane: the first warning signs, which could go unnoticed in the demo, take shape little by little, and the revelations only arrive on the last day.
Having multiple endings, the story changes conclusion depending on the choices made in dialogue and the bonuses unlocked. What remains the same in every playthrough is the protagonist, and it is from his character that the story starts.
A Lonely Life
The story begins with the protagonist dealing with a headache, a condition that recurs over the four days and accompanies his psychological distress. One of the trophies earned at the start is titled a lonely life, which describes his situation well: he lives alone, rarely socializes with the other villagers, and prefers the company of his dolls. In the demo he could pass for a somewhat odd loner, someone who doesn’t know how to deal with the world, and that impression held until the story began to reveal the rest.
The distress takes the form of paranoia. Silhouettes torment him in his dreams and, awake, he feels hunted, as if someone were always watching him. Perhaps that is why all the other characters are depicted as featureless silhouettes: the graphic choice seems to reflect a man who feels out of place and, in dreams as when awake, judged and surrounded, and the village takes on for the player the same physiognomy it has for him. Besides the protagonist, only two other figures escape this stylistic choice and have visible features: one is his doll, hidden in the locked room, and the other enters the scene on the second day.
One could say, ironically, that he is “not quite right in the head”: he is obsessed with dolls, for him only they exist, and they are his only friends, his family. When a customer calls him because something has happened to her doll, he treats the matter as a real emergency, as the second day will show. He claims that dolls listen without judging, whereas people are often selfish and cruel.
Compared to the demo, where he seemed a touch less troubled, the protagonist of the full game is very well characterized and far more multifaceted. The previous chapter put forward empathy as the condition for horror to move those watching, and here that condition is put to the test with an obsessive, paranoid character who is disinclined to contact with others. The whole story revolves around his psychological distress, and the four days are experienced through his single point of view.
The Village and the People Around the Protagonist
Mrs. Sato and the Doll with the Cracked Face
Calling on the morning of the second day is a customer, the elderly Mrs. Sato, and something has happened to her doll. The protagonist treats the matter as a real emergency and goes to her house right away, where he finds the doll in very bad shape, its face cracked. The culprit, says Mrs. Sato, is her granddaughter.
During their conversation, some information about the village emerges: who has returned, who has left, what is said about each of them. The talk slides onto the young people and children who don’t know how to behave, remarks prompted by the damage suffered by the doll.
The scene turns a repair job into a social situation and is the first true mechanism of the story. Mrs. Sato opens to the protagonist the door of other people’s homes and offers the player a first map of who lives in the village and how reputation works in a small community. It is in this climate that the girl arrives.
The Granddaughter
While the protagonist is still in Mrs. Sato’s house, the granddaughter arrives, now a grown woman, and she is the figure missing from a village of silhouettes: she has a face, and that face closely resembles the doll he keeps hidden in the back of the shop. The protagonist can no longer make sense of anything, fumbles, and apologizes for the unfortunate remark about young people.
The girl is his childhood friend, back from the city after many years away, a bit tired of her stressful job at a large corporation and the metropolitan corollary that comes with it. As a child she frequented the doll shop reluctantly, because his father frightened her, yet she went anyway, because her friend was always there and she wanted to see him and be in his company.
Among the village’s characters, she is the only one who looks at the protagonist from the outside without caution or suspicion. The contrast between them surfaces when she points out how obsessed he is with dolls, explicitly asking him, as a condition for having dinner together, not to talk about them. She tells him, without mincing words, that a doll cannot replace a human being, and he retorts that dolls have different qualities and that he has lived his whole life with them. The conversation ends with neither one convincing the other.
On the third day the girl accepts his invitation to visit him at the shop, and it is the day when the choices that determine the ending begin.
Mrs. Fujimoto
Mrs. Fujimoto is the customer of the doll with which the demo begins, and she is also the first to ask more of the protagonist than a repair: she had already proposed marriage to him, promising to support him so that he could devote himself to his art without worries. Around her the village becomes a web of obligations, and the proposal, on paper a reasonable solution to two solitudes, becomes harder to refuse precisely because of the affability with which Mrs. Fujimoto makes it.
