Stuck in a room with Da Vinci’s finest
Escape room games work really well in VR, and Blue Brain Games’ House of Da Vinci is no different. The game is set in Florence, Italy during the Renaissance. We’re the artist’s apprentice and he’s disappeared. So, we have to find him by exploring his lab. Being in first person gives us a real understanding of our space, and gets us to interact with everything in more dedicated — or weird –ways.
We look around a room, we find nonsense. We have a sort of blacklight that lets us see secrets. We pull levers, stick things together, push some buttons.
The biggest problem I have with this game is that sometimes we come across puzzles where we kind of need to take notes. It has a sort of built-in notation system, but there are a couple of instances where the note is inverted. Da Vinci was known for writing backwards (something called Mirror Script) so there’s very much a lore reason that this happens in the game. But for the old noggin, it’s not great. And I’ve got a headset on, so I can’t take my own notes to look at them.
There have been a couple of puzzles in the game where I had to really just think too hard for a normal human being, but that’s what these games basically are supposed to be like. House of Da Vinci VR is a good escape room game, it’s challenging and fun, and it has us wondering what Leonardo did that required a blacklight.
This review is based on a Meta Quest code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live for February 17, 2025. Images and video courtesy publisher.
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