Orientalism remains the primary lens with which videogames have represented the Arab world: white heroes raiding tombs, being seduced by belly dancers, and killing terrorists. As Ahmed Al-Rawi notes, “The region is represented as chaotic, ‘barbaric’, and unpredictably dangerous.” Islamophobia increased during the War on Terror. “Middle Easterners are constantly vilified and are stripped of their humanity, often reduced to a subhuman category in order to justify virtually killing them.”
House of Hikmah counters such discourses. You play as Maya, a 14-year-old girl who comes to the House of Wisdom searching for answers in the wake of her father’s death. Maya is sharp and strong-willed. She faces threats to her heart and soul but never engages in violence. Instead, by solving puzzles, you help Maya come to grips with the loss of her father and find her place in the world.
Considerable historical research went into making this game, though the team paired this knowledge with a magical realist approach. The House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikmah) was an intellectual centre in Baghdad from the 8th century until the Mongols destroyed it in the siege of 1258. The majority of the cast are historical intellectuals and artists of the Islamic Golden Age (8th–13th centuries), the proverbial fathers and mothers of medicine, robotics, and optics, among other fields. Several of Maya’s mentors are women. For instance, Fatima al-Fihri (ca. 800–880) founded the world’s oldest university, al-Qarawiyyin, in Morocco in 857–59. And Mariam al-Asturlabi was a 10th-century maker of astrolabes based in Aleppo in present-day Syria.
Maya’s father, Abdullah, died on a voyage to Al-Andalus. The game was inspired by Creative Director Faris Attieh’s own grief over the loss of his father. “This is the game I wish I had when I was going through it,” he told Game Watcher. Like Sergent Studios’ Tales of Kenzera: Zau (2024), House of Hikmah rejects familiar formulas for representing grief (e.g., the “five stages”). Each character responds to Abdullah’s death in their own way. While al-Asturlabi finds solace in her work, mechanical engineer Ismail al-Jazari is unable to keep his inventions in working order.
Maya uses a device her father invented to solve puzzles involving transmuting objects into different elements: ether, metal, glass, and energy. Each scholar’s domain is a level devoted to a particular element. In the final level, Maya must display her mastery over all four elements by solving puzzles that require her to use them in tandem.
For an indie title with considerable narrative and artistic ambitions, I was expecting puzzles more along the lines of Giant Squid’s The Pathless (2020) or Hello Games’s The Last Campfire (2021). The depth with which House of Hikmah explores the possibilities of each element and their combinations was a pleasant surprise. For instance, Maya can turn walls into ether to access new areas, turn a weight on a platform into ether in order to raise it, or make a gear weightless so that the wind can blow it to another area. Conversely, Maya can transform objects into metal to make them heavier or to make use of metal’s reflective or magnetic properties.
Collectables come in the form of leaves of parchment containing lore and curios associated with each scholar, none of which are required to roll credits. That knowledge is the reward for exploring hidden corners of levels or taking on additional puzzles is thematically appropriate. On my first playthrough, I only collected a few pieces of parchment and one curio (the telescope) that I happened to stumble upon. Initially I thought it was required to complete the level and was somewhat disappointed that it seemed to have no use. Given that I engaged with lore piecemeal and out of order, I found it difficult to contextualize. I assumed that I was intended to return to earlier levels with new abilities to attain the remaining items. When I tested this hypothesis in the post-game, I found that I could only replay the level with the same suite of abilities I had the first time. Although I was keen for more backstory, this realization deflated my desire to reexplore levels.
Another stand-out of House of Hikmah is its visual design, especially its environmental art by Omar Souissi and Marcello De Sousa. Each scholar’s realm is not only visually distinct but also revealing about their owner’s historical contributions and personality. Lunacy Studios even went as far as recreating Ismail al-Jazari’s water-powered elephant clock! Animation resources were wisely focused on Maya, especially her long braid. Expressive body animations bring NPCs to life, but the lack of facial animations took some getting used to.
I hope to see House of Hikmah well-represented in nominations for the Game Audio Network Guild Awards. Remarkably for its scale, House of Hikmah contains full voice acting in English and Arabic. Even the English cast features Arabic-speaking actors, such as Nezar Alderazi, Laila Alj, and Talal Karkouti. Sound design is also expertly handled by a team from A Shell in the Pit directed by Mauricio Ruiz. And, finally, the reason this game got on my radar in the first place was that Austin Wintory helmed the music.
Given the authenticity with which the game represents its characters and environments, it was clear that recycling Orientalist musical tropes (e.g., duduks noodling the double harmonic major scale over a drone) was not going to cut it for House of Hikmah. Wintory is no stranger to collaborating with musicians outside of the Western classical tradition, such as the Alash Ensemble on The Pathless. On House of Hikmah, Wintory spent a week in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, recording virtuosos on the ney, rabāba, ‘ūd, qānūn, and simsimiyya. Appropriate to the game’s temporally amorphous, magical-realist setting, the soundtrack combines these classical Arabic instruments with modern Western instruments, such as the guitar and violin, which trace their origins to these ancient instruments (‘ūd and rabāba, respectively).
Many challenges attend such cross-cultural collaborations. Improvisation hasn’t been a central part of Western classical music for centuries but remains an important part of Middle Eastern classical music. Arab musicians have their own, more complicated system of scales called maqām, many of which contain quarter notes or notes that fall in between notes on the piano. Geoff Knorr, lead composer on Civilization VI (2016), describes avoiding modes with notes outside of the Western chromatic scale. However, as he relates, musicians trained in this tradition regard quarter tones as bringing depth to the music. The musicians on House of Hikmah’s soundtrack explore that depth, particularly in the later levels that are more corrupted by “shadow” that gives voice to Maya’s worst thoughts and fears. The improvisatory character of House of Hikmah’s soundtrack makes it a perfect accompaniment to puzzle solving while also being enjoyable as music one could listen to outside of the game.
At launch, House of Hikmah was rough around the edges, though I did not experience any game-breaking bugs. If the platforming were more demanding, Maya’s movement would need tighter controls—the avatar can catch and stutter on the edges of platforms, and I found aiming Maya’s throws frustrating to a degree that I don’t think was intentional. Fabrics that make up the attire of NPCs, especially Fatima al-Fihri, appeared stiff, often draped unnaturally, or seemed to float in the air. I found the shifts between gameplay and conversation abrupt and somewhat disorienting. The rough edges even extend to the UI, as, at least in English, when a word doesn’t fit on a line, you will see it briefly on the upper line before it reappears on the lower one. In short, the game could have benefited from a longer period of QA testing and polish, but for a self-published debut title by a core team of less than a dozen, resources might not have stretched that far. To the team’s credit, they released a patch on 29 April 2026, less than a month after release, which fixed the game-breaking bugs as well as some of the above issues.
The House of Hikmah portrays a vision of the Arab world that has possibly never been seen in the medium. I recommend it to anyone eager to become immersed in the Islamic Golden Age or looking for a narrative-forward puzzle game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It was a 5.5-hour experience for me, but players with either more puzzle-solving prowess or a penchant for collecting may spend more or less time with it. Its difficulty is scaffolded enough for more casual players like myself while also providing enough challenge and novelty for more experienced puzzlers, such as my husband, who was taking turns on my playthrough. It’s exciting to see game developers of underrepresented groups helming projects like these that challenge well-worn stereotypes; in light of current world events, this game could not have come at a better time.
