Dolls Nest is a mecha combat simulator developed by Nitroplus. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Dolls Nest Review Overview
What is Dolls Nest?
Set in the vast, crater-like world of Hod, Dolls Nest is a 3D action game where you play as a mecha girl navigating a desolate industrial landscape. The environment is littered with broken machines, ruined structures, and hostile armored units that roam its decaying terrain. Survival depends on scavenging for resources amid the wreckage, as the journey to uncover the truth behind this ruined world is anything but kind.
Dolls Nest features:
⚫︎ Customizable mecha girl protagonist
⚫︎ Large, winding maps
⚫︎ Loadouts with different weapon and armor types
⚫︎ Gauge-based combat
⚫︎ Interconnected areas with boss battles
⚫︎ Upgradeable gear
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
 Steam |
$19.99 |
Dolls Nest Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Customization is a Battle of Practicality and Beauty Surprisingly Challenging Bleeds Personality |
Absurdly Inadequate Onboarding The Maps Are Too Big Generally Feels Unpolished |
Dolls Nest Overall Score - 78/100
With its layered gameplay and striking visual style, Dolls Nest offers a compelling mix of technical depth and surreal atmosphere, even if its narrative leans heavily on interpretation over exposition. While the audio and story elements can feel uneven, the game compensates with memorable design choices and a satisfying challenge curve. But don't let the rather subpar score fool you. It's an amazing game whose charm lies in its unique personality, not in what standard metrics would suggest.
Dolls Nest Story - 7/10
What this game excels at is in its environmental storytelling—par for the course in any post-apocalyptic title worth its salt. On the other hand, the main narrative is nearly nonexistent, relying almost entirely on a "show, don’t tell" approach early on. That might sound off-putting, but it’s about what you’d expect from developers known for leaning heavily into… evocative imagery.
Dolls Nest Gameplay - 8/10
There’s a distinct charm to a mecha game that’s simple on the surface yet built on layers of technical depth. Sure, combat boils down to "shoot the enemy, don’t get shot," but the stats you have to juggle to do that efficiently form a laundry list of jargon that’ll fly over the average player’s head. Not that I’m complaining—if anything, that’s a compliment—unlike the sprawling, often convoluted maps that feel tailor-made to get you lost more than once due to its almost complete lack of guiding markers.
Dolls Nest Visuals - 9/10
Strictly speaking, Dolls Nest is best described as "pretty," and not much more. It won’t be winning awards for model fidelity anytime soon, and there’s only so much mileage you can get out of particle spam. Still, the stylistic character designs and the oddly striking brutalist architecture leave a very strong lasting impression—even if they look like they were pulled from entirely different games.
Dolls Nest Audio - 7/10
Every part of Dolls Nest’s audio design sits cleanly on the fence. The music shines during boss fights and story-heavy areas… and fades into obscurity everywhere else. As for the voice acting, it’s top-tier—as is usually the case when the cast comes from Japan’s pool of audio overachievers.
Dolls Nest Value for Money - 8/10
Between getting lost, customizing your loadout, and dying to bosses you didn’t or barely prepare for, Dolls Nest gives you a lot of game for the low low price of $19.99. It’s also fairly replayable, thanks to hidden collectibles and side content worth revisiting. Unfortunately, the limited build variety does little to suggest any kind of lasting attachment.
Dolls Nest Review: Great Things Can Come With Small Scores
When I heard that the developer of some of my favorite visual novels—Saya no Uta, Steins;Gate, and even Super Sonico—was creating a mecha musume (literally "mechanical girl") game, I knew I had to try it. Nitroplus is known for their distinctively dark, edgy, and often provocative style—gore, body horror, taboo-breaking themes—and I was curious how that would translate to a third-person shooter.
Strangely, that signature style isn’t immediately apparent. You’re unceremoniously dropped into a tutorial, asked to test loadouts, and forced to watch a cutscene that barely tells you what’s going on.
The game itself is an action shooter—closer to Armored Core or Mecha BREAK than Soulslikes like Code Vein or AI Limit. You control a girl outfitted with oversized mechanical gear, blasting through large maps full of enemies that can introduce your insides to the outside just as easily if you’re not careful.
Why are you doing all this? The game doesn’t tell you upfront. There’s a noticeable lack of lore early on, which does hurt immersion a bit—especially when you’re piloting what looks like a pubescent girl with giant mecha limbs into battle with no context. You’ll have to clear an entire level before learning anything about the world.
In short: you are the servant of a defeated deity seeking rebirth. To make her whole again, you need to recover her stolen parts. Yeah, that’s some real Nitroplus material right there.
No Bones Given
I mentioned earlier that you need to progress quite far into the early stages of the first level to even get any idea why you’re playing the game in the first place. Lore, I mean. However, that’s not even the worst thing you have to fish out for yourself.
The mechanics themselves are something you’ll have to learn as you go. Tutorial? That’s just for the most basic of basics. It never tells you things like the fact that you can dual-wield handgun-type firearms or that you can recover ammo by destroying enemies with backshots (heh).
Navigation is, frustratingly, also something you’ll have to take into your own hands. You’ve heard people complain about some games being too hand-holdy, right? Still Wakes the Deep, for example, doesn’t trust the player at all, so it drowns you in excessive markers to guide you around. Nitroplus, on the other hand, clearly lost sleep thinking about their players—because there’s practically nothing of the sort anywhere. No icons. No breadcrumbs. No "you are here" sticker. Just vibes.
