Nie no Hakoniwa: Dollhouse of Offerings

Nie no Hakoniwa: Dollhouse of Offerings

released on Feb 17, 2024

Nie no Hakoniwa: Dollhouse of Offerings

released on Feb 17, 2024

"Let us celebrate, the birth of this nightmare." A story about an urban legend surrounding a certain "Box", this is a Japanese-style, supernatural visual novel about madness, love and hate.


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This is one of the most painful games I have ever played, the art is mwah phenomenal but good lord my heart can only take so much.

The story starts off SO good and engaging but around the halfway mark it just falls off and stops making much sense character and story wise.

This review contains spoilers

The art, voice acting and music is really beautiful. The story has interesting parts, but as a whole it has major problems. With how the trailer was set up it also felt like the curse would have a different role than it had which led to my disappointment. The characters are not really likeable, which made the whole journey insufferable. The first half was genuinely more interesting, and as soon as the curse came in it went on a downhill. I do not mind eroguro, but it felt pointless, even though there was a reason behind it. I wish the story would have given us a slightly different female lead, so we would come to like her. But Kyouko's whole personality is just "let me give birth to Kurou-sama's babies". It was explained away with childhood trauma, but in the end her suffering and breaking and thus her insanity wasn't impactful in the second half. While she had her own quirks, she was stubborn but clever, she knew how to act for her family but these were such miniscule moments that it amount to nothing. I wish we could have seen Futara Touko's story instead of this.
Or let's talk about Madoka, who wanted to be fucked for the sake of atonement. This should have played out differently. Such a missed opportunity to make an impact on the reader to just render all her character into a "Oh I'm enjoying a different c.ck than my husband's but this is all for atonement. I love you husband.".
But to also mention more good about it, I loved what they did with Nozomi's story at the end. Her character became good at that point, when they revealed who she is.
On this note, I didn't like the after scene. I wish the whole future line with the journalist would have been left out and just focused on the other actually interesting lines.

Would I recommend this? On sitting a few days on it, I don't think so. Unless you love art as much as me, there's more to be frustrated about than to enjoy.