Locked In Glasgow: Dolls House | Review

Dolls House Review | You and your fellow podcasters decide to launch the first episode of your show from the house of the Carson family, where the notorious doll maker’s daughter disappeared. Robert Carson was arrested in connection with her disappearance- but is he guilty or is there something more at play? You intend to uncover his secrets when suddenly there is a strange noise in the walls, a floorboard creaks… will you make it to episode two?

Date Played: March 2024
Time Taken: 34:18 minutes
Number of Players: 4
Difficulty: Medium

After successfully escaping from Locked In Glasgow’s Bloodline room, we eagerly awaited our second booking: Dolls House. Initially I thought we’d booked them the other way around which is apparently the best way to do it since the two are thematically similar but Dolls House the considerably more easy of the two. But instead we booked the company’s hardest to easiest rooms…  Bloodline to Dolls House. But hey, at least we got the ‘trickier’ one out the way successfully so we could take our time in Dolls House, right? 😅

Photos (c) Locked In Glasgow

In the end, we actually took a little longer to escape from Dolls House, which certainly isn’t the norm. Our team got stuck redoing a few of the more multi-step puzzles, resulting in around a 3 minute slower escape time overall. Even at our very fastest we might not have shaved off that much time overall. The two felt… Not too dissimilar in difficult to me. So, it just goes to show that no two escape teams are alike in their strengths and weaknesses.

Before we jump into the review, just to cross-share a note on the venue itself from our other review:

On arrival, we all squeezed into a small lift which took us up to the same floor Locked In is on. It’s a strange sort of building, since you’ll pass lots of other businesses from offices to chiropractors and goodness knows what else. Locked In also isn’t that well signposted – or at least, not enough for our team, who walked past the door twice before realising where to go. But, once you do find the right place, you’ll be greeted very warmly by the team of Games Masters there into a large lobby space.

In terms of Dolls House overall as a room, it’s certainly unique. The theme is- you’ll never guess it- a doll’s house. The creepy kind of doll’s house where you expect all of the plushies and dolls to suddenly come alive and their heads to rotate 360 degrees. Everywhere you look this room is absolutely oozing with fun details. From blocks on shelves spelling out DIE, to cages with strange doll scenes, and hundreds and hundreds of doors with strange surprises awaiting behind. Like Bloodline, Locked In Glasgow’s unique selling point really is their attention to detail when it comes to set design – and almost everything is made from second hand, every day items.

Photos (c) Locked In Glasgow

To make these everyday items twice as creepy, the whole room was also bathed in a red light. The red light cast long shadows into each shadowy corner, making it all the more ‘jump scare’-worthy once you did grab a torch and shine it somewhere unexpected.

In terms of the puzzles, I found that at least compared to Bloodline there was a lot less to do and much of it involved searching around. However the puzzles that were in this room largely required multiple steps to solve, and several different bits of separate information being combined. For this reason when we played, we largely split up in order to ferry information back and forth and call out what we could see when another team member needed the information. For sure, it was a linear room in which one puzzle followed another and so on, but often each of those required teamwork in a fun way.

Photos (c) Locked In Glasgow

There was only one that didn’t quite vibe with us. Don’t get me wrong, it was an excellently fun thing to discover at the perfect time in the puzzle flow, but the puzzle itself just took a few too many attempts that I think we were all quite glad just to finally get the correct answer and move on.

Dolls House | The Verdict

We really enjoyed playing Dolls House. It was well decorated, and had a fun puzzle flow with some excellent reveals. Of the two we tackled at Locked In, I think overall we’d all agree that we slightly preferred Bloodline, but that’s no shade on Dolls House. The two work thematically together. We managed to escape in 34 minutes as a team of 4, making this room on the shorter side for enthusiasts, but still a good time and well worth checking out whilst in Glasgow.

Dolls House can be booked at Locked In Glasgow.