Dollhouse: Behind The Broken Mirror is the latest game from developer and publisher, SODESCO. This game is technically the second in the Dollhouse series, but I didn’t have the opportunity to play the first. Dollhouse: Behind The Broken Mirror has us play as Eliza de Moor, a famous singer who has fallen into an amnesic state. We must help her to regain her memories and piece back together her past. Beware, as we deal with creepy dolls, spooky clowns and just a whole bunch of nonsense.

We open upon a hall, lined with chairs facing a stage. There’s audio of a crowd, but the only person in the room is who we presume is Eliza. She’s singing a song in English, but the lyrics sound poorly translated. With lines such as “The only you can do” and “Carry on away”, the song doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially without any context. During her performance, Eliza collapses on stage, and everything fades to black.

When Eliza regains consciousness, she finds herself in a mental hospital where she’s supposedly been for a while. She’s directed upstairs by the nurse to go talk to the doctor, who’s been waiting to speak with her. He lets Eliza know of the severity of her amnesia and also speaks of an experimental medication which he’s extremely confident will help her to regain her memories.

He suggests taking a trip back to her home, the defunct (and visibly cursed) de Moor Manor and attached Dollhouse factory. He believes the secrets to her history lie there, and that if she takes the medication while exploring the secrets to her past, all will be revealed.

The conversations with the doctor feel awkward with the lack of any response from Eliza. She doesn’t speak or even make a single sound the whole game. It also doesn’t help that the camera angle is constantly changing, sweeping in and out, as if every 5 seconds needs to be a new dramatic shot. It takes the focus away from the conversation, and it just feels weird and unnecessary. There is no view of Eliza even when the camera angle is behind the doctor, and if the goal is to make us as the player feel like we are Eliza, constantly breaking eye contact with the character we’re talking to doesn’t help.

At its core, Dollhouse: Behind The Broken Mirror is a puzzle game mixed with elements of horror and linear exploration. Unfortunately, none of these elements work terribly well together in the setting, due to the overwhelming frustration with the systems in place. The first major puzzle the game presents you with has you shooting some statues in a particular order which is dictated by a nearby sign. The sign, however, is barely readable and lacks any connection to the lore; the puzzle type never returned.

One particular puzzle halfway through the game involved interacting with a series of symbols in a particular order, but the game gives you absolutely no indication of how you’re supposed to solve this puzzle. It was so incredibly frustrating as interacting with the wrong symbol caused an immediate death, and it felt like pure trial and error to solve it.

This unfortunately continues through the entirety of the experience, with some puzzles being so unintuitive and lacking in explanation that they felt genuinely broken. Every puzzle was standalone, with no connective tissue to any others that came up. Learning how to solve a puzzle meant nothing for the next one, and it caused such a jarring lack of any continuity of mechanics.

The pacing of Behind The Broken Mirror is as rough as the puzzles, with objectives without context being thrown at you every time you enter a new area. For example, you’re tasked to ‘obtain the old Colt 45’ before you’ve even had a chance to learn a gun exists. This continues for all the story beats, like being tasked to find a way to open a gate you haven’t even found yet, or to find the heads of unfamiliar characters who mean nothing to us or the story as of yet.

It’s jarring and frustrating in its own way, because a player should be learning what their objectives are through exploration. Solving the mystery of how to open the gate shouldn’t occur to the player until they’ve actually found the gate. Letting the player explore and discover their own checklist of things that they need to do in order to progress is so paramount to making the pacing of a game enjoyable and rewarding.

“Learning how to solve a puzzle meant nothing for the next one, and it caused such a jarring lack of any continuity of mechanics.”

The environmental design in Dollhouse: Behind The Broken Mirror is also another weak point. The areas don’t feel cohesive enough in their relation to each other. The village feels incredibly disconnected aesthetically from the amusement park, and yet the lore tries to tie them together… what little lore there actually is to find.

The swamp area, for instance, is incredibly frustrating to traverse. If you find yourself falling into the water, which happens often due to the incredibly small platform bridges, you instantly die. It’s also hard to navigate due to the enemy chasing you in this area, who will kill you nearly instantly as well if they hit you.

