Hidden Side

The Lighthouse of Darkness

A gloomy little lighthouse with real teeth, if you can forgive the app that is no longer there.

Brick Rated Score

3.7/5

Set 70431 · 2020

Pieces548

Minifigs5

Year2020

Set number70431

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The verdict

I have a soft spot for lighthouses, so this one had me before I even opened a bag.

It builds into a properly moody model with a keeper who has the most wonderful swirly ghost beard, and the sides crack open to show teeth while a claw shoves out of the rock. The catch is that the whole Hidden Side idea was built around an augmented reality app that LEGO switched off in 2023, so the digital half is simply gone now. If you want a spooky lighthouse that stands on its own two feet as a model, it still delivers.

Best for: Halloween LEGO fans who want a haunted lighthouse to display and play with by hand

The full review

What it is

The Lighthouse of Darkness is the big centrepiece of LEGO's Hidden Side wave, and I will be honest, the lighthouse is what got me. It stands over eleven inches tall on a cliff of rock with a little jetty and a jet ski parked below, and the whole thing has this permanently overcast, ghost-story mood to it. You get five minifigs (Jack, Parker, a skeleton, Jennie Napo and the lighthouse keeper Claus Stormward), and the keeper is the star, with a huge swirly ghost beard tucked under his hat that makes him look properly cursed. The build has real theatre built in too. Turn a knob and the eye above the door goes from friendly to spooky, the sides of the tower swing open to reveal a mouthful of teeth, and a claw shoves its way out of the rock underneath. It is the kind of set that rewards you for fiddling with it.

The catch

Here is the part I cannot skip over. Hidden Side was designed as a hybrid theme, half physical LEGO and half augmented reality. Every set was meant to be scanned with a phone app so you could hunt ghosts and fight the boss spook floating around your build. LEGO retired the theme in early 2021 and then switched the app off completely at the start of 2023, so that entire digital layer is dead. If you buy this today expecting the ghost hunting game, you will not get it. On top of that, the physical transformation, while genuinely clever, is fairly quiet, and a few builders felt the tower could have hidden a bigger monster reveal. At the launch price of just under fifty dollars, 548 pieces is not the most generous ratio either.

Who it's for

So who is this actually for now. If you love a spooky display piece, especially around Halloween, and you judge it purely as a hand-played model, it is a lovely, characterful lighthouse with more going on than you would guess. It is also a warm pick for a kid who likes ghost stories and does not care one bit about apps. I would steer you away from it only if the augmented reality was the whole draw for you, because that ship has sailed, or if you want a dense, engineering-heavy build for the money. Take it as a moody lighthouse with a few tricks up its sleeve and it holds up nicely.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

Building this is more involved than the modest piece count suggests, mostly because so much of it is studs-not-on-top work. The tower is put together in stacked sections where the left and right walls face inward with doors and windows set into the middle, and the back is left open so little hands can reach in. That approach hides a surprising number of moving parts, the eye mechanism, the opening jaws, the popping claw, so a good chunk of your time is spent on the guts rather than the shell. It is a satisfying build with plenty of tiny touches to notice as you go.

The parts palette leans into the mood with sand green, dark tan and plenty of weathered rockwork, and the printed lighthouse eye is a nice character piece. The five minifigs carry a lot of the value here, with the diver's grimy, sea-worn detailing and Claus Stormward's swirly beard being the ones I kept picking back up. There are no headline new molds that will make a parts collector rush out, but the greys and greens are handy rockwork colours, and the whole thing is a decent little donor set for anyone building spooky scenery.

Fun facts

01Hidden Side was one of LEGO's boldest experiments, pairing every set with an augmented reality app, but the app was switched off completely at the start of 2023, leaving the sets to stand on their own as regular models.
02The set is completely battery-free. Every effect, the spooky eye, the opening teeth and the popping claw, is driven by simple mechanical linkages you work by hand.
03In the app's ghost hunting story this lighthouse was tied to the boss spook Joe Ishmael, and the keeper Claus Stormward was one of the theme's haunted characters.
04The finished model stands over eleven inches (29cm) tall, making it one of the larger builds in the short-lived Hidden Side line before the theme retired in early 2021.