In Stranger Things, victims trapped in Vecna’s curse describe the Creel House as a place where reality fractures and splinters around them, rooms shifting into impossible geometries. LEGO has somehow captured that exact horror in brick form. Their new 2,593-piece Creel House literally transforms with a lever pull, walls splitting apart to reveal Vecna’s cursed mind lair within. It’s launching January 1st at $299.99, and after six years without a proper Stranger Things LEGO set, fans won’t want to escape this one.

Stranger Things Season 5 wraps up on New Year’s Eve at 5 p.m. PST. LEGO Insiders get early access to the set that same day before general release on January 4th. You’ll have processed the finale’s emotional damage and immediately have 2,593 pieces of therapeutic building to work through your feelings. I can’t decide if this is brilliant marketing or deliberately sadistic.

Designer: LEGO

LEGO calls it their first ever transforming house. Pull the corners and the entire structure reconfigures itself: some rooms split in two, others rotate 45 degrees, one wall drops into place, and the central spire rises up to reveal that infamous grandfather clock. Most LEGO sets with transformation gimmicks feel like compromises, sacrificing detail in one mode to accommodate the other. You get a decent robot or a passable vehicle, never both. This thing maintains a 20-inch-wide, nearly 12-inch-tall facade in both states, which means someone on the engineering team actually gave a shit about making both configurations work properly instead of treating one as an afterthought.

Open up the back and you’ve got seven distinct rooms: hallway, dining room, sitting room, Alice’s and Henry’s bedrooms, an upstairs landing, and two attic spaces. You can build it boarded-up or with the boards removed, which matters because the boarded version captures that abandoned murder house aesthetic from earlier seasons while the clean version works better as Vecna’s active lair. That’s not just aesthetic choice for its own sake. Anyone who’s watched the show knows the house exists in multiple states across different timelines, and giving builders the option to represent that shows someone actually paid attention to the source material instead of skimming a wiki for reference images.

Thirteen minifigures come with the set: Will, Mike, Lucas, Dustin, Vecna, Mr. Whatsit (Henry in his Season 5 human disguise), Holly, Steve, Nancy, Robin, Jonathan, Max, and Eleven. For $300, that’s a solid roster. The Mr. Whatsit to Vecna transformation happens through a hideaway feature built into the set, letting you physically swap between Henry’s boring normal kid persona and his full monster form. It works better in LEGO than it would in most other collectible formats because the medium already asks you to suspend disbelief about scale and realism. A transforming minifigure compartment feels natural here in a way it wouldn’t in, say, a high-end statue.

Buy during the first week and you’ll get the 40891 WSQK Radio Station gift, a 234-piece bonus set with Joyce Byers and a magnificently bearded Sheriff Hopper. Given their absence from the main set’s roster, this feels mandatory rather than optional. That rubber chicken printed tile though? Absolute deep cut for fans who’ve been paying attention to Season 5’s marketing. Stock runs out fast on these gift-with-purchase promotions, so waiting for a sale means missing Joyce and Hopper entirely unless you want to pay scalper prices on BrickLink later.

Steve’s car and the WSQK radio van both use six-wide construction with complicated techniques for tight angles and small offsets. Will’s bicycle rounds out the vehicle collection. None of these are throwaway builds to pad the piece count. LEGO City vehicles typically phone it in with basic stud-and-plate construction, but these use the kind of techniques you’d expect from Creator Expert or Speed Champions sets. Small details like that separate a licensed cash grab from a set that actually respects the builder’s time and money.

LEGO’s pricing sits at $299.99 US, £249.99 UK, €279.99 EU, and AU$449.99 Australia. That works out to roughly 11.5 cents per piece, above standard LEGO pricing but expected for licensed sets. Add in the transformation mechanism’s manufacturing complexity and you can justify the premium. Whether 2,593 pieces and 13 minifigures actually justify three hundred dollars depends on how much you care about Stranger Things specifically. If you’re ambivalent about the show, this is an expensive shelf decoration. If you’ve been waiting since 2019 for another proper set, it’s basically a bargain.

The post LEGO Just Dropped a $300 Stranger Things Set That Transforms When You Pull the Corners first appeared on Yanko Design.

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