Fantasy Dress Up Games

When the character is not human

Add wings and the back of every outfit has to open. Add a tail and there are no shoes. Add horns and the hairstyle has to work around them.

That is what makes a fantasy game different from a styling game with a costume in it. The body is different, so the clothes have to be, and the good games take that seriously instead of drawing a normal dress and gluing wings to the back of it.

The recurring cast is small and everybody already knows it: fairies, mermaids, witches, vampires, elves, angels, and whatever the game means by a warrior. Each comes with its own silhouette, and half the pleasure is that you know the rules before the game explains them.

The fairy problem

Fairies are the largest group here and the easiest to get wrong, because the default is a small princess with wings and that is not a fairy at all.

Pixie Friends solves it by making the wardrobe out of the wood itself: petals, leaves, bark, moss, spider silk. Once she is dressed from the forest rather than from a shop, the wings stop looking bolted on. Thumbelina pushes the same idea further, since a girl the size of a thumb cannot have anything tailored at all. Vintage Fairy goes the other way and dresses her in real Edwardian clothing, which is stranger and works beautifully.

Fairycore, witchcore and the aesthetic turn

Fantasy stopped being purely a costume genre when the aesthetics arrived.

Fairycore is fantasy filtered through cottagecore: mushrooms, moss, flower crowns, muted greens instead of glitter.

Witchcore is the darker one, black and herbs and a lot of layers, and it has almost nothing to do with the pointed-hat version.

Mermaidcore is iridescence applied to clothes a human could actually wear, which is why it escaped into real fashion.

These are worth knowing because they are what people search for now, and because they are far easier to build than a full costume.

Myth, which is where the depth is

The strongest games on this shelf come from mythology rather than from generic fantasy. Goddess Freya has the Brisingamen necklace and a cloak of falcon feathers. Sun Dress is built on a Grimm tale about a gown as bright as the sun. Grimm Beauty covers the whole canon. Medieval Doll sits at the point where fantasy and history stop being distinguishable.

Life Story, which runs a character through an entire lifetime, is the longest-played game on the whole site.

Characters for stories and roleplay

Plenty of people come here to design an OC rather than to play a round: a character for a campaign, a story, a roleplay server.

If that is you, build the face first in doll creator, where the creators handle ears, horns and wings, then use the styling games here for outfit ideas. For the human court version of the same thing, princess is next door.