Build the museum of your dreams – My Museum: Treasure Hunter

Have you ever wanted to be an archaeologist? Did you feel the call to adventure as if the spirit of Indiana Jones guided you? If so, then My Museum: Treasure Hunter may be the adventure you’ve been waiting for.

My Museum: Treasure Hunter is a first-person simulation game at its core. Your aim is to collect artefacts, clean them, and display them in your museum for profit. To collect artefacts, however, you are sent off into the wide world on several expeditions. Here you brave the wilds, explore hidden caves and bunkers, and solve puzzles to uncover hidden treasures for your displays.

These expeditions can take a while depending on your understanding of the puzzles and they offer a nice range of challenges to keep it fresh over the different zones. The various areas have strong themes and brilliant atmospherics, but there were a few bugs.

My museum - an ancient book with hidden clues

My museum - using a lighter to disarm the traps

I found myself caught in between boundaries a few times and my dog (yes, you get a dog to help you) regularly got caught on things. The game handholds you through many of the puzzles, leading me to believe it was aimed towards a younger audience, but didn’t explain simpler mechanics such as right-clicking to place puzzle pieces in the frame when there is no interaction pop-up. Still, I really did enjoy this aspect of the gameplay loop and would like to see more expeditions added in the future.

My museum - inside an ancient tomb with golden artefacts and sandstone walls

My museum - a golden Labrador retriever awaits treats to guide you through the level

Returning from your expedition, you will need to prepare for an exhibit. This involves setting up your museum displays and cleaning up all your artefacts.

There are several ways to clean up your artefacts but they all revolve around mini-game mechanics to remove the rust and polish your finds. I won’t say these are especially fun as most of the time I would clean to a certain percentage and hit the button to pay for an auto-finish, but I can see the appeal. It kind of adds to the authenticity of the curator role, but the controls were a bit sticky and I often had to zoom way out before trying to rotate anything. In the end, I wound up skipping this step altogether and just displaying things as I found them.

Using the workbenches, you will be able to see if an artefact is broken and you are told that some objects are worth more if you don’t clean them, but I never really figured out how to tell. I think I was also supposed to sell some of the pieces but generally didn’t have enough to keep the shelves full, especially in the bigger museum.

My museum - holding a bag of rubbish looking over an industrial space

My museum - buffing an old helmet for display

Displaying your newly acquired artefacts and building your museum was the thing I had expected to enjoy the most, but I found this sadly lacking. It was fun tearing down the old museum with a sledgehammer and putting the debris in bin liners, but having to do this each time I replaced a unit felt wasteful. Moving display and decorative pieces was fun, but the controls and perspective made it difficult to place things how I wanted, which wouldn’t be as much of an issue if it didn’t boot me back into first-person every time I released the object I wanted to move.

This next error I cannot explain as the shop to purchase display pieces from appeared to be bugged too. I could only purchase the same six items and they did not accommodate many of the items I found in my expeditions. For example, I unlocked a special set piece for the first expedition and not the others, but it was in the shop several times. So there may be more display items in the game, I just didn’t have access to them.

These things I could mostly deal with, but it was the customer management side of things which really hampered my enjoyment of My Museum. The sticky controls and buggy interface truly shine in these moments as you try to micro-manage every customer who walks through your door. At least, that’s what it felt like.

The instructions (which popped up every time I opened the customer control) want you to direct customers to specific pieces that will be to their liking. To do this you click on the customer and then the display. Simple, right? Except, I’d find more success trying to get my cat to write poetry, and it would likely be less labour-intensive too.

I think there is some form of customer AI within the stream of clones attending your exhibits. I noticed a few walking off in different directions, but their inconsistency led me to believe it was probably a miss-click of mine as I fought against the camera to try and find the displays. It’s a real shame too as a little pivot to something more like Super Market Simulator’s customers would have worked really well.

Super Market Simulator also has a solid core gameplay loop where you open and close your shop, but there wasn’t much of an indicator for this in My Museum. It’s kind of lacking all of the business elements you would expect from a management sim and while it makes an effort to include the illusion of expansion with two larger plots to unlock, there’s not really anything to work towards other than filling your shelves.

The graphics and animation aren’t anything to scream and shout about, but it works well as a whole. There are some UI things I wasn’t a fan of, such as the shortcut menu quitting out instead of going back, but I liked the style. Again I will commend the atmosphere built in the expeditions and will admit to falling victim to several mild jump-scares.

I popped over to the Steam store to see if there was an age rating for My Museum: Treasure Hunter, and was distracted by a slew of angry reviews that I feel may be a little too harsh on an indie game. I won’t excuse the bugs and sticky controls, but it seems the devs are pretty active on their Steam page and are working hard to repair the issues.

My Museum: Treasure Hunter is already a halfway decent game, but it has so much potential that I can understand why people are disappointed by its current form. The main draw of this kind of game for many people is the mindless observation of the customers as they admire your hard work, myself included. By micro-managing every step on each customer’s tour, the task becomes much more laborious and with nothing more to work towards, I held no desire to continue opening my doors.

I will be keeping an eye on My Museum: Treasure Hunter and suggest checking it out for yourself if you don’t mind a few sticky controls and bugs.