From the very first meeting the protagonist feels discomfort in her presence, even though the woman makes her proposal graciously and there is not yet any evident reason for mistrust. That discomfort anticipates what follows, and in hindsight it reads as a warning. When Mrs. Fujimoto notices the rapport between him and the girl she immediately shows jealousy, and the proposal changes sign: from an offer it becomes a debt to collect. Little by little her dark side emerges, blackmailing and vindictive. She knows everyone, knows whom to talk to, and reminds the protagonist that in the village confidences travel fast. Courtesy remains the form through which she exerts pressure, and it is one of the points where the writing seemed to me more mature than the genre average.
The Places of the Village
In the demo, the interactions centered on the ramen shop and the public baths, and in the full version these two places remain important, but the village now has other places to visit: the general store, the police post, the shrine and the forest.
The ramen shop is the place where one most keenly feels how much the village has emptied out. Vintage posters cover the walls, and in front of some of them the protagonist finds pieces of his own history: the curry advertisement his mother always cooked for him, the poster of a young people’s film he loved as a child, which reminds him that back then the village still had a cinema. The owner, in turn, recalls what the place was like when there were people, and through his memories come the pieces of information about the village that the player gathers in fragments. For those who want to complete the game, the shop also offers a bonus, unlocked by ordering every type of ramen on the menu.
The sentō, the public baths, is another waypoint where the context and conditions of the village can be reconstructed: almost always deserted, with objects left unchanged over time, like the umbrella abandoned in a corner. The bath scene opens with a cinematic pan across the panel, slowly moving from one detail to another, and the player decides how long to stay in the tub. He can leave the bath at any moment or stop to look at the elements drawn in the room, and anyone who bathes at least twice unlocks a bonus.
The station, built recently, has a departures board announcing a train that never arrives, snow on the tracks, the road to the outside buried, and the bus service suspended since mid-winter. Looking at it, the protagonist admits the purpose for which the village wanted it, namely to entice someone to move there, and observes that it has made leaving easier.
The general store sells groceries and goods of every kind, including the paints the protagonist needs for his work, so a visit there serves both his shopping and his craft.
The police post is a kōban, the small neighborhood police station typical of Japan.
The shrine is the village’s place of prayer. In front of the door hangs the large bell with the braided rope that worshippers shake before they pray.
In the forest stands a statue of Jizō, the deity that Japanese tradition regards as the protector of children and travelers. In a village where a girl has gone missing, it is hard not to link the statue to the case.
The Burned House
The village is also home to a burned house, whose existence remains shrouded in mystery for almost the entire game.A family of three, father, mother and daughter, inhabited it and died years earlier, when the protagonist and the childhood friend were still children.Today only the ruins remain, with snow on the broken beams and a red flower left inside as a tribute and memorial to the tragedy.
Four Days
The story unfolds over four days, and each has its own tone.
The first, “A lonely life”, introduces the protagonist in his routine as a solitary craftsman and has something didactic about it, because it serves to get familiar with the shop and the village. The second, “An unexpected encounter”, opens with the phone ringing early in the morning, while he is still asleep, and is the closest to a provincial mystery, made of house visits and information passed from mouth to mouth.
The third, “Trust or suspicion?”, begins with the girl’s visit to the shop and continues with a search of what remains of the burned house and an evening date at the ramen shop, leaving the player suspended between the two hypotheses. The last, “The trap closes”, opens with a confused awakening: the protagonist barely remembers what happened the day before, and from there the revelations arrive, more or less clear depending on the ending reached.
From here on everything is revealed, but how much of it is understood depends on the ending reached.
The Doll Doctor
Free exploration, inherited from graphic adventures, alternates with the dialogue choices typical of the visual novel, and between one conversation and another come the workshop jobs. These are small jigsaws, that is, objects that the player puts back in place by hand with no puzzle to solve, and the protagonist approaches them with the seriousness of a surgeon.
