The House of Da Vinci

Overall I enjoyed this game - it definitely tickled my love of escape rooms.

That being said, the early game was far more fun than the later game. The puzzles didn't only increase in challenge (which is fine), they increased in obscurity as well. The early puzzles in the first few levels may have taken me some trial and error and serious thinking, but I got them eventually. Some of the later puzzles were so obscure I had to make extensive use of the hint system, and a couple of them I had to find guides elsewhere to help. Two of the puzzles in the last stage nearly had me rage-quitting even with hints.

Again, I did overall enjoy the game and would say it's worth playing if you like escape room style puzzle games, but The Room series was better IMHO. I don't know for certain if I'll play the rest of this series, while The Room had me hooked from the start and there was never any doubt I would play them all.

It’s been years since I completed all the 4 ‘The Room’ games on the iPad. These games were so enjoyable that I was all too happy to buy them on Steam again. Even though I bought two of the ‘House of Da Vinci’ games on the iPad, I never got around to playing them. Now, I finally start with the first one on Steam thanks to a recent sale. It has been a good start but it’s not without some hiccups.
One thing that is almost impossible to ignore will be the comparison to ‘The Room’ games. Although my memories are not as vivid, it is easy to see the similarities. They are very alike but there are still some slight differences. It feels like the first ‘House of Da Vinci’ is more concerned about its story. I remember ‘The Room’ being lighter on story, a lot of the puzzles felt random until you read some notes near the end. Da Vinci has a couple of short cutscenes, the notes are consistent at keeping you updated with why you’re solving these puzzles and even the puzzles/locations themselves have some purpose why you’re doing them. This attention to detail and presentation gives Da Vinci a stronger impression. What lets the game down a bit are some of the puzzles. Some of them are brilliant and very satisfying to solve but a couple were too complex for their own good. The first Room game might have had some of those moments but they don’t go as far, that game feels more intuitive overall. There is a hint system that usually gives you enough pointers to push you in the right direction, I still used a video walkthrough here and there though. The controls with the mouse is generally okay but there are a couple of specific situations where the controls can feel awkward and annoying. Lastly, I encountered one bug where a puzzle doesn’t continue after solving it, luckily re-loading a save fixes this.
For a first game, ‘House of da Vinci’ leaves a good impression. I can definitely recommend it (on sale) for fans of ‘The Room’ games if you are willing to deal with a few imperfections. The Room games did become better and more polished with time and I expect the same to hold true here. It took me 8.6 hours to complete the game and get all the achievements which are only 6, you need to find one collectible in each of the 6 ‘chapters’.

Fascinating. I definitely wasn't up to completing it by myself, but I loved doing what I could. A beautifully complex environment.

