| Quick Verdict: If the execution was half as good as the ideas were for My Museum: Treasure Hunter, then it’d be a decent game. Unfortunately, there are innumerable issues that keep this from being a good title. |
| Game: | My Museum: Treasure Hunter |
| Developer(s): | ManyDev Studio and Code Meister |
| Publisher: | PID Games |
| Review Score: | 5 |
| Cozy Score: | 5 |
| Price: | $14.99 |
| Pros: | The visuals are decent. |
| Cons: | The camera zooms around, you get teleported around without reason, the tutorials both handhold too much and don’t give enough detail depending on what it’s explaining, the controls aren’t the best, and while there were good ideas, none of them were executed well. |
| Platforms: | PC |
| Genres: | Simulator |
So, I wanted to love My Museum: Treasure Hunter, but if I had to choose one word to describe this game it would simply be “oof.”
Y’all, I thought this was going to be a winner, I really did. Unfortunately, there’s just so much wrong and we’re going to get into it.
My Museum: Treasure Hunter – it’s not even worth the Steam achievements.
Where do I begin? Maybe we’ll start with the good; limited as it is. Visually, this game is pretty. It’s not winning any awards, but it gets the job done. As far as ideas go, My Museum: Treasure Hunter had the spirit, but it lacked execution.
I wish there was more.
Ultimately, this game had a lot of good ideas and none of them were fully realized. You play as someone who is opening the world’s junkiest museum, but hey, at least there are fixtures! Or so you’d think. One of your first orders of business is to take a hammer and smash all of the old displays, even if it showed things inside of them.
What you’re going to find is that My Museum: Treasure Hunter is a lot of tutorial, but on the wrong thing. It’ll go on and on about what the customers think, but then give you the least amount of detail in how to set up your antiquities. And, by the way, your customers are likely to be bugged, so it hardly matters what they think anyway.
Perhaps the most egregious flaw is the camera view. Not only will you get teleported around when the game feels like you’ve entered a zone you shouldn’t, but the camera will zoom across the room for the smallest of reasons.
Honestly, I was getting a headache with how often the camera raced to a different portion of the room.
In truth, the museum part of this game is the worst part, while the treasure hunter part is the stronger aspect.
For your museum, you’re trying to build up your little spot by filling it with display tables and then kitting it out with items. You get those items either by buying them from auctions, on the computer, or by going exploring.
Some items may come to us in need of repair, so you’ll have to fix that by sanding down the surface and polishing it to restore it to some former glory. This part is very tedious and loses its charm quickly. You’re basically running your mouse in circles around this item as a percentage counter tells you how far you have to go.
Once things are cleaned up, you can either display them, sell them at auction, or sell them straight from your inventory. Any time you buy on the PC and sell from the inventory, it seems like you get a smaller portion, but I may be misremembering that.
That’s it for your museum. Just rinse and repeat.
Except there’s one more thing, the treasure hunting part. This was by far the most fun, but even this was ruined by the amount of handholding that the game did.
You see, you can go on expeditions and your first one is Egypt, naturally. When you get there, you notice that there are some puzzles to get through the pyramid – except that there aren’t. Not only did the developers set up puzzles, they also treated it like a tutorial the ENTIRE time and told you exactly what to do the whole way through.
Need light? Clean the mirrors. Need to open a door? Pick up the scrap pieces and put them back together in frames. Need a code? Look at these exact pillars that tell you what order to do it in.
Every room until the very end you were told what to do. Now, I don’t know if the other expeditions will do that, but my heart says it’s quite likely.
The amount of handholding they gave us on the easiest of things felt like a children’s game. Except that I can’t even recommend that you let kids play it because of the bugs, the controls, and the lack of information for the rest of it.
My Museum: Treasure Hunter is this weird juxtaposition of too much and not enough.
This game feels like it should be early access and yet it’s fully released. I can’t even say “if you like x, y, z then you’ll enjoy it more than the average bear” because I don’t think you will.
I really can’t recommend My Museum: Treasure Hunter and that’s a major bummer. If you want to torture yourself, you can try it out on Steam for $14.99. Otherwise, you can check out the review we did of Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland.
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