Room Escape Artist

Feel little again.

Location: Fitchburg, MA

Date played: December 10, 2016

Team size: 4-8; we recommend 4-6

Duration: 60 minutes

Price: $28 per ticket

Story & setting

In The Dollhouse we entered a life-size dollhouse.

The Dollhouse looked like the hodgepodge mess of furniture and toys that one would find in a kid’s dollhouse. Not mine… which was anal-retentively matched, but I certainly had friends with dollhouses that felt a lot like the one built by Curious Escape Rooms.

The pretense for this excursion was secondary to the puzzle adventure in the world Curious Escape Rooms created, but that journey was magnificently child-like.

Puzzles

Many of the puzzles in The Dollhouse required substantial searching.

As long as we had all the components, the puzzles made sense and flowed logically one to the next.

Standouts

Curious Escape Rooms built this entire experience with a small budget and a lot of creativity. The designers knew their strengths and steered into those skills when they conceptualized and constructed The Dollhouse. As a result of their ingenuity, they produced a unique game with some imaginative, yet budget-conscious innovation.

The Dollhouse manipulated perspective in unexpected ways. It was an unusual theme and it came to life, so to speak.

A pair of particularly surprising moments added depth and made The Dollhouse pretty damn compelling.

The conclusion was clever.

Shortcomings

While the aesthetic held together, some of the set could have been more thoroughly cleaned, especially considering the extent to which we had to scavenge.

The Dollhouse involved moving more substantial setpieces than experienced players will generally feel comfortable with.

One puzzle overstayed its welcome and probably should have been broken up into a few smaller interactions.

Should I play Curious Escape Rooms’ The Dollhouse?

The Dollhouse was a fun escape room that brought childhood memories to life through creative perspective and skillful use of technology.

Note that this room escape is playful and approachable for all audiences; it is not creepy.

The puzzling was relatively basic. The beauty of The Dollhouse was playing around inside it. It was a great beginner game.

Curious Escape Rooms is a little over an hour’s drive west of Boston, but also accessible by train. It might be a hike, but The Dollhouse is worth a visit for experienced players interested in seeing how escape room designers embraced constraints and used their skills to create something brilliantly unusual.

Book your hour with Curious Escape Rooms’ The Dollhouse, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Full disclosure: Curious Escape Rooms comped our tickets for this game.