Review: The Mysterious Museum

RATING: 3 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: 2:26

A time machine? Quickly! You must set the coordinates to the exact moment this game’s designer sat down to write it. We have notes.

Thames & Kosmos follows a consistently formulaic path through all of their escape game titles. As such, you’ll notice throughout the span of our reviews for various Exit: The Game titles, certain segments may carry over, simply because it defines the big picture information about this product line as a whole. Each review will, however, continue to include unique, game specific information.

Story

It’s the last day of your vacation in Florence! You are strolling happily through the narrow alleyways of the city when the heavens open up in a sudden downpour. As you scramble for cover, you bump into a strangely-clad man. With a conspiratorial air, he presses a strange marble disk into your hand along with a museum brochure, mumbles something about the “treasure of the Santa Maria,” “free tickets,” and “have fun,” and disappears into the heavy rain. A treasure? Free tickets? You don’t have to be told twice!

As you enter the imposing museum, however, there is not another soul to be seen. Even the ticket booth is closed! Disappointed, you decided to turn around when the giant entry door sudden slams shut right in front of your noses. You are locked in! You look around in a panic. What seems to be the only other exit is blocked by a turnstile with an odd symbol. Wait! Haven’t you seen that symbol before? And it dawns on you: Only if you can work together and solve the riddle of the museum will you be able to escape. If not, you will surely be added to its permanent collection…

Here’s the weird thing about The Mysterious Museum – this game is actually very narrative-driven from start to finish, yet somehow its official story has… almost nothing to do with it? That mysterious man who gave you the tickets? He never comes up again. Even the whole “treasure of the Santa Maria” thing, which is almost immediately linked to Christopher Columbus upon “entering” the museum, has no further connection to him or his famed discovering of America again.

Instead, this story is about a time machine created in the 1500s by Leonardo da Vinci himself. In present day, that very time machine has been made an exhibit within The Mysterious Museum in Florence, Italy, and now, somehow, you’ve figured out how to power it on. What results is honestly a much more interesting narrative to follow, which does make it a bit confusing to not lead with this instead.

The story of da Vinci’s time machine is furthered with each new card drawn from the deck. Every task connects in some way to deciphering codes he himself set into the machine’s programming, setting the stage for an adventure that spans hundreds of years in each direction.

Scenic

As we’ve touched on previously, being a home game, we define “Scenic,” from a graphic design perspective, as well as the quality, weight and feel of print materials inside the box.

We’ve mentioned that Thames & Kosmos goes the route of mostly card-based escape home games. Each edition is produced to a fairly high level of quality – with fairly thick, glossy textures that have the feel of a deck of playing cards, while also carrying similar dimensions of 3.5″ x 2.25″ in size. Each Exit: The Game edition also includes a themed booklet spanning multiple pages that connects with tasks identified on the cards. A 4.5″ cardstock decoder wheel, always featuring three rotatable discs that align to highlight an answer code is included in every box.

Exit: The Game titles also make use of something they like to call “strange items.” Basically, these are “anything else” left in the box. In the case of The Mysterious Museum, the strange items are a cut out made to look like a series of wooden planks and some string.

Each game’s respective page within the free Kosmo Games Helper App is lightly themed to its storyworld, featuring package art as the wallpaper for the time clock and background “soundtrack” to help transport the adventure off the cards and bring it to life all around players. In this particular game, though, that “soundtrack” consisted of no music at all, but rather just ambient background noises that added little to the tone of the storyworld. The addition of the game’s story on a sort of ‘book on tape’ format in the app is a nice touch that adds a light sense of a traditional preshow one might expect to find in person at a brick and mortar attraction.

Puzzles

Progressing through an Exit: The Game scenario will lead players on a primarily card-based gameplay adventure to match a three digit number with a unique shape, which must then be entered into an included decoder wheel. If correct, this will indicate the next card(s) to draw from the deck. Where things get tedious, however, is that each answer will lead you to a card which then directs you to verify your solution and draw yet another card. This unnecessary double-step quickly becomes tiresome throughout the course of gameplay.

The Mysterious Museum does not start of well, instead opting to open with a puzzle confusing and convoluted enough to immediately send us into the hint card pile, all the way to its respective solution. This pattern continued for several of the first few puzzles, giving this game a rather frustrating first impression.

Momentum did somewhat course-correct thanks to several puzzles that were entirely intuitive, some of which actually verged on clever. Unfortunately, the yin to that yang is several other puzzles whose logic are iffy at best, and others that are so frustratingly confusing that it’s much easier to just read the solution and move on rather than deal with the headache.

But perhaps worst of all, Exit: The Game products have a nasty habit of hiding clues and codes outside of the game itself, in places like the retail packaging, under cardboard dividers within the box, in the instruction manuals and yes, even the SKU number on the items bar code. Not only does this present an illogical and irrational expectation that players are to connect, but it instantly kills whatever storyworld an Exit: The Game title has managed to build up to that point, breaking the fourth wall for, well, absolutely no reason or benefit what so ever. Overall

The Mysterious Museum is one of more than two dozen escape game home activities available for sale under the “Exit: The Game” branding from Thames & Kosmos. Unlike other home games, these are each individually packaged, and thus carry a relatively lower price point. We’d suggest, however, that in the case of Exit: The Game, this is generally a matter of “you get what you pay for.”

We’ve played more than half of all Exit: The Game products released to this point, and simply put, they’re rarely even remotely enjoyable. Instead, players can expect to find a box typically stacked from top to bottom with one logic leap after another, leading to a most frustrating hour ahead.

The Mysterious Museum was full of hot-and-cold moments, admittedly most of which rest on the colder side. It’s like a juggling act where for every one fun task, two frustrating ones are required to keep the universe in balance. Unfortunately da Vinci didn’t design a time machine with enough charge to jump to only the enjoyable challenges, and in the end, we do have a better understanding of why Mona Lisa never smiled.