The House Of Da Vinci PC Review

Do you like the Renaissance? Do you like puzzles and mystery? You might want to give The House Of Da Vinci a try!

Set during the Renaissance, The House Of Da Vinci gives you a hint of what to expect by its very title. You are Da Vinci’s apprentice but your master has disappeared and you have no idea what has happened. So your quest begins… Leonardo’s workshop is full of puzzles, inventions, escape mechanisms and secrets. You’ll need to use all your intelligence to decipher clues and make your way through the clues left for you to uncover what has happened to your master.

With a fantastic setting and premise, how does it actually play? My initial thought (and it did linger to some extent) was that the control mechanic is messed up. The view is somewhat inverted… you can change this in the setting but then it feels like it is inverted for other situations (typically when manipulating puzzles). So that can be a bit frustrating but it’s not insurmountable. Movement is a little hit and miss in that you basically have to click on the area you want to move to… but you have to figure out that you can move to it before you can do so… once in a location you have a certain amount of looking around you can do… but not completely freely (it’s like your feet are locked in position and you can look from side to side and maybe up and down a bit… but not too much). This can also be frustrating… especially if you accidentally click a location that you didn’t want while trying to go somewhere else (this happens more in the later part of the game when you find yourself going back and forth between locations a bit more).

If you can get past the controls… there is a lot to enjoy here. The visuals are quite lovely and the inspiration from Leonardo Da Vinci is clear (the little collectible designs are a nice touch). The puzzles themselves can be a bit overly tricky at times (especially when they involve looking at an area from a different perspective when it’s not always clear you can shift your perspective to where the clue is)… fortunately there is a hint system that will give you a bit of time to solve a puzzle and if you seem to be stuck it will release a clue… after a bit more time it will release another clue and these seem vague enough to not hand you the answer but clear enough to definitely put you on the right path.

Final Thoughts:

Though definitely hampered by questionable controls and sometimes obscure puzzles and movement… the overall satisfaction of solving a puzzle and seeing what new contraption was revealed kept me going. If you enjoy puzzle games, certainly give it a look.