The first, already present in the demo, consists of repainting the face of Mrs. Fujimoto’s doll: on the table are a box of watercolors and a brush resting on its stand, and the color spreads one touch at a time. On the second day the job is assembly, because Mrs. Sato’s doll has a cracked face. An empty white oval remains on the bench and the porcelain fragments lie scattered on the wood. The player reassembles them following the shape of the edges. When the work is almost done, the protagonist says what he will do with the face: he will sand the glue smooth and repaint it until he erases every trace of the fracture.
The restoration of Mrs. Sato’s doll leaves one extra fragment on the bench, and that piece that finds no place has the effect of the leftover screw after assembling a piece of furniture: one fears having forgotten something. The doubt grows with the pieces that arrive later, because they are of the same material and are clearly parts of a doll’s face. Some the protagonist finds around the village, others are delivered to him, and the player collects them one after another without knowing what to do with them, until the very end.
After porcelain the work moves to an equally delicate material: butterflies. The protagonist has a second passion as well, the collection of lepidoptera. One of the jigsaws consists precisely of placing each butterfly in the right spot on the display board, following its outline and pinning it down. I found interesting, and unsettling, the naturalness with which the protagonist carries out this task: he impales still-living butterflies so they can no longer fly away, and leaves them there until they die.
The difficulty stays low from the first repair to the last. What matters is the care for detail: the fragments have thickness, the watercolor palette has worn-down cakes, and the same gestures must follow the right sequence, including rinsing the brush tip at every change of ink.
The pleasure comes from the gesture and from the chance to look closely at objects the authors have drawn with care. The space taken up by the mechanics is objectively small: between one job and the next one returns to reading and walking, and the repairs take up a reduced portion of the time. In a work where illustration and story prevail, the proportion makes sense, and anyone approaching The Doll Shop knowing they will find a narrative adventure will not be disappointed.
Proceeding requires attention to detail and patience, the same two qualities the protagonist puts into his craft.
A Helpful Eye
The objects one can interact with are marked by a small eye that appears next to the item to examine. The eye stays red until the player has completed the action and turns purple after the player has read what it is about: the color change indicates that the player has already done the action and need not repeat it, unless one wants to do it again.Those exploring can thus avoid having to remember what they have already looked at and keep the freedom to return to any object whenever they wish.
To find their way, players can rely on the lights and, even more, on the tracks in the snow, which act as a guide and mark the direction to follow. They prevent getting lost and wandering aimlessly, and the time saved counts, because the walking pace is fairly realistic and therefore a little slow, not too much, just right for a snow-covered village.
Dialogue appears in a window at the bottom, with a thin red border, and the color of the text indicates who is speaking: yellow for the protagonist, purple for the other characters, red for the doll and for the girl. A small red flame sits beneath whoever is speaking, on the left or right depending on where they appear on screen. Red unites the doll and the girl, the two figures who, besides the protagonist, are not silhouettes, and the parallelism is noticeable even before the endings.
An emblem at the top right opens the objectives panel and the pause menu. The panel lists the current task and separates optional objectives from required ones, so the player immediately knows what is needed to proceed. The score keeps track of endings, posters, ramen and bonuses, and the day selection allows restarting from any day without losing progress on the optional content. The result is an interface that gives the player the necessary information and leaves as much space as possible to the illustrations.
A Unique and Recognizable Style
The full version keeps the demo’s style and puts it to the test on a larger scale. In the preview the interactions were concentrated in a few locations, whereas here the ink line and the watercolor color must hold up an entire village, from the customers’ houses to the ruins of the burned one, and from one environment to another only the light and the color temperature change. The player has more things to look at, and Atelier Sentô shows the same attention to detail in every new place.
The authors come from comics, and it shows in the layout of the scenes. Wide fields showing the environment alternate with close-ups that fill the screen, and when an object becomes important it occupies the center, large and tilted, while the characters stay at the sides, as in a panel. The result is an interactive comic which, in a genre prone to dark tones, immediately stands out for a warm and colorful palette.
