Dollhouse of Dead

I came into Dollhouse of Dead fully expecting another Lethal Company clone dressed up in creepy doll skins. What I got is closer to that, yes, but with enough of its own personality to keep three friends and me genuinely yelling at each other for a few solid sessions. Renderise - the same indie studio behind Ghost Watchers - dropped this one in November 2025, and the pitch is straightforward: you and up to three others are corporate scavengers hired to raid AI-toy-infested factories, collect junk, process it into materials, and upgrade your gear between runs. The session structure is tight. One run equals one quota. Miss it and you leave empty-handed. Hit it and you unlock progression. No fussy menus, no overwrought tutorials. The enemy roster is the game's clearest strength. You are not just dodging one generic monster type. Thumper, Spider, Teddy Bear, Doll, and a variety of others all patrol the factory floors, each with distinct behavior. The neutral-but-temperamental rabbits are a particular design highlight - trade junk with them fairly and they leave you alone, short them and they will take your head. That faction dynamic adds a layer of decision-making that most games in this space skip entirely. Hiding is available via closets, toilet stalls, and a bizarrely camp human-sized backpack option that somehow works. The chaos is deliberately dense; the developers have stated they prioritized constant action over slow atmospheric dread, and that call pays off in co-op where dead air is the real enemy. There are also seven playable characters with distinct active and passive abilities, which gives the group something to optimize and argue about before each run. The weaknesses are predictable for an early-access-adjacent indie at this price point. With a small player pool, finding strangers online is genuinely difficult - community feedback flags this repeatedly. Bring your own group or you will be sitting in a lobby. Mouse input reportedly has some quirks in certain hide states, including negative acceleration when zipped inside that backpack. Performance polish is still catching up to ambition. The procedural factory layouts keep runs from feeling identical, but the variety in environment aesthetics is limited enough that the first few hours feel fresher than later ones. The meta-progression through gear upgrades does give you a reason to keep coming back, though the ceiling of that system is not yet clear. For shooter-adjacent co-op players who want something with chaos density closer to REPO than to Phasmophobia, Dollhouse of Dead earns its low asking price - especially with three friends queued up and voice chat on. The enemy variety and the faction-based rabbit mechanic show a developer thinking beyond genre basics. Solo play exists but this game is plainly built around shared panic, and playing alone strips out most of what makes it interesting. Steam reviews sit in the mostly positive range with roughly 77-79 percent approval across a modest sample, which is an honest signal: it works, it is not polished to a mirror finish, but the core loop is fun enough that the rough edges do not break the experience.

Fred · Scout Team

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