Jumping is a missing mechanic, which is mostly unfortunate only because of how easy it is to get stuck and soft-lock yourself. The ability to walk off the platforms and into the water of the swamp also leads itself to being able to walk off into the land, without being able to get back up onto the bridge.

A key element in horror games is sound design, and Behind The Broken Mirror sadly falls short here too. At the beginning of the game, there was an almost deafening deep bass noise which very quickly became headache-inducing. The ambient audio never feels like it fully suits the area you’re in, and it struggles to create the right tone or atmosphere.

There was an instance where gates closed behind me without any indication or sound cue, which was frustrating as I was unknowingly stuck in a room with more enemies than I could deal with causing me to die almost immediately when turning to escape. The audio cuts entirely every time you pick up an item, further killing any immersion it might have been able to create, and the last location was almost silent in a way that didn’t feel intentional and just like someone forgot to add the sound.

Though Behind The Broken Mirror has variety in the enemies it throws at you, none of them feel like genuine threats. The game loads you up with so much ammunition that you never feel worried, and they all come at you with the same slow, silent shamble. It would have been nice if the different doll types had varying animations or attacks, but that’s sadly not the case.

Facing the clown is the only time an enemy breaks this formula, but it’s not done in a way that feels anything other than frustrating. After shooting every enemy, you suddenly find yourself in a chase sequence and will be killed instantly if you try anything other than running. This also only happens one time, and it’s really jarring to have an established mechanic be broken only to never use that new experience again.

The final boss fight also lacked in creating any fear or tension, and was just frustrating as it ran me around in circles before finally defeating them. The combat throughout felt so forced, and the constant waves of enemies felt more like an inconvenience impeding progress than anything scary.

SODESCO have uploaded to their YouTube channel the first episode of their “Session Series” where they plan to explore the game in depth. Now, I think it’s great to dive into the development of a game series, but Dollhouse: Behind The Broken Mirror wasn’t even out yet when the first episode was posted and it contained spoilers for the story. Not only that, but it featured an entirely AI voice-over, which feels a bit yucky when the game has competent voice acting. Even just a voice-over from one of the developers themselves would have felt nicer.

If you’re curious about there being any connection to the other Dollhouse game, from what I can tell the only thing they have in common is that the main character is trying to piece together fragmented memories of their past, and people also thought the other game was bad. That’s it. There are mannequins in the ‘first’ game which I guess are… technically dolls? But apart from that, those are the only similarities I could find. It feels like they’ve just slapped the same name on two entirely different games that don’t reference each other at all.

The devs have stated that there’s a list of things they’re planning to fix for launch day, such as collision and boundaries that get the player stuck and general overall rebalancing of difficulty. Unfortunately for me, the issues are far too structural, and dressing it up nicely with a few patches isn’t going to fix the damaged groundwork. Sadly Dollhouse: Behind The Broken Mirror is just as broken on the other side.

3.5

Bad

Positive:

Voice acting was decent (give or take a character)

Negative:

Headache-inducing bass in the audio
Soft-locking, and constantly struggling with collision
Poorly presented, nonsensical story
Genuinely nothing scary, unless dolls are icky to you
Goes for too long and could have easily been cut down

Dollhouse: Behind The Broken Mirror felt like someone attempted to make a horror game who didn’t know what made them scary to begin with, and then didn’t show it to a single person for feedback before releasing it. The story is all over the place, and any lore you get throughout the game is hard to make sense of or connect to anything you have already learned. The enemies are obnoxious in number and any possible threat or fear goes out the window due to the sheer frustration that they instill. It feels like a bunch of half-baked concepts and locations thrown into a pot and left to boil for way too long. The flaws in the gameplay and overall functionality bleed so far through the experience that it felt like a slog, and the scariest part was the fact it took 8 hours to finish.

Dollhouse: Behind The Broken Mirror Review – Behind the broken game

Reviewed March 28, 2025 on PC

3.5

Bad

Positive:

Negative:

Hayley Louise

Fresh off the press