The most evident research concerns the dolls, which belong to different types of the Japanese tradition. The ichimatsu ningyō, with their black bobs and kimonos, are the most numerous and each has its own face and outfit. The wooden kokeshi have cylindrical bodies and barely sketched faces, and on top of the furniture sit the pairs in court dress of the Doll Festival. Behind this variety lies the collection of antique dolls that Mr. Sasagawa opened up to the authors during the winter spent in Niigata, and surrounding the protagonist with different species makes his trade as a restorer believable.
The working method, made of sketches and photographs collected during trips to Japan, produces details of everyday life that in the full version find more space because there are more locations.
Atelier Sentô makes everything by hand. The authors create the drawings on iPad with Procreate and Artstudio Pro, and they are keen to point out that they created the game “with our clumsy little hands” and did not use generative artificial intelligence. The work took two years of spare time, in full independence, thanks to the supporters on Patreon, and the authors built it on the Adventure Creator plugin: they thank its developer, Chris Burton, and write that without him the game would not exist.Atelier Sentô has done a simple and clean job, and they dedicate it to their friends in Niigata.
What is worth adding concerns working as a duo.The drawings bear both signatures, Olivier writes and programs, and Atelier Sentô entrusts the translations to external collaborators.
The sound is polished in the details, noticeable already from the footsteps: Atelier Sentô designed the sound so that it changes depending on where one walks, and on snow you hear a different noise than on tiles. Players cross the village on foot, so footsteps are the sound heard most often, and the care extends, in general, to all the others.
The sounds come from the online library freesound.org, where anyone can share their own sound effects, and the authors chose ones that fit very well. The music is by Cécile herself, composed with GarageBand, Apple’s music-making software.
Endings and Optional Content (Spoilers)
From this point on, I reveal scenes and endings: those who want to stay unspoiled can skip directly to the conclusion.
The Red Room
The door the protagonist always keeps locked conceals the room with red walls, where framed butterflies protected by glass domes cover every wall. Here lives the “living doll”, a figure drawn in full, with a black bob and a pink kimono: she is Hikari, the missing girl, and in ending C she shows herself for what she is, a mummified corpse. Her lines appear in red and in capital letters, and it is she who, at a certain point, orders him to open a lacquered box, where he finds the bracelet of blue and yellow beads with the blue butterfly charm that belonged to her. The protagonist realizes that, if the police find it, they will finally have their culprit, and he decides to hide it to throw the investigation off track: the choice seems his, but it is born from the girl’s words.
The Three Endings
At the end of each playthrough a seven-item summary appears, checked or left blank depending on how things went: having survived, having spared the childhood friend, having kept the secret, having yielded to Mrs. Fujimoto’s advances, having had someone incriminated, having completed the butterfly collection and being happy. In ending C three are confirmed, because the protagonist survives, keeps his secret and is happy. From there one can replay choosing the starting point, and the day selection menu offers two restarts, one for ending A and one for the final decision from which the player reaches B and C.
In ending A the protagonist fails to win the girl’s trust, she leaves by train, and he remains alone with his dolls. The moment she is about to board the carriage she too becomes a silhouette and her features vanish, which seemed to me the sign that the story exits his point of view and she returns to being just another figure, indistinguishable from the other villagers.
Ending B stems from the unmasking. Hikari’s mother asks him to sign a petition to reopen the case, and the player can choose whether to do so or not, and it is precisely from that request that the need to hide the bracelet arises. When the police corner him, the protagonist sets fire to himself and to the secret room.
Ending C is the most tragic. The protagonist has won the girl’s trust and takes her into the locked room, where he presents her with his “living doll”, convinced that she will understand. Faced with Hikari’s mummified corpse she panics and tries to flee, and he kills her. The girl’s face cracks like that of Mrs. Sato’s doll, and the protagonist reassembles it with the porcelain fragments collected during the story, like the mouth found among the ruins: she thus meets the same fate as Hikari, who from that moment keeps her company, and he has assembled his ideal family.
The Dark Doubles
At the end of the third day, when he visits what remains of the burned house, the protagonist meets his dark double, itself a silhouette, which goads him into malicious actions. The house belonged to a family of three, father, mother and daughter, who died years earlier, when he and the girl were still children, and the little girl was already dead before the building caught fire. A dark double also appears to Mrs. Fujimoto, in an extra scene unlocked by taking her payment: two identical silhouettes, with their hair pinned up and two white dots in place of eyes, question whether the girl can really steal the protagonist’s love. In both cases the silhouette adds a layer to the character’s psychological complexity.
