My Museum: Treasure Hunter Review: Promising Sim Crumbles Under Clunky Controls

As the simulation genre continues to expand, it’s no surprise that managing a historical museum eventually found its way into the mix. That’s the heart of ManyDev Studio’s new sim My Museum: Treasure Hunter. After taking over your grandpa’s old museum and doing a bit of cleanup, players embark on a series of expeditions to gather artifacts and expand your collection. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more in need of restoration than just those artifacts. 

Building Your Collection One Artifact at a Time

When players first get rolling in My Museum: Treasure Hunter, which is just $14.99 on Steam, it quickly becomes clear this isn’t the most visually polished game you’ll find. The graphics aren’t exactly pristine, but you’ll start by knocking out the earliest renovations for the museum. 

Things like taking out the trash, hammering down some unnecessary walls, and destroying any display cases you no longer need fill up that earliest section of the game. Once you’re ready to start on an artifact, there are a few already in the museum you can work on. This usually involves holding a tool over the artifact and cleaning or polishing each surface of it, not unlike trying to clean every inch of a window in House Flipper 2. 

Once things leave the museum, your first expedition heads to Egypt. At first this was fairly exciting, as you’d work your way through corridors and attempt to locate additional artifacts. Some areas were blocked by puzzles, but these tended to be blandly simple and featured erratic or unclear point and click mechanics.

Controls are Desperately in Need of Restoration 

Late in that first Egypt expedition, there’s a seemingly simple moment of trying to remove the lid of a sarcophagus. To do so, you need to find an incredibly difficult to spot piece of metal on the floor and insert it into the lid. There’s no clear indicator of where it goes on the lid, and like many things in My Museum: Treasure Hunter you just kind of jerk the camera in random directions until you’re close to the right spot where it magically pops into place. 

You’re then immediately prompted to replace a fuse, but there’s no explanation of where this fuse is. You might guess it's for the generator just outside the tomb that's powering your lights, and you'd be wrong. You can wander around aimlessly for minutes without ever spotting the tiny button click prompt next to a crane (spelled crain in the game), and even getting that click right once you’ve found it is frustrating. It might seem like an outlier, but these kinds of problems are littered throughout the game. 

For as many great ideas as there are throughout My Museum: Treasure Hunter, the execution is just not there at this point. The restoration process on artifacts can be a relaxing task, and being able to curate and organize exhibits sounds fantastic, but you have to actually be able to tolerate the game long enough to make it back to the museum. They include short historical summaries with each artifact, but these can feel surface level and are easy to skip past once the game becomes particularly frustrating.

There’s a little variety in how you can setup the museum layout, but an inability to zoom and camera movement on this screen being tied to your cursor reaching the edge of the screen make the whole process unnecessarily difficult. Camera movement while navigating My Museum: Treasure Hunter is so shaky that just looking around started to give me motion sickness, particularly while trying to explore the early tomb in Egypt, and the point-and-click mechanics are far too finicky to enjoy. It’s possible that with future updates this might get refined into something more worthwhile, but right now this is difficult to recommend even for simulation fans and history buffs.