Behind the Broken Mirror Review

In 2019, SOEDESCO published Dollhouse, a film noir-inspired horror game complete with a single-player campaign, a skill tree, and online multiplayer. Perhaps Dollhouse bit off more than it could chew because the game was not well-received. With the first-person successor game Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror, SOEDESCO has scaled things back significantly. There’s no skill tree this time around and no multiplayer to speak of, with the focus solely on delivering a survival horror experience in a classic style. Unfortunately, the narrower focus didn’t help, as Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror is one of the worst horror games ever made.

In Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror, players take on the role of the amnesiac Eliza, who is given an experimental drug and dumped in a creepy countryside to try to piece together her past. The story is vomited out in painful exposition dumps by uninterested voice actors, and all plot twists are obvious from the start. The game takes a swing at something like Silent Hill‘s Otherworld that players can reach by interacting with mirrors, but this idea isn’t used to any great effect in the story or the game.

Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror‘s story is a mess, and so are its graphics. Character models look multiple generations behind, with stiff animations, bland designs, and occasional oddities, like a character whose eyelashes don’t seem to move with their blinking eyelids. Textures are muddy, and the lighting is all over the place. The game makes the mistake of thinking oppressive darkness makes games scarier, when in reality, it only makes them more annoying to navigate. Light from lanterns cuts in and out, textures fail to load, players can push their heads through walls to see inside buildings, trees and structures don’t always touch the ground, some rocks are see-through because the developers seemingly forgot to finish them, and more. Simply put, Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror‘s graphics are a disaster.

Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror is a Broken Mess

Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror‘s shockingly bad graphics are the first clue that the game isn’t in a finished state, but the bugged puzzles really drive the point home. Behind the Broken Mirror tries to emulate classic survival horror games where players have to walk around spooky environments, collecting keys, managing their resources, and solving puzzles. The problem is that the puzzles don’t always work as intended. The game’s second major area has you collecting four doll heads that must be placed in a specific order on a set of stakes. But despite having the doll heads in the correct order, the scene wouldn’t trigger to let me continue the game. After picking up the doll heads and putting them back in the same place multiple times, it eventually decided to work.

There are other order-focused puzzles like this in Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror, so not only are the puzzles bugged, but they are also repetitive. My favorite was the one in the last major area that involved putting four masks on mannequins in a specific order. It’s almost like the developers decided to scrap the actual “puzzle” element from this part of the game because Behind the Broken Mirror doesn’t allow the masks to be put in the wrong spot. So, it’s a simple matter of trying the masks on each one until it works.

Selecting the wrong item in a puzzle is a jarring experience in Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror. Most survival horror games alert the player that the item doesn’t work, but Behind the Broken Mirror removes the inventory menu from the screen and leaves players staring at the puzzle object. Now, what needs to be used in any given puzzle is always blatantly obvious and so this will only happen in the case of misclicks, but it’s still a strange oversight that serves as further proof Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror is either not a finished video game or a very poorly made one.

Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror is full of head-scratching oversights like this, with one of the most baffling being how it tells players every objective at the start of each level. Instead of letting players explore Behind the Broken Mirror‘s environments and organically discover what they need to do to progress, the game lays it all out. This robs Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror of any sense of discovery it might have had, spoiling what kind of puzzles players will have to solve and what new weapons they’ll find.

When players aren’t walking around in the dark and solving mindless puzzles, they are engaging in the game’s equally mindless combat. Behind the Broken Mirror‘s combat is laborious, slow, and inconvenient. Nearly every combat encounter in the game plays out the same way. Living dolls of various shapes, sizes, and weaponry walk straight at the player, sometimes reacting to gunshots and sometimes not, and then they die with no strategy required. Every gun in the game is a handgun of some description, and a couple look almost identical. Each gun uses different ammunition, but the developers didn’t even bother to use different colors for the boxes. There’s blue, yellow, and, bizarrely, two shades of red. Some of the guns also have hilariously bad range, though that quit being a problem once I realized most enemies wouldn’t follow me through doors. The child-sized enemies would pursue me, but the others would freeze outside, waiting for their turn to get shot to death.

Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror is a Failure on All Fronts

Many survival horror games build tension by giving players limited resources, but Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror throws this out the window by forcing players to engage with most enemies and giving them so much ammunition that they won’t know what to do with it. There’s a basic crafting system for players to restock their ammo, and it’s comical how many materials players get. It actually becomes a nuisance because the ammo and crafting materials start taking up too much inventory space.

Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror‘s combat is terrible, its graphics are ugly, and its puzzles are too easy and buggy, but if it were scary, a lot of that could have at least been tolerated for the sake of good scares. Predictably, Dollhouse: The Broken Mirror fails on that front as well. The game is full of random “spooky” sounds like doors creaking and random footsteps, so they all become meaningless. There is some obnoxiously loud music when enemies show up that might make players jump once or twice, but that loses its luster very quickly.

Halfway through Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror, players reach a carnival level that I thought might provide a brief glimmer of entertainment in the sea of atrocity that is the rest of the game. The carnival level has players participating in mini-games to earn tickets that can be used to exit to the next area or turned in for yet another handgun. Players can toss rings on bowling pins, throw skulls at wooden targets, and chuck balls into giant clown heads to earn points. At first, none of these games worked. I was unable to pick up any of the objects and had to restart the checkpoint. Things worked properly after loading in again, but the carnival games still felt awful to play with a controller. Players have to look down, line the cursor up with whatever object they’re trying to grab, drag the stick back up, angle their shot, and then throw. Each mini-game has a strict time limit that leaves little room for error, though one of the games has a trick to bypass it. I think these mini-games would have felt better with a mouse, but with a controller, they’re wonky at best.

There are no redeeming qualities to be found in Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror. The game is a complete disaster in all categories. It’s broken, ugly, not scary, and worst of all, not fun to play. The story is laughably bad, and the gameplay is a poor imitation of the Resident Evil games. Horror fans should avoid Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror at all costs.

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Reviewed on PS5

Released

March 28, 2025

ESRB

T For Teen // Blood, Violence

Developer(s)

SOEDESCO

Publisher(s)

SOEDESCO

Pros & Cons

• Eye-rolling story told almost entirely through exposition dumps
• Ugly graphics that make the game look unfinished
• Easy puzzles that are sometimes bugged
• Boring combat
• Not scary at all
• Extremely short with no replay value

Dollhouse: Behind the Broken Mirror launches March 28 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. Game Rant was provided with a PS5 code for this review.