DEVELOPER
Based inFrance
CONTACT
ateliersento@gmail.com
WEBSITE
ateliersento.com
RELEASE DATE
October 2026
PLATFORMS
Steam PC
LANGUAGES
English, Japanese, French
AGE 16+
Psychological horror with no graphic or spoken violence
TEAM
Olivier Pichard
Art, Code, Words
Cecile Brun
Art, music
Josh Tierney
English translation
The Doll Shop is a hand-drawn narrative horror game with a touch of romance, set in a strange, snow-covered Japanese village. Play as a young dollmaker who reunites with his childhood friend. After so many years apart, do you have it in you to confess your secret?
In a remote village caught in the middle of an endless winter, we find a young dollmaker living a life of solitude. Rarely socializing with the other villagers, he prefers the company of his dolls - especially the one hidden in the back of his shop. But there’s a threat looming: a little girl has gone missing, and suspicion and paranoia are beginning to take hold among the villagers. It’s during this troubled time that the dollmaker receives a visit from a young woman - a childhood friend who has returned to the village after spending many years in the city. Feeling nostalgic for their past, she seeks to reconnect with him, unaware that it could seal her fate…
The Doll Shop blends adventure games (freely explore the village, collect items, and solve puzzles) and visual novels (a focus on narrative with dialogue choices that have real consequences). This immersive format provides the freedom to move at your own pace, live your life in the village, and uncover all its secrets.
In The Doll Shop, the protagonist may not be quite as innocent as he believes. This presents the player with difficult moral choices. Should he act in the best interests of the role he’s playing? Or should he try to protect the people around him… at the risk of getting a bad ending? With a full cast of endearing characters to interact with, you’ll want to make sure they make it through to the end. But be careful—your actions could have terrible consequences. The Doll Shop will feature 3 different endings, 6 collectible bonus scenes, and even a hidden post-game with a new perspective on the story!
The Doll Shop places emphasis on the emotional states of its characters. There’s a strange comfort in its horror and twisted charm in its romance. You won't find any jump scares here. The game aims to create a dark, surreal atmosphere, where violence remains off-screen but is no less frightening.
Every single detail in the game is hand-drawn on i-pad in a graphic novel style, inspired by the nostalgic landscapes of northern Japan where we used to live. We brought back countless sketches and photographs from our travels and used them as reference to draw the backgrounds and characters from the game. Instead of opting for dark and frightening graphics, we’ve aimed for a warm and colorful style to create a striking contrast in the player’s mind.
The Doll Shop was first released as a free prototype created during a masterclass with students. It has since been downloaded over 50,000 times on Itch.io and received many positive reviews. The success of the prototype convinced us to completely rebuild the game with new artwork, characters, dialogue, and music.
- " It’s a great piece of storytelling backed up with some fantastic hand-drawn artwork, and it’s not often that a horror game makes you feel scared for someone else’s life rather than your own." Free Game Planet
- " Every so often I come across a good scary story, one that renews my faith in the horror genre and Atelier Sentô’s The Doll Shop is one of those hidden horror gems." Blerdy Otome
When Cécile was studying Japanese at the University, we had the opportunity to spend a whole year in Niigata, a very cold rural area, where we painted many watercolours. This experience of remote life during a long, snowy winter had a strong impact on us. While we were there, we also met an antique collector who showed us his collection of old Japanese dolls. We were mesmerized by their serene and mysterious faces and their richly decorated clothing. These memories lingered in our minds and eventually led to the creation of this game.
The horror elements of The Doll Shop draw inspiration from Japan’s darkest true stories as well as works from many mediums. Japanese horror films often utilize deceptively reassuring settings from everyday life (see the J-horror wave and films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa). Anime such as Serial Experiments Lain and Junji Ito’s manga use their illustrated mediums to push this theme even further. Our love of horror cinema has also inspired us to sprinkle in subtle visual and musical references to cult classics such as Suspiria, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and many others...
A few years ago, legendary game creator Hideo Kojima discovered the Japanese version of our graphic novel ONIBI in a Tokyo bookstore. He promoted it on his social networks and, thanks to this unlikely turn of events, we had the opportunity to visit the office of Kojima Productions. There, we were scanned and turned into Non-Playable Characters in Death Stranding 2! Then, to celebrate the release of DS2, we created A Prepper’s Life, a webcomic series made in collaboration with Kojima Productions. Who would have thought that drawing comics would lead to becoming videogame characters? Certainly not us!
