If you made a Venn diagram (you know, with the overlapping circles) of people who love point-and-click adventures, people intrigued by Leonardo da Vinci, and people who don’t get carsick, everyone in the overlapping area absolutely needs to play The Secrets of Da Vinci. But anyone else might find this game’s flaws too much to take.
Our biggest problem was the camera, which is frustrating because the game’s 3D environments--a faithful re-creation of the Clos Lucé, Leonardo’s final residence, as it looked in 1522--are so beautiful. They’re full of rich color and detail, right down to Leonardo’s paintings and drawings hanging from the walls. And while the simple controls let you move the camera by moving the mouse, we found ourselves getting queasy after an hour or so of playtime on even the slowest setting.
Unlocking da Vinci's celestial globe only reveals more mysteries.
If that doesn’t make you flee, you’ll play as Valdo, searching Leonardo’s estate for a missing notebook on behalf of a mysterious patron. But your quest keeps you bouncing between the same handful of locations again and again to collect items needed to solve puzzles, making the gameplay feel like a slog.
The puzzles, based on da Vinci’s inventions and artwork, are engaging and can usually be solved without too much frustration as long as you have the required items in your inventory--and you can find them. The inventory system is a mess; items are added to its five pages in the order you collect them, but as you use them, their empty slots are filled with the next item you pick up. Virtually every time we wanted something, we had to page through the entire inventory, mousing over each item’s icon to read its name.
As you grapple with that while searching for Leonardo’s notebook, you get information from your own notes, papers you find that belonged to Leonardo, and conversations with the other two characters, Madam Babou and the caretaker Saturnin. The choices you have are affected by your morality score--if you try to deceive Babou, your “diabolic meter” rises, for example, while feeding milk to a cat raises your “angelic meter.” But you can also spend points earned by completing the puzzles to rebalance your morality, making the whole system pretty pointless. Also pointless is any task we have to repeat more than once, such as pressing globs of papier-mâché into sheets of paper, a multistep process that’s repeated four times. Too bad Leonardo never invented a helpful android sidekick.
Moving around the estate collecting items and finishing tasks can get tedious, but the lovely environments, interesting story, and clever puzzles make the journey worthwhile, especially for point-and-click fans.
The Secrets of Da Vinci
COMPANY: Coladia
CONTACT: www.coladia.com
PRICE: $29.90
REQUIREMENTS: 1.6GHz or faster processor, Mac OS 10.4 or 10.5, 2GB disk space
Beautiful environments. Interesting puzzles based on da Vinci's works. Attention given to accuracy of da Vinci's final residence, now a museum. ESRB rating: Everyone 10+. Universal binary.
Way too much backtracking. Camera can cause motion sickness. Some tasks become tedious with repetition.
