The Room: Old Sins: A Puzzle Box Worth Getting Lost In

By Nham Vu · Updated July 2026

The Room: Old Sins is the fourth entry in Fireproof Games' tactile puzzle series, released for mobile in January 2018 and later ported to Windows in February 2021. I have played through every game in this series, and Old Sins is the one I keep recommending first to newcomers, because it swaps the single cursed object of earlier entries for an entire dollhouse full of them.

That dollhouse is the whole trick. Instead of circling one box on a table, you are peering into miniature rooms inside a real house, and the game keeps folding those two scales into each other. It sounds gimmicky on paper. In practice it is the smartest structural idea Fireproof has had in the series.

This piece covers what the game actually is, how the puzzles hold up chapter to chapter, where new players get stuck, and the practical details, like platforms and length, that people searching for this game actually want answered.

What is The Room: Old Sins about?

The Room: Old Sins puts you in the role of a collector sent by a secret organization called The Circle to investigate the disappearance of a married couple, the Waldegraves, whose last known project was an elaborate dollhouse. Fireproof Games developed it as the fourth mainline installment, following The Room, The Room Two, and The Room Three.

The story is told almost entirely through environmental clues, letters tucked into drawers, and notes scrawled on the back of photographs. There is no dialogue to speak of. What holds it together is a slow, unsettling reveal about occult experimentation and a family that got in over its head, which fits the gothic, Victorian-tinged tone the series has leaned into since the first game.

How does the dollhouse mechanic actually work?

The dollhouse in Old Sins functions as a hub that connects to full-size versions of its own rooms, so solving a puzzle in the miniature study unlocks or alters something in the real study you can then walk into. Each of the game's chapters swaps between these two scales, often mid-puzzle.

What trips up new players is assuming the dollhouse is just decoration between the real puzzle rooms. It is not. Objects you shrink down, letters you find in miniature, and mechanisms you trigger at doll-scale routinely change what is solvable in the life-size room, and vice versa. The best players I have seen treat every room as two puzzles stacked on top of each other rather than one.

How long does it take to beat The Room: Old Sins?

Most players finish The Room: Old Sins in roughly 6 to 8 hours on a first playthrough, which makes it noticeably longer than the earlier three games in the series, each of which typically ran 3 to 5 hours.

That extra length comes from the number of distinct rooms rather than padding. The game is broken into chapters, each centered on a themed room such as the study, the curiosity room, or the workshop, and each one introduces a new mechanical idea instead of recycling the last chapter's tricks.

What platforms is The Room: Old Sins available on?

The Room: Old Sins launched on Android and iOS in January 2018 and later arrived on Microsoft Windows via Steam in February 2021, giving it the widest platform spread of any game in the series at the time.

The mobile version is built around touch controls that feel natural for the pinching, rotating, and zooming this series depends on. The PC version translates those same gestures to mouse controls competently, though a handful of finicky rotation puzzles are still a little easier with a touchscreen in my experience.

Current ways to play include:

• Android via Google Play
• iOS via the App Store
• Windows PC via Steam

What are the hardest puzzles and where do players get stuck?

The puzzles that generate the most walkthrough searches are the ones tied to the Japanese-influenced room later in the game and the multi-step mechanisms in the workshop, both of which layer several smaller locks into one sequence rather than presenting a single obvious solution.

A general rule that has served me well across this whole series: if a puzzle feels stuck, rotate the object you are holding and look at its underside or hidden edges before assuming you are missing an item elsewhere in the room. Old Sins hides an unusual number of solutions on the reverse side of things, more than any previous entry.

How does The Room: Old Sins end and does it set up a sequel?

The ending resolves the fate of the Waldegrave family and the source of the dollhouse's power, while leaving The Circle's broader agenda around the mysterious Null Element open, a thread the series had already been building since the first game.

It is a satisfying close to this particular story without being a full stop for the franchise. Fireproof went on to make The Room VR: A Dark Matter as a spin-off rather than a direct sequel to Old Sins, and the core mystery of the Null Element itself remains something the studio has only partially answered across the whole series.

Is The Room: Old Sins worth playing if you're new to the series?

Yes, and it is arguably the best entry to start with, since the dollhouse concept is self-contained and does not require knowledge of the earlier three games to follow. The BAFTA nominations it picked up for Mobile Game and British Game reflect how well it was received on release, and the puzzle design has aged well.

If you enjoy tactile, physical-feeling puzzle mechanics, and you don't mind a story you have to piece together yourself from scraps of paper rather than cutscenes, this is one of the more rewarding puzzle games mobile platforms have produced.