Dolls Nest

My first reaction when I heard Nitroplus, a studio whose catalogue is essentially a library of dark visual novels, was making a third-person mecha shooter was skepticism. Then I played it, and that skepticism evaporated fast. Dolls Nest drops you into Hod, a vast crater-world of decaying megastructures, insect-like automata, and bio-mechanical Nymph girls who communicate in cryptic whispers, and it tells you almost nothing upfront. The story, like the architecture around you, is something you piece together from item descriptions, environmental details, and the occasional brittle NPC exchange. Nitroplus's DNA for bleak, body-horror-inflected writing is absolutely here, just delivered through level geometry instead of text boxes. The combat sits in fascinating territory between Armored Core and the Souls series. There are no parries, no shields, no rolling. Instead, you AC-dodge on jets, boost to close distance, and manage a shared ammo bar that drains terrifyingly fast when you bring heavy weapons. Running dry mid-fight or mid-exploration is a real threat, and consumable restocks are limited enough that you have to weigh every engagement. Building your Frame Unit is deceptively involved: mobility is not a single stat but a combination of fuel drain, ground speed, and handling, so stacking one number and ignoring the rest will get you killed. The weapons themselves range across machine guns, long-reload LMGs, and heavier ordnance, and the boss roster mixes quick rival Nymphs with slow tanks and genuinely oddball multi-phase encounters. Where Dolls Nest really earns its reputation is in the level design. The map structure echoes Demon's Souls more than anything else, a central hub branching into large parallel zones, each with a single checkpoint and a web of shortcuts that loop back on themselves in ways that consistently surprise. The verticality is smartly rationed: you can jump, hover, and dash in ways no Souls character could, but you cannot just boost infinitely upward like a late-era AC, which keeps exploration tense and deliberate. Hidden collectibles, multi-outcome NPC quests, and secret routes give the areas real density. The replayability is genuine, even if the build variety is narrower than hardcore min-maxers will want. The rough edges are honest and worth naming. Performance under DX11 can push CPU usage unreasonably high (forcing DX12 helps). Some visual effects pile up until the screen becomes a particle party that obscures what is actually happening. Boss balance is uneven, with a few encounters that fold to straightforward cheese. These feel like first-3D-game growing pains from a studio that had never shipped anything in this space before, and they are real friction points. But a post-launch High Difficulty Mode update addressed the criticism that the base game was too easy, which shows the team is listening. Steam sentiment at launch was Very Positive and climbed toward Overwhelmingly Positive after that update, which tracks: the core loop is genuinely compelling and the atmosphere is singular. This is the game for you if you want environmental storytelling that respects your patience, mecha customization that requires actual thought, and a world strange enough to keep you off-balance. It is not for players who need hand-holding navigation markers, tightly tuned boss gauntlets, or high production polish. Think of it as what happens when a team of writers obsessed with dark, surreal fiction decides to build the Armored Souls game FromSoftware never quite made, on a modest budget, and mostly gets it right.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Dolls Nest.