The House of Da Vinci
The House of Da Vinci is a 2017 puzzle adventure game developed by Slovak indie studio Blue Brain Games. The game is based on fictional events that occured during the renaissance. The game is avilable in English, French, German, Spanish, Brazilian, Portuguese, Czech, Slovak, Russian, Turkish, Italian, Polish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chines, Hindi adn Malay.
The story is set up in Florence, Italy during the renaissance. The player is Leonardo Da Vinci's most promising apprentice. Leonardo has disappeared. The player starts searching for the truth in Leonardo Da Vinci's house. However, Leonardo's workshop is full of puzzles, inventions, escape mechanism and objects hidden in all corners of decorated rooms. The players have to solve series of puzzles in different rooms in order to find whether Da Vinci has left any message for them.
Gameplay
Apart from complex puzzle that are physics based, the player gains access to two lenses with supernatural abilities. With one, they can see hidden codes and with the other they can see what had happened in the past. The player occasionally gets to see letter from their master Da Vinci and also from the antagonists. The player gets closer to finding the truth after completion of every level.
Development
Bue Brain Games is an indie team of graphic artists adn developers, all of whome are people intersted in both 3D puzzle games and teh renaissance genius Leonardo Da Vinci. The house of Da Vinci was successfully funded on Kickstarter in late 2016. 2,391 adventure game enthusiasts backed the game.
The puzzles are incredibly eloborate, with solutins nested inside solutions nested inside solutions.
Just as you're congratulating yourself on working out how to extract a key from its hiding place, you learn that you still have to combine it with something else to make it functional, and once you've found that thing and turned the key in the lock yet another puzzle appears.
Rooms can take an hour or more to finish (depending on how clever you are), meaning that The House of Da Vinci is a very substantial offering in terms of playing time.
Mercifully, it also contains plenty of variety. While many oth puzzles involve finding objects and sliding stuff around to uncover, unlock, or rearrange mechanical puzzle parts, occasionally making use of one your Oculi, there are forays into other types of gameplay too, such as Galcon-style strategy mini-game where you have to conquer the world.
In terms of puzzle design and presentation it's difficult to fault The House of Da Vinci. The graphics are richly detailed and evocative, and the period music and realistic sound effects do their bit to keep you in the world.
There's also an excellent hint system, which gives you the option of seeing increasingly heavy hints on a timed, recharging basis.
There are a few tiny niggles. The controls on a 5.7 inch screen can be fiddly, though you get a feel for them after a while, and it's a shame that it's not possible to interact in some way with more of the background objects, which would have infused the world with more life.
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