If Leonardo Da Vinci had been born in the 20th century he would have been the best game designer ever. An artistic visionary with a gift for creative technical thinking, Italy’s renaissance superstar would have made Miyamoto look like an …
If Leonardo Da Vinci had been born in the 20th century he would have been the best game designer ever. An artistic visionary with a gift for creative technical thinking, Italy’s renaissance superstar would have made Miyamoto look like an Amish slaughterhouse worker.
Alas, Da Vinci died 500 years ago, leaving plucky young developer Blue Brain Games to carry on his legacy.
The House of Da Vinci started life as a Kickstarter campaign in 2016. It impressed eager gamers enough to smash its £25,000 target, raising £43,600 in total, and now the finished product is finally hitting the App Store, with Android, Mac and PC versions coming soon.
The game places you in the shoes of Da Vinci’s most promising apprentice and tasks you with discovering the whereabouts of the legendary polymath, who has mysteriously vanished. Was he assassinated by a shadowy Churchman? Did one of his machines transport him to another dimension accidentally? It’s up to you to find out.
As you can imagine, Da Vinci’s gorgeously rendered 3D workshop is full of ingenious contraptions and cleverly concealed objects and clues. To help you discover everything the game has to offer you’ll be able to see through surfaces and even rewind time, literally adding a fourth dimension to the gameplay.
The House of Da Vinci looks a bit like acclaimed puzzler The Room, in that it has a vaguely creepy alone-in-a-weird-room vibe, but Blue Brain Games is keen to emphasise the rich renaissance setting, complete with period music, architecture, and general ambience.
There’s also a strong narrative element, as you uncover more and more about your missing mentor through environmental clues and the puzzles themselves, all of which are based on Da Vinci’s own concepts and designs.
The mobile app stores aren’t short of puzzlers, but we think The House of Da Vinci is a beautiful and well-crafted addition to the genre.
You can judge for yourself too, as you can download the game on the App Store now.
This article is sponsored and is supplied by the Push Your App network.
