The House of Da Vinci Series — All Four Games Ranked and Reviewed

The original House of Da Vinci sets the template for everything that follows. You’re Giacomo, Da Vinci’s apprentice, searching for your missing master through a series of interlocking puzzle rooms built from his workshop and inventions. The Oculus device — introduced here — lets you peer into the past to see how mechanisms were assembled, providing both the series’ central mystery hook and its most satisfying puzzle tool.

Where the game earns its reputation is in the tactile quality of the puzzles. Gears turn, drawers slide, hidden compartments reveal themselves in sequence. Everything is physical and everything makes sense within its own logic. For a debut entry from a small indie studio, the craft on display is genuinely impressive — the environments are rich, the mechanisms are inventive, and the progression never stalls into frustration. The series’ DNA is fully formed here from the first room.

The story is light but serves its purpose: providing context and motivation for moving through the puzzles without overstaying its welcome. The 3-4 hour runtime is appropriate for the content and price point. Play this first, and if the mechanical puzzle design clicks for you, the rest of the series is a safe investment.

The second entry is the series’ high point. Blue Brain Games arrived with more budget, more confidence, and a significantly expanded scope — taking Giacomo beyond the workshop into new locations across Renaissance Italy while deepening both the puzzle design and the narrative stakes. The Lovecraftian undercurrent that threads through the story adds an unexpected dimension that makes the sequel feel richer than the original without abandoning what worked.

The puzzles in Da Vinci 2 are more ambitious and more satisfying than those in the first game. The mechanical contraptions are larger, the Oculus sequences are more cleverly integrated, and the difficulty curve is well-calibrated — challenging enough to feel earned, accessible enough to avoid frustration. This is the entry that demonstrates Blue Brain Games had more than one good game in them.

The expanded runtime and more developed story make this the recommendation for anyone who enjoyed the first and wants more. It’s also the entry that most justifies playing the series in order — the narrative payoffs are richer with the first game’s context behind you. Start with one, but Da Vinci 2 is where the series reaches its ceiling.

The third entry closes Giacomo’s story and does so with the series’ visual ambition at its highest point. The environments in Da Vinci 3 are among the most gorgeous Blue Brain Games has produced — the Renaissance detail is richer, the scale is larger, and the production values show a studio that had grown considerably since the 2017 original. The puzzles remain inventive throughout and the conclusion feels genuinely earned after three games of investment in the story and characters.

The slight step back from the 8.5 of the sequel reflects the reality that the third entry is consolidating rather than expanding. The puzzle design is excellent but doesn’t reach the peaks of new mechanical creativity that Da Vinci 2 managed. The story closure is satisfying without being exceptional. These are the observations of a strong series entry rather than a weak one — Da Vinci 3 is a good game that occasionally reminds you it was preceded by a great one.

If you’ve played one and two, play three. The trilogy functions as a complete narrative and the conclusion is worth experiencing. If you’re new to the series, don’t start here — the emotional weight of the ending depends entirely on the earlier entries.

The VR entry takes the series’ mechanical puzzle design and puts it directly in your hands — and for the right audience, this is the definitive way to experience the House of Da Vinci’s contraption-turning, gear-spinning core. Physically reaching into a Renaissance mechanism and manipulating its components with motion controls is a fundamentally different and more immersive experience than doing so with a cursor.

The VR adaptation scores lower than the mainline trilogy not because it does its job poorly, but because VR fundamentally narrows the audience relative to the flat-screen entries. The hardware requirement gates out a significant portion of the puzzle game audience who would otherwise enjoy exactly what’s on offer here. Evaluated purely on the VR puzzle experience it delivers, Da Vinci VR is a strong implementation — the tactile quality of the puzzles translates exceptionally well to motion controls, and the environments are as atmospherically rich as the mainline games.

The recommendation is clear: if you have VR hardware and enjoyed any of the trilogy, this is worth your time. If you don’t own VR hardware, start with the flat-screen entries — the series is excellent without it.