Heck, there are even boss rooms located directly behind you when you start an area, marked only by an interactable console you can easily miss—because why would you turn around when our gamer™ instincts are always screaming at us to go forward?
Objectives are also a Where’s Wally experience thanks to a complete lack of a quest list. This becomes especially problematic whenever you have a key item that unlocks specific parts of the map or activates features in a stage. And even then, it’s often unintuitive. Case in point: the eyeball the first boss drops after you beat it? You have to stick it into the grotesque corpse impaled through the head at the main hub. Why? No idea. How did I know? I didn’t.
I just saw the prompt while I was wandering around.
I May Be Weak, But at Least I Am Cute
If you’re talking about builds in Dolls Nest, you’re talking about equipment loadouts. Strictly speaking, there are no "skills" to play around with here, so your performance depends heavily on the modules (gear) you have installed.
Unfortunately, for those of us who care about making sure our characters look as good as they play, modules have a major impact on your character’s appearance. For example, you can turn her into a spastic spider with the mobility stats of a child in a candy store, a heavily armored mecha straight out of a more prominent franchise, or even Demonbane from one of my favorite mecha-Cthulhu series, Deus Machina Demonbane.
I even named my in-game character Al-Azif as a nod to the protagonist’s sidekick in that series (even though I'm using different colors).
Anyway! The point is: if you want to look good, you’ll have to sacrifice something in return. Unfortunately, there’s no transmog system in this game—at least as far as I can tell. So, if you’re seeking armor that performs well and looks sleek (and not like a floating armadillo), you really have no choice but to meet yourself somewhere in the middle.
Deceptively Difficult for How Simple It Is
Dolls Nest’s combat philosophy is extremely simple: shoot at the enemy, and try not to get shot yourself. Unfortunately, that only sounds easy on paper. Or on pixels.
First of all, you need to build for the occasion. Yes, you’re mostly reliant on gear. Yes, stats mostly come from there. But, unlike in a typical Souls-like—and more in line with a lot of action mecha titles—building your character isn’t as easy as just picking a stat and pumping it up to the sky. Mobility, for example, isn’t just a single number. It’s a whole cocktail of factors: how well your unit handles, how much fuel it consumes while dashing, how fast it runs on foot, and so on.
Ergo, you can’t just stack one or two stats and expect to survive when you’re cornered. You’ll need backup plans, because the enemies in this game are not pushovers.
If you thought, "I’ll just take cover when I get shot at," upon hearing this is an action shooter—hey, I can’t blame you. I thought the same. Right up until I learned, at the cost of more HP than I care to admit, that some enemy shots can, of all things, curve around corners.
Some enemies will actively hunt you down if you’re hiding, too. Others will only shoot if they’ve got a clear line of sight, effectively shutting down any "sit and wait" tactics.
On the upside, that does make them somewhat predictable. It’s entirely possible to bait them into specific behaviors for easy kills. For example: coaxing them into jumping off cliffs. Hilarious strategies become viable once you understand their patterns—and honestly, I think that’s pretty cool.
A Nitroplus Game if I’ve Ever Seen One
Besides looking like their 2015 work Expelled from Paradise if it were set in a place that physically qualifies as Hell, there’s almost nothing in the first hour of gameplay that screamed "Nitroplus." Well, aside from the protagonist design—but honestly, I’d expect the same design choices from Mages or Nippon Ichi. In other words: it lacked personality.
That was until I clapped the first boss and finally entered the main hub. The shopkeeper for hairstyles and clothes? The one with four arms, the mentality of a toddler, and the physical presence of three giraffes tied together? That’s definitely something Nitroplus could cook up on a regular Tuesday. The monstrous corpse of a humanoid-shaped mecha-organic entity that speaks in a tone of benevolence but uses the language of a malicious spirit? Not uniquely Nitroplus, but extremely on-brand.
It was at that point I realized that even the game’s overarching themes were also textbook Nitroplus: servitude, tragedy, moral ambiguity, existential dread. That’s basically most of their catalog boiled down into a sentence (except Super Sonico, obviously).
… Oh yeah. Sonico was also a vtuber for a hot second a few years ago. Man, Nitroplus really tried to dig into that industry too, huh?
Is Dolls Nest Worth It?
Yes. Buy it now.
A score of 78 out of 100 may look unimpressive if you don’t read between the lines. Dolls Nest’s charm doesn’t lie in the precise structure of its gameplay, the delivery of its narrative, or even the aesthetics of its audiovisuals. Instead, its strength is thematic. It’s a surreal experience that takes the convoluted, often raw nature of its overall presentation and somehow turns it into something unnervingly pleasant—something that can make your hair stand on end.
I highly recommend the game to anyone with money to spare. Trust me: you’ll at least get your money’s worth.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam |
$19.99 |
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Dolls Nest Product Information
 |
|
| Title | DOLLS NEST |
|---|---|
| Release Date | April 24, 2025 |
| Developer | Nitroplus |
| Publisher | Nitroplus |
| Supported Platforms | PC |
| Genre | Action, Shooter, Souls-like |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | TBR |
| Official Website | Dolls Nest Website |
