Back in April 2024, I attended WASD at the London Games Festival. Having spent countless hours on Blue Brain Games’ masterful The House of Da Vinci series, I made a beeline for their booth to get my hands on the recently announced The House of Tesla. Now available on Steam, the demo remains largely unchanged in its current incarnation, though the release window has shifted from 2024 to 2025 - perhaps fitting for a game all about manipulating electricity and time.
The demo, which runs a little under 30 minutes, drops players into a small room within the eerily empty Wardenclyffe facility - Tesla's ambitious but ill-fated attempt at creating a wireless power transmission tower. The setting immediately establishes the game's commitment to historical authenticity while leaving room for creative interpretation in both puzzles and plot.
Within Wardenclyffe, oxidised copper pipes snake around the exposed brickwork, and a persistent hum of electrical current fills the air, broken only by claps of thunder and lightning beyond the towering industrial windows. Though the demo is contained in one space, it invites exploration with small easter eggs like an article about Tesla’s real-life contemporary Marconi hidden on the desk. Never mind games that boast “you can pet the cat”, I want Blue Brain Games to let me click all the things and read every single word.
“Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world.” - Nikola Tesla
To play, you point, click, and drag your way around the atmospheric 3D space. When something is clickable, your cursor changes to a magnifying glass. When it’s collectable, it’s added to your inventory, and when it can be manipulated or combined with another object, a helpful icon appears beside it.
Many escape room games often lean heavily into either pure puzzle mechanics or pure narrative, but here The House of Tesla demo suggests a more nuanced approach. Blue Brain Games' upcoming title weaves historical fiction with electrical engineering puzzles in a grounded way - pun intended.
Rather than treating electricity as a simple on / off mechanism, The House of Tesla offers the player a specialised device, the “Remote Space Wireless Power Transmitter” to visualise the electrical currents as, you probably guessed it, wibbly electrical blue currents and lightning bolts. Like the Oculi Infinitum in The House of Da Vinci, this device might be a little anachronistic but its inclusion is a masterclass in “finding the fun”. What looked like background detail before is suddenly illuminated in an electrical glow ready to be connected into a sprawling web of currents.
The demo offers just one puzzle like this, towards the end of the experience. In this, you use the Remote Space Wirel- okay, let’s just call it “the device” to chain-link an electrical current through a series of degraded machines, conductors, and hidden wires. Simple here in its execution but very clear to see how complex it could become over the full game.
If I had only one hesitation about The House of Tesla, it would be that since the demo largely represents one small part of the full game, there isn’t wasn't a lot of time dedicated to a tutorial. I felt a familiarity with the original Da Vinci games was helpful, if not necessary to understand what the game asks. Tesla has many curious mechanical contraptions in his workshop and I got the sense that what might be intuitive to The House of Da Vinci player may not be to someone else. Remember this: If faced with a contraption you don’t know what to do, just follow the Bop It commandments: Push it, pull it, twist it, flick it and if all else fails, shout at it.
The question of the device is likely just one small part of a delicate balance Blue Brain Games have to solve in the full release. How to make The House of Tesla historically believable yet still a fun thinky puzzle game. The House of Da Vinci can get away with being whimsical, fantastical and at times, supernatural. I mean, Da Vinci was alive such a long time ago. Tesla on the other hand was still working in the 1940s, and today you can go visit the same Wardenclyffe Tower where this game is set.
I don’t know to what degree the full release will go into the true history of Tesla, but his dream at Wardenclyffe was to create an ambitious, wireless global telecommunications system. His bold vision was to transmit voices, images, and news in seconds all over the world, using the Earth itself as an enormous conductor.
"When wireless is fully applied, the earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts." - Nikola Tesla
It’s an amazing setting for an escape room game, but the world in the 1940s was very different from Da Vinci’s 1400s, and I’m equally excited and curious to see where The House of Tesla will take his story. From the demo alone, it seems poised to join the ranks of the beautifully crafted escape room games that successfully blend historical fiction with engaging, tactile puzzle mechanics. While the demo leaves many questions unanswered, it provides just enough intrigue that the full release, planned for 2025 across PC, console, and mobile platforms, will be worth watching.
As a final thought, although Tesla famously failed his Wardenclyffe experiment, I’d like to think that he would be pleased to know his dream was realised in the world we live in today. A vast network of people creating, playing, and writing about fantastic thinky puzzle games and learning the principles of playful problem solving through electrical puzzles along the way. If the full game can expand on the demo’s promising foundation, The House of Tesla would offer something unique whilst capturing the spirit of scientific discovery that drove one of history’s most fascinating inventors.
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