ThinkFun Escape the Room The Cursed Dollhouse – An Escape Room Experience in a Box for Ages 13 and Up (7353)

We tried the Cursed Dollhouse game and really loved it. At first, I balked at the extra price, but now I understand why it’s pricier than Dr Gravely’s Retreat and Stargazer Manor. It’s an actual buildable dollhouse, and you explore rooms and discover clues one room at a time. There are a lot of props, too, which adds to your set of clues and to the experience. We’ve played Dr Gravely’s Retreat before and liked it, but felt it was pretty easy. This one is a bit harder; we had to use our brains, but didn’t really get stuck too much. This game has a lot more atmosphere, and a good balance between storyline and puzzling. We spent about 4 hours with two people, and didn’t use their hint system. I wish they’d make another! I was so sorry when it was done. Definitely worth the price. EDIT: We played Stargazer’s Manor a few weeks later. Having heard it was easy, we gave it to our kids (ages 5 & 9). They finished it without help from us in 70 minutes. Very fun and kid-friendly, but quite easy.

We’ve played the other escape rooms from ThinkFun. They were so fun! This one however, sucked. Nothing made sense. Every single puzzle was so far stretched and honestly just frustrating. Truly not at the same level as their other escape room games.

This escape room system is definitely challenging, but it is also fiddly. Some of the puzzles just did not line up quite right even though we knew what to do to solve them. Others involved some giant leaps of logic, and one we skipped by without missing anything else. Those criticisms aside, it was fun to do. We also tried our best to rebuild it so that other people can try to solve it again without being influenced by our work.

Very fun. I liked building the house out of the box, it's very different than other escape room games. There's some components that aren't reusable but they provide a link so you ran reprint them yourself. It was definitely challenging and took a few hours to complete but it was interesting and enjoyable. Did need a couple of hints on some of the puzzles but a lot we were able to complete without help.

The pandemic has had my family playing more of this escape room type games: The Exit series, the unlock series, escape room in a box, etc. This is my first venture into the Think Fun Series. Replayability: First off, this game is only one experience, so the same play group can't play it again without knowing the answers. Secondly, they say this game is replayable for another group, but it only is in the sense that you can reprint materials online after (which is available on their website). Beating the game requires you to fold, disassemble, and otherwise modify the contents. I dont have a good color printer that could replicate the quality of this for another group, so I ended up treating this more like a one time experience like the exit series and i'll likely be tossing this afterward. Puzzling Experience: I think doing this as our first Think Fun Experience might have been a bad choice. We spent a good amount of time just trying to get used to the system of using their decoder wheel, which isn't all that bad, but still took time. Lots of moments we would find things in one room that wouldnt have relevance until a later time in the game. My family and I found lots of the puzzles frustrating, but perhaps that speaks more to our puzzle skills than the puzzle itself. Definitely be prepared to look around the rooms and connect the dots between the different things presented -- i felt some of the ties of the clues to the solution were kind of weak. Gameplay evolves like this: you start in the living room and have to find 3 symbols that are associated with the colors red, green, and blue. Once you do, you place those symbols and the colors into the wheel and if you're correct, the wheel will show you two matching symbols of the room you're in, saying you can progress the story. You then move to different rooms around the house in the same manner until you've explored the whole house and can complete the story. Personally, we found all the puzzles in the bathroom the most challenging. When we looked up the solutions, we wondered how you would even know to execute some of those solutions, as there didn't seem to have enough hints to guide you in that direction. Either way, i'll likely stick to the unlock & exit series. Their puzzles seemed a little more logical. They also pack more experiences for less money (Unlock is 3 experiences for $30, Exit is $15 each, and this is $40 for the singular experience at time of review).

As many other reviewers have noted, this version is not fun. We enjoyed the first two so much that I joined the ThinkFun email list and even pre-ordered this game. The puzzles are way too hard to the point of frustration. Even with using hints, which we didn’t in the first two games, the puzzles are hard to figure out. There are not intuitive so the parts that are supposed to give hints to help you figure out the puzzle don’t seem to go together. We made to the fourth room before quitting for the night. It’s been two weeks and we decided that we don’t want to finish. Some additional reasons: It’s hard to see inside the dollhouse for more than one person, you need a flashlight to see some of the things for how dark it is, and even have to pick up the dollhouse to move to see what you are supposed to find then the pieces that are supposed to be in the room, fall out. Also, in this version, you are required to destroy some of the puzzles in order to figure them out. This wasn’t required in the first two, and we liked that, so we could pass it on to someone else to play. There is the site that tells you how to put it back together which lets you print out the puzzles but it will never be the same. All in all, a real disappointment.

The ThinkFun escape room games are very high quality and very well-designed. This particular one is very hard, and may not be for everyone. The official online clue system is helpful though. Also, the puzzles are physically small, so if you have more than two or three people, it could be tricky for everyone to participate.

While it looks super intricate and awesome, it does not make any sense like majority of escape rooms. It’s like the inventor was high when it was made. There were three things that made sense. The rest was absolutely stupid. Garbage. Waste of money

Bought this for my boyfriends birthday but haven't had a chance to play it yet. The box arrived scuffed and torn but the shipping box was intact. The product is listed as new but it looked like it was used for many years and not taken care of then returned and shipped out. Currently sending it back and waiting on a replacement. Hopefully the next one is in better condition. **Edit - Second box arrived and the shipping box has zero damage but the product is again damaged. Less scuffing on the front but there's a huge chunk of the side is just ripped off.

Some of the puzzles were poorly produced. Especially the one using the UV light. The ink seemed like it had faded to the point where we had to look it up online to figure it out. I can't recommend this.