Escape of The Curse of The Museum is an online puzzle game with live audio narration created by Akai Team Company.
Format
Style of Play:
- Online native experience (can NOT be played IRL)
- Web-based inventory system
Required Equipment: computer with internet connection
Recommended Team Size: 2-4
Play Time: 60 minutes
Price: €49 per team
Booking: book online for a specific time slot
Description
You play on a website. There’s also a gamemaster on a Google Meet. The gamemaster lets you explore new parts of the museum as you unlock doors on the website.
Hivemind Review Scale
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Tammy McLeod’s Reaction
This game has a host who narrates backstory, describes each new place, and unlocks things based on our verbal input. The interface has a timer, map, code checker, and an “objects of interest” view. There was a decent amount of puzzle content, including some good cooperative tasks. The museum theme and story were not extremely compelling, however. I played this game with only 2 other teammates, so I enjoyed it, but if you play with a larger team to make the flat cost more reasonable, it may not be quite as fun.
Matthew Stein’s Reaction
Escape of the Curse of the Museum utilized an interesting format — the game took place through an online inventory system with live audio narration providing light narrative transitions. As with many other audio games, my top point of critique is that Escape of the Curse of the Museum failed to take advantage of its medium and mostly just replicated what you might find in a standard physical space, framed by an overly expected, trope-y theme.
This game was originally in Spanish, and its translation into English was clunky, but sufficiently intelligible. Apart from a few clever moments, the puzzle design was shaky, with needlessly random input sequences (post-game, we were told that a few answers which looked like they might be words in another language were indeed just random). The custom-built inventory system worked well overall, with just one minor UI annoyance: rather than being able to just type answers, we had to click keys on the image of a computer keyboard — which oddly didn’t even look like it belonged alongside the game’s museum-themed graphics.
Joel Smileypeacefun Reaction
You enter a museum of some sort that was cursed. Through solving puzzles, you should be able to find a missing person and lift the curse.
At its best, the game was made out of several rooms you could discover over time. A little map shows you in which room you’re currently in. This brought back some great point-and-click adventure vibes. The website we played on had an answer input, so we could always double-check if we’d solved something correctly.
At its worst, the puzzles seemed pretty random and only very loosely fitting into any cohesive theme. In addition, some of the solutions were just nonsense letter combinations with no meaning. It would be more helpful if those would be actual word solutions.
I really liked how the website was set up and how the game was presented structurally. I wasn’t, however, captivated by the story or the puzzles themselves.
Disclosure: Akai Team Company provided the Hivemind reviewers with a complimentary play.