In terms of gameplay this is a direct (but inferior) clone of the successful "The Room" series by Fireproof games (who seem to only make VR stuff now). Play those first, and then consider this only if you're desperate for more.
House of Da Vinci has plenty of competent, mostly fair puzzles in the form of fascinating devices and architecture, just like The Room, but the failure to go the last mile with polish and quality control puts this in a decidedly less satisfying tier. It was often a needlessly frustrating experience, despite its wonderful setting and mostly well-executed formula.
Some of the rough edges that nearly ruined it:
Clumsy controls and poor transitions between nodes. It's common to know what you want to do but not be able to because you can't identify exactly which pixel holds the hitbox for the object or adjacent location node, or because important areas are not visually distinct. This often means you'll abandon the solution you correctly identified, and go rummaging around the locations on a wild goose chase, only for a hint to tell you later you were right in the first place and you need to go back and wildly click around on some stuff you were already looking at. And speaking of hints: The Room seemed to link each hint with a specific action, and then track those actions so it only showed hints which were currently relevant. House of Da Vinci's hint system looks the same, but is far less sophisticated under the hood: often you will wait on two or three separate hint timers because you've got 3/4 way through a particular puzzle cluster, but the hint system isn't intelligent enough to skip all those hints you don't need. Because of the poor controls and bugs, I began to rely on hints much more than I normally do, to verify I was not barking up the wrong tree, which reduced my enjoyment of the game.
I encountered a few fairly serious bugs, but thankfully none that soft-locked me: in at least one case, I could not place a required object at all, and had to consult a walkthrough and finally a forum post (well over a year old, not patched), discovering I had to exit the game and reload it, after which the object magically spawned in the correct place. Another big issue is the extreme flakiness of the Oculus. This is a lens you look through to see if there is any magical blue goo floating about to solve puzzles with. It's a direct adaptation of a mechanic from The Room, where it was much more thematically appropriate, and more effectively deployed. The problem here is, in this game, these events cannot be securely relied upon to show up at the right time. Even if a hint is instructing you to use it, it still may not actually be visible, so you will have to click around different nodes until your time-o-plasm or whatever triggers in the game logic. Sometimes exiting to menu and coming back seemed to trigger it. But this is really, really problematic for an event that is supposed to serve both as a clue, and as a puzzle mechanic. In "The Room" this phenomenon was much more stable and only appeared and disappeared based on clear state changes. Here they pop in and out of existence seemingly randomly, and the puzzles themselves can be visually noisy as well has hard to control, compounding the annoyance.
And finally, if you've played The Room (the PC releases at least), you'll immediately notice that the texture quality is much, much poorer in House of Da Vinci (closer to mobile versions). It may seem superficial but this actually has a huge impact on my enjoyment of the game. It's much less tiresome to search for the next hidden switch or clue when what you're looking at is an exquisitely crafted work of art, rather than a somewhat bland PS3-era model. House of Da Vinci looks dull and plain by comparison, even with similar functional design, and it makes spending time searching objects much less engaging. These boring textures combined with extremely dark environments with no gamma control make much of the game look muddy.
Even with considerable frustration and disappointment, there was still a lot to like here. There's some genuine creativity, decent puzzles and environments, and historical flavor (the achievements plaza is a very cool bonus) that shows a real interest and respect for the titular inventor. It was strong enough to push through, and suggests there's enough talent on this team that I'll give the next game a try. I'd say that's positive.

I'm mixed. I got this at 80% off and it's not bad, but it is a little frustrating and a little nonsensical.
I think I tend to focus too much on negatives in my reviews, so some positives to start off: The setting is cool, it looks nice, sound design is good, and there are a lot of neat machines. It's got that "escape room" feel to it. The puzzles are decent and varied.
Some downsides though: sometimes you need to spot (and click on) something quite small in order to progress. The areas you're in are dark and have quite a lot going on, so I found it easy to miss some of these. The hints system does help, but it's unsatisfying to rely on hints to realise "oh, I just completely didn't see that". One area in particular has a small entry room that I kept forgetting about, that you do actually have to return to multiple times.
The machines you're interacting with become increasingly implausible. Even before the more fantastical things, repeatedly you find that placing a mechanical thing on another mechanical thing suddenly makes it jump to life in a way that doesn't make sense. This probably wouldn't bother most people, and is a minor thing.
Also a minor thing, the plot is odd. If someone I cared about was hiding, and I knew I was being closely followed by people seeking to harm them, I wouldn't be carefully dismantling the obstacles protecting them.
So overall, it's a decent enough puzzle game, but I expected better after playing their previous game Quern.
It's also worth mentioning that some of the movements between areas made me feel a little dizzy and I'm not normally affected by motion sickness. So if you're sensitive to that you might not enjoy this.

I really enjoyed this game. The puzzles were just right for a casual experience, which is exactly what I was after. Sometimes I just want something relaxing. They (the puzzles) weren’t hard, but they weren’t mindless either. Once you figure out what the game wants from you, usually finding a missing object to activate a mechanism, the rest falls into place and the puzzles are fairly straight forward. It’s satisfying without ever getting frustrating. And the game does give you hints if you get stuck and don't know where to look.
That said, the story felt a bit lacking. It’s there, but pretty thin and doesn’t really build to much. The ending especially was kind of abrupt. I’m not sure what I was expecting, honestly. I finished the last puzzle, stepped through a portal, and just went, “Wait…?” I won’t spoil anything, but you’ll see what I mean.
If you’re here for some casual puzzle solving and not a deep narrative, you’ll probably enjoy it like I did. I’d recommend it as a fun, not-too-difficult escape room game.

Good puzzle room game, but it becomes real hard at times, where instinct stops working, hints become useless, and only a Youtube video can save you. Looking forward to the sequel!