Another Reading
Those who reassemble the six pieces of the torn photograph unlock a post-game. The image shows a family of three with a little girl at the center, presumably the one from the burned house. From that moment on, wanted posters with the protagonist’s face and a bounty of three million yen start appearing in the village: he finds one in a shop, is shaken, and decides to throw it away before anyone sees him. Those who collect them all see the memory of the young protagonist with his father, the original owner of the doll shop, a stern man who scolds him constantly. In that scene the father kills the childhood friend while she is still little and then proposes burning the house, and from the memory it emerges that the fire was his doing, with the son’s complicity and silence. The ambiguity is deliberate: rather than an additional explanation, it seemed to me a different interpretation of the story.
The Extra Scenes
The seven extra scenes sit on a board with the village map and photographs connected by strings. Each states the condition to fulfill. Five depend on actions to perform: bathing at the public baths at least twice (“Old grudges resurface…”), ordering all four ramen (“A meeting in the dead of night…”), removing the twenty posters of the missing girl (“A mother’s fears are confirmed…”), taking Mrs. Fujimoto’s payment (“A spider weaves its web out of sight…”) and finding the camellia flower (“An offering left in a forgotten place…”). The flower is in the burned house, and it turns out the girl left it there as a tribute. The other two require specific events: reassembling the torn photograph (“A long-buried secret resurfaces…”) and completing ending C (“A meeting changes the course of events…”).
Collecting the twenty posters, one witnesses the scene in which Hikari’s mother, beside two police officers, recognizes her daughter’s blue shoe. The other scene takes place at the shrine, in the snow: the protagonist meets a little girl with a blue backpack and a green scarf, two red hairpins in her hair and lines in red like the doll’s. She says she is there only for a walk, and he offers to stop by his shop on her way, because he repairs children’s dolls for free. She is Hikari, and it is the moment he meets her.
The extra scenes are not needed to reach the end, and they are not superfluous: they add pieces of story to the narrative picture, and it seems to me a smart strategy to push players to keep going.
Conclusion
The Doll Shop goes beyond the classic narrative adventure, where one certainly expects a high level of graphic and writing quality, both elements amply delivered.
The evident nod to the style of print comics, well simulated although made digitally, gives the work a distinctive character that I particularly appreciated. The meticulous research into realistic details, scattered in many small touches that enrich the context, is another strong point. At times lore risks weighing down a story, even as it helps make concrete and authentic the narrative universe in which the authors set it; in The Doll Shop, despite a considerable amount of information, the whole is lightened by the authors’ ability to dose these details harmoniously, within the very same scenery.
The story is more complex and layered than it let on, especially in the demo, and the alternative endings, including a fourth that carries ambiguities with it, leave the underlying narrative structure intact. This is by no means a negligible aspect: personally I am not fond of stories in which multiple choices lead to different endings, because they give me the impression that the plot lacks real solidity. That is not the case here, because The Doll Shop is not about what happens or has happened, but about a complex man and the possibility that behind a mild appearance may hide a dark and unexpected world.
This connects to another very strong point of this experience: The Doll Shop really is a horror story. A love story I cannot say, but horror it certainly is, and it is the kind of horror that moves the guts without showing anything graphic. The story is disturbing and the level of unease is incredibly high. Take it from a genre lover who has seen and read it all and is no longer fazed by anything.
The gameplay is essential: compared to other narrative games the mechanics occupy a small space, and it is the only limitation I point out, understandable in a work built on illustration and story. In proportion to the premises on which it was made, I found no other relevant flaws.
In short, The Doll Shop appeals to those looking for narrative depth and aesthetic taste, and less to those who prefer more elaborate game mechanics. The level of entertainment is nonetheless undeniable, and the story is hard to forget, both for how it presents itself graphically and, above all, for everything rotten and unsettling it hides.
8.6/10
