Clever puzzles and a gorgeous setting held back by awkward PS5 controls
Look, I get what The House of Tesla is going for, and I love the vibe. Give me an elaborate machine, a mysterious workshop, and a bunch of mechanisms to figure out, and I am happy. Blue Brain Games understands that appeal. Its PS5 outing, The House of Tesla: Definitive Edition, has plenty of cool puzzle designs. I just wish interacting with them felt better.
You play as Nikola Tesla, exploring the abandoned Wardenclyffe facility and piecing together the mystery surrounding his work. Flashbacks provide glimpses into the past, giving the deserted machinery some context. It is a fictional mystery built around the inventor and his ambitions, with enough story to give all that inspecting and tinkering a purpose. For me, though, the main attraction is getting another strange contraption working.
The setting does a lot of the work. These rooms are full of machines that make me want to lean closer and examine how everything fits together. The combination of intricate mechanisms, period surroundings, and electrical effects is immediately inviting. There is something appealing about a place that looks as though someone spent years building it, then left you to work out what any of it actually does.
The puzzles build on that curiosity. You inspect objects, find missing components, rotate parts, and gradually make sense of mechanisms that initially look baffling. Electricity gives the familiar formula its own identity. A prototype device lets you see and influence the flow of power, adding another consideration when figuring out how a machine operates. Getting something assembled is only part of the problem when it still needs electricity.
I like most of these designs. Working through the different parts of a mechanism and understanding how they connect is satisfying. If you enjoyed the intricate objects in The House of Da Vinci, the attraction is easy to understand. The trouble on PS5 is that every little adjustment passes through a control scheme that I never found particularly comfortable.
Instead of moving freely around the environment, you travel between specific points, then focus on individual puzzles. I understand the intention: put the player where they can see and interact with the important stuff. But I kept wishing I could walk around normally and have the game lock me into position when I approached a puzzle. Moving between predetermined viewpoints makes exploring these lovely spaces feel unnecessarily restrictive.
Once you focus on something, you use an on-screen cursor to manipulate it. You move that cursor with an analog stick, selecting objects and performing the pulling, turning, and adjusting that the puzzles demand. It works. I could interact with things and make progress. But moving a pointer onto a small part, then trying to finagle that part into doing what I wanted, consistently felt awkward.
That matters in a game where manipulating objects is so much of the experience. Understanding a mechanism should be the satisfying breakthrough, followed by the pleasure of making it work. Here, even when I knew what I wanted to do, I still had to deal with how it felt to do it. Repeating that process across so many interactions makes the controls difficult to ignore. The small interruptions add up. You can get absorbed in figuring something out, then find yourself thinking about the cursor again as soon as you need to make an adjustment. I could accept that friction to reach the next puzzle, but it kept taking some of the pleasure out of solving the current one.
The missing option I really do not understand is DualSense touchpad cursor control. You have a touch surface sitting right there on the controller, yet you cannot use it to guide the pointer. I cannot promise that would solve every awkward interaction, but I would have loved to try it. These games are such a natural fit for touchscreens, where you can put your finger on the thing you want to move.
That is also why I enjoyed The House of Da Vinci VR so much. Being able to reach out and manipulate those objects with my hands made the whole idea feel right. Tesla left me wanting that same connection. There is no PS VR2 mode here, and I could not find a confirmed Meta Quest or PCVR version at the time of writing. For this PS5 review, the controller is what I had to embrace.
And honestly, if you can embrace it, there is a lot to enjoy. The House of Tesla has the atmosphere, the intricate machinery, and enough clever ideas to keep a puzzle fan interested. I still wanted to see what the next contraption would ask of me. On PS5, though, that enthusiasm comes with a persistent frustration over how I have to interact with it. A good puzzle adventure, provided you can get comfortable with the cursor. Thanks for reading!
