You'll find the puzzles in The Da Vinci Code game to be intricate and challenging. If you have recently sustained a major head injury.
The creators of the video-game version (for PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC) of Dan Brown's perennially best-selling thriller did, to their credit, realize that any Da Vinci game should be built around the logic puzzles and cryptic riddles that form the core of the book's plot. But for whatever reason, they neglected to make the final product any more taxing than the Fun Brain Benders for Kidz that I read in sixth grade.
The puzzles rarely advance beyond the level of, say, figuring out the next few numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. Yes, this might be slightly difficult if it were presented with no context. But the game practically beats you over the head with clues. Furthermore, the puzzles are presented in a strictly linear fashion, one after the other. This ensures that you'll never have to think on your own about what to do next – there's only one thing you can do next.
I ran into one puzzle that required a miniature bit of lateral thinking, but it only took a minute to figure out the rhyming riddle's relation to a set of chess pieces. For this brief, shining moment, the game's creators came close to being able to design their way out of a paper bag. As it turns out, they only got as far as poking a small hole into the bag before retreating into its manila depths.
Da Vinci also features one of the most poorly designed fist-fighting combat engines ever devised. You can't just punch your enemies – you have to get into a grapple with them, then input a series of button presses as prompted on the screen. Intriguing concept, horrid execution: a few fights and you'll wish you could go back to letter-substitution ciphers.
Much of the visual inspiration here was taken from the feature film – but not the likenesses of the actors. This means that Robert Langdon looks nothing like Tom Hanks, and the cast's lines are voiced by a significantly lower-budget cadre of poorly directed actors.
Despite claims of "new plot twists" on the back of the box, the retelling of the Da Vinci story has actually been stripped down. Major characters and events have been sliced out wholesale – in particular, all references to the controversial Roman Catholic organization Opus Dei have been removed.
To top it off, there are several major bugs (at least in the Xbox version that I played). At one point, I was playing as police agent Sophie Neveu, but the character model for Langdon appeared instead, speaking in a sultry French woman's accent. Later, as I was reading through the in-game encyclopedia of places and clues, the answer to a puzzle I had yet to solve appeared there, before it was supposed to.
You can avoid these bugs by simply never playing The Da Vinci Code, which is my recommended solution.
