The House of Da Vinci

I usually love this kind of games, but there are so many problems with this one that makes the experience kinda miserable. The biggest one is the controls. They're incredibly janky, you'll click on something and either it will never register or throw you at a random place you were super far away from. For some puzzles you'll have some leeway for where you position things and suddenly for others you'll have to be exactly at the exact millimeter where it wants you to be or else it won't count. Anything that's supposed to spin will just not follow your mouse at all and reset after 1-2 spins. I'm trying to not spoil, but bright neon blue things that are hard to read is not a good idea when you have to memorize things. The quality of the puzzles is just all over the place. Some are way too easy, some are just plain trial and error, memory games (not really puzzles). Really depends on what you're looking for here, but I was expecting it to be more logic puzzles than anything else. I'm also going to add a warning that if you have motion sickness while playing games, there's a good chance you will while playing this one. It might not be too bad in the first few chapters, but near the end, I couldn't even look at the screen while moving around. It's a shame because there are some great puzzles in there, it's just such a pain to get through everything else.

The puzzles are generally pretty good, but occasionally there's areas that seem unsolvable only because you didn't click the exact right area of something you've already been clicking. For example, a picture with a secret compartment that you can't open until you zoom in on it, but to zoom in you have to click on the right spot with no indication of what that is. This can lead to times when you're searching around the rest of the level wondering what you've missed, when the answer is what you were trying to do already. The Hints button help out with this, but if you're trying to go without them you WILL run into these situations.

The puzzles were callenging enough to be fun and free hints are availible if you get stuck

House of da Vinci can be best summarized as an entry level puzzle game for normies, and Leonardo da Vinci deserves so much more. Leonardo da Vinci is best known as a painter, but he was also interested in anatomy, astronomy, botany, engineering, and more - and this game does reflect some of those things. He was also known for his mirrored handwriting and using unusual symbols for notation – which has led to the popular belief he was including secret codes in his letters and paintings. Regardless if he was or was not writing in code, this game could have leaned into that mystique far more, and it should have. An incredibly wasted opportunity. Instead of a puzzle game full of ciphers and hidden messages, we got a game where 90% your time will be wasted poking around objects and the environment to find the next move. A pixel hunt, if you will. A good puzzle game gives you a ring of keys so you can figure out which one is the correct key. A bad puzzle game hides the key instead. Of the actual puzzles present, most of them are lightweight. Most involve finding a missing component to a weird contraption. Others are geometric in nature. But all of them are buried underneath all of the "clicking around" you'll be doing. The final puzzle is easily the best one, but even that one suffers from the "hidden keys" problem. So to that end, don't feel bad if you need the hint system. Just keep in mind it's also useless half of the time. For every hint that says, "you should look over there by the table" there is one that goes "I think this item goes somewhere."

It's okay. I found the controls clunky, particularly when it came to opening objects (especially doors). Puzzles were either easy or very obtuse. Didn't feel like there were enough subtler hints placed within each space to avoid using the optional hint system from the settings. The settings hint system also seems to be linear? It was giving me hints for a part of a level I hadn't even gotten to yet rather than for the area I was working in and the objects I had in my inventory. Also found the time/x-ray vision mechanic to not be well implemented. Often could not tell something of that sort was needed unless I was at the exact zoom level where it would be used so there would be no clue that you needed it. This is particularly odd for the time watching because it's supposed to have a particle effect that's visible to tell you that it can be used in that spot in the first place. Overall I played it for longer than I should have and didn't finish it because it was too clunky going back and forth to try different solutions.