Dress-up games

Dress-up games

Exactly one game carries this label: Girl Dress Up. Not one that we chose to feature — one that exists, because the source catalogue applied the label to a single title and to nothing else. Most sites would hand you that lonely card and let you work it out. Since you are here, the space is better spent explaining what the game is and where its relatives live, starting with the kids shelf, which holds six titles including a second dress-up game.

Where this label came from

The name of the shelf is the source catalogue's own categorisation and not a statement from us about who should play what. Every game on this site opens the same way for everybody, with nothing asked beforehand. We keep the existing name rather than renaming it, because a label is a route, and quietly rewriting a route strands the people who used it last time.

Nothing here counts anything

Almost every game in this library measures you — score, distance, time survived, levels cleared. This one measures nothing. There is no timer in any corner, no end screen, and no state in which you have done badly. Nothing can go wrong, which also means there is nothing to recover from, and what you take away when you stop is simply the figure you assembled.

The consequences run deeper than they sound. You can put it down mid-decision and lose nothing. A choice made four minutes ago can be undone as easily as one made four seconds ago. And nothing in it pushes you onwards, so the session ends when you decide it does rather than when the game decides. If that rhythm is the appeal, the set with no game over collects everything in the library that works this way, and the untimed set collects the boards that never start a countdown.

What is actually inside the one game

The main screen is a dressing room: a wardrobe standing open behind the figure, a green sofa, a curved floor lamp, and rows of option strips down both sides. Each strip carries an arrow at either end for cycling through its contents and a small number showing which variant you are on out of how many exist, so you always know how much is left to try.

Counted from real play, that comes to seven hairstyles, ten hair colours, eight sets of eyes, three pairs of glasses, ten outfits with four colourways each, and nine pairs of shoes, with further strips for lips, build and nails. Multiply only the hair, the colour, the outfit and the shoes and the number of distinct results is already past six thousand. That arithmetic is the reason this kind of game does not need levels: its variety is combinatorial rather than sequential, and it does not run out the way a level list does.

The second dress-up title, and where it is filed

Fashion Dress Up is the same kind of game and it is in the catalogue, but the source library tags it under kids only and not under this label, so it cannot appear in the list above however the page is built — you have to walk over to the kids shelf and pick it up from there. The title on this shelf carries both tags, which is why that one turns up in two places. We leave supplier tags exactly as they arrive.

Dress-up questions

The screen stays dark after I press play — is it broken?

Probably not. This title takes noticeably longer to reach its first playable screen than most of the library; in our testing the loading screen held for a while before the dressing room appeared. Give it longer than you would give anything else here before closing the tab.

Does it work on a phone?

It runs, but more than ten option strips are packed down both sides of the figure, and on a small screen those arrows sit very close together and are easy to hit one row off. A tablet or a desktop screen makes a real difference to this game specifically.

Can I save the character I made?

There are no accounts on this site. Anything a game retains is kept by the browser you played in, on the device you played on, and will not travel with you to another one.