With clever mechanics and hands-on problem-solving, House of Da Vinci VR taps into what makes escape room–style games so compelling in VR. If there’s one game genre that fits into the virtual reality space better than any other, it’s the escape room-style puzzle game. There’s just something about standing in a room, poking around, pulling levers and sliding open hidden compartments with your own two hands that makes perfect sense in VR. Some of the best examples — I Expect You To Die, The Room VR, even Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire — prove just how well this formula works when the puzzles are clever and the interactions feel real.
So, House of Da Vinci VR should, in theory, slide comfortably in alongside those games. And in a lot of ways, it does. The atmosphere is there. The interactivity is solid. The puzzle design has some smart moments. But it doesn’t quite hit the highs of the greats, and a few frustrating issues hold it back from being something truly special.
The setup for House of Da Vinci VR is straightforward: you’re Da Vinci’s apprentice, called to his home in Florence, only to find he’s gone missing. From there, it’s your job to retrace his steps and figure out what happened by solving puzzles hidden throughout his manor. It’s a bare-bones story, but honestly, that works in the game’s favour. It doesn’t try to be more than it needs to be. The plot is just a light framework to get you moving from one puzzle to the next, and that’s totally fine, because what VR does best is hands-on problem-solving, not heavy exposition dumps.
“So, House of Da Vinci VR should, in theory, slide comfortably in alongside those games — and in a lot of ways, it does.”
And really, that’s where House of Da Vinci VR shines. The puzzle work feels great. There’s a real tactile satisfaction to the way things move and click into place. You’ll rotate mechanisms, slot pieces together, pull cranks and align objects with that perfect “aha” moment. Some puzzles even trigger those Rube Goldberg–style chain reactions that are just fun to watch unfold. It makes the most of VR’s strengths: your hands, your eyes, your presence in a 3D space.
You also get access to a couple of special tools early on in House of Da Vinci VR. One lets you kind of “X-ray” certain parts of the environment to spot hidden components. The other allows you to view past events — sort of like echoing back in time. These get layered into the puzzles really well, and by the time you’re switching between base-level interaction, past visions and X-ray mechanics, it starts to feel like you’re juggling three layers of reality at once. It’s a neat game mechanic, and it helps keep things fresh during the game’s short runtime. I wrapped up the whole thing in about two hours, which feels a little brief, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
“Instead of feeling like you’re gaining problem-solving skills… you’re bouncing back and forth between easy and hard with no real logic.”
As much as I enjoyed the feel of the puzzles, there’s something off about how they’re paced and balanced. Usually in puzzle games, there’s a nice difficulty curve. You start with simple stuff, and the complexity slowly builds until you’re doing intense-level logic chains by the end. But here, it’s kind of all over the place. One minute you’re solving a complex war map with mathematical strategy, and the next you’re just shoving a triangle into a triangle-shaped hole. Then it’s back to spinning dials on a lock that requires three layers of thought, followed by a basic word association puzzle. It’s not bad, but the jump in complexity from one moment to the next is jarring.
It’s not that any of the puzzles are outright broken or unfair — they’re not. Most are totally doable, and a few are really satisfying. But the way they’re arranged doesn’t build much momentum. Instead of feeling like you’re gaining problem-solving skills and understanding more advanced puzzle mechanics, you’re bouncing back and forth between easy and hard with no real logic. It’s a bit of a missed opportunity, because that kind of ramp is part of what makes puzzle games feel rewarding.
But the biggest issue during House of Da Vinci VR was the controller desyncing. And it happened a lot. In a game where all you do is interact with the world using your hands, having your controllers randomly lose sync is incredibly frustrating. There were several moments where I was trying to manipulate an object, and my hand would drift, freeze or just not register correctly. I tried changing locations and even recalibrating my headset to make sure it wasn’t a lighting or tracking issue, but the problem persisted across multiple play sessions. It’s not game-breaking, but it’s definitely immersion-breaking — and in VR, that matters.
