I’ll admit, in my fast-paced life, puzzle games can sometimes struggle to resonate with me. Do I like them? Yes, but if I have to run around, back and forth, trying to figure it out, I can get turned off and gravitate away from them. This isn’t even an indictment of a game or me saying it is bad, just a statement about how hard it is to keep my interest. The House of Hikmah rounds out at about 5 hours, or at least it did for me, and managed to hold my interest; take that as you might.
The thing I love most about indie games is that they give creators a broad palette to tell a story. In the debut game from Lunacy Studios, we are transported to the Grand Library of Baghdad during the 9th century, the golden age of Islam. This might have been in the game, though it seemed to start by jumping into the conflict pretty quickly (or at least what the game treats as one). If it was never mentioned, that’s fine. Dosa Divas sent me down a rabbit hole of research as well. I love it when a game can expose me to something unfamiliar to me in that way, and this one does.
You play as a young girl named Maya, sent to the House of Hikmah while your father goes off on a pilgrimage. You are tasked with little things, but the library is presented as a trippy and bizarre series of areas you need to solve your way through. There is some form of buildup in here as the task of bringing several masters to the main hall for a meeting. That said, the game is only 5 hours long. This isn’t to make a negative point, but to say that about two hours in, I had completed the first two tasks, both of which felt like they might be tutorials for a bigger journey to unfold… Only to have to find the next person in their room of oddities again.
The narrative has pretty solid voice work, given the scope of the game, but it makes what I would say is a misstep in presentation. Cutscenes play out in close-ups of two characters talking, but with no mouth work, I feel like the better choice would have been more zoomed-out stage cutscenes. This being said, characters have pretty emotive eyes, which was impressive to see.
There is a hub world connecting all the areas together, but unfortunately, except for some dialog options, there is very little to do there. You can jump around and explore, but really, everything is guided towards the next door to walk through. Annoyingly, without waypoints on traversal locations, even in this area, it was absurdly easy to lose track of where I needed to go. The levels can be even worse.
There are areas that you get locked into, the kind you need to solve a weight or light puzzle to traverse, but what’s more shocking is how big some places can actually get. The second area, for instance, involves plenty of wind tunnels that the player must traverse to move from area to area, with several long areas that involve a second type of puzzle. A later area involving a big desert can feel even longer as you switch between a wide-open space and a long pathway.
Almost all tasks flow specifically through a bracelet that Maya wears on her wrist, which allows the player to switch the substance of materials. They can cause them to become translucent, metallic, or even glass at will, to interesting effect. These can also be annoyingly drawn out. In one, I needed to traverse through many gears and platforming to activate some additional magnetic gears; they traverse the path back with a gear.
To do so, you need to pick up the gear in its light state, use the magnetized moving gears to transport it in its metal state, and occasionally transport it through wind tunnels in its translucent state. The game doesn’t explain much of how these states interact. The magnet was obvious to piece together, but wind tunnels feel less obvious, and puzzles can occasionally be slightly obtuse like that. I still figured it out eventually in every case, so it is hard to say the game isn’t solvable without explanation.
Along this same route, though, the game hit the most annoying roadblock, and that became the problem. When I am changing substances, I’m enjoying myself. When the task involves me platforming past or asks for something else, less so. At one point, to move this gear, I needed to throw it along moving platforms. Midway through this, you need to pull a gear to switch the direction of the gears. On the final platform, I had to throw the gear, and Maya had a weak throw. I must have tried 6 or 7 times before the gear landed and stayed and didn’t fall into the void. Thankfully, there are item save points, so you don’t need to go all the way back to the start, but you have to reset and traverse the gear platforms to start again, creating an annoyance.
On the more fun side was a puzzle later on that involved weights and a light that you needed to reflect to certain points to activate. Turning them metal pulls them down, and turning them glass raises them and creates a reflective surface to bounce them around. Again, very little explanation is given for solving this task, but discovering just how everything interacted was a part of what made me enjoy doing this so much.
The House of Hikmah is an imperfect experience, and there were a few puzzles that caused me some frustration, especially one that needed me to restart the game to reset. It’s the type of game where you will probably know what you stand to gain from it, even at first glance. The fact that the substance-shifting puzzle-solving appealed to me is more of a happy accident. I was drawn in by its shifting world and historical influence, which both did not disappoint in the end.
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