a Museum of Dubious Splendors

Although they are not usually very popular unless they are dedicated to weird subjects, museums are a great way to admire interesting objects, as well as neat sources of knowledge. Naturally, modern technology can make them appear a bit obsolete, given the fact that you can find out everything you need to know on the Internet. In fact, VR might play a crucial role in this a few years into the future.

a Museum of Dubious Splendors is a first-person interactive story game, in which you get to explore a surreal museum and expose your mind to something different for a change. In essence, the game is based on some Gujarati essays written by Mir UmarHassan, but since it’s difficult to find any information on this author, probably because of language barriers, you’ll have to take the developer’s word for it.

The game is structured into different rooms, with each room having a certain piece of artwork you can look at. That’s not all, however, because there’s usually some text that accompanies the said artwork. In some cases, you have quite a bit of reading to do, which is nice to see nowadays. As for the artwork pieces themselves, they are pretty surreal, so they might not make too much sense at first.

The fact that everything is split into separate rooms can also be a problem, however, mainly because you have to wait for a while in order for the next room to be loaded. This also makes navigation a bit difficult sometimes, because there are multiple doors to go through, and the labeling is sketchy at best. You can consider this a puzzle, but it’s also possible to miss some of the rooms along the way, which is annoying.

Thankfully, the graphics are on par with the uniqueness of the artwork, even if the UV unwrapping is a bit off for some objects, so the textures look weird. The lighting is very nice as well, so the atmosphere is pretty engaging most of the time. You can also move with ease and interact with doors with a simple click, so you do not have to worry about figuring out complex keybindings or anything of the sort.

Art lovers are certainly going to get a kick out of a Museum of Dubious Splendors, especially if you do not mind some of the more abstract pieces. Hence, the only real drawback is that the overall experience is pretty short.