Escape The Museum (Nintendo DS) Review

The world has been thrown into chaos by a monumental earthquake that struck a magnitude of 7.6 on the Richter scale, and the once warm and peaceful city where Susan Anderson worked has been turned on its head. Unfortunately, it just so happened that this tragic occurrence happened on the one day that Susan chose to bring her daughter, Caitlin, to her place of employment - the National Museum of History. Rather than a fun-filled trek through the inner workings of a natural history museum, though, disaster strikes, leaving Susan no choice other than to get Caitlin to safety before ensuring the place has been fully evacuated. However, falling debris catches her unaware and, upon coming to, even more damage has been caused around the building, isolating her from the young girl.

This is where the player steps in, taking control of Susan as she works her way back to her daughter, Caitlin, room-by-room, puzzle-by-puzzle. At its heart this is indeed another Hidden Object outing, but the pure gameplay of that genre is pushed to the background in favour of something more akin to the point-and-click style of games. Players are given a small hint before play starts in each room, with the challenge being to drag the stylus around to uncover items that will be of benefit when it comes to escaping to the next area. Set off fire alarms to unlock safety doors, figure out how to support weakened sections to quickly scarper, or merely create a means of bridging the gap to the next exit; there is definitely considerable variety in how best to reach the conclusion of Escape the Museum.

The simplest way of navigating a location is to slowly pan around an area using the directional pad, and use the stylus to dig out required items. Sometimes there will be a magnifying glass that indicates something can be zoomed into for a closer gander, others will throw up a dancing question mark icon that alludes to something useful stashed away underneath, behind or even within something else. Once items have been accrued, the inventory can be accessed at the top of the touch-screen to join two or more pieces of kit together where necessary, then drag whatever you feel works, depending on the situation, in order to find the solution to vacating the room in the swiftest possible time.

On top of this, there are a plethora of Hidden Object-only stages that follow the age-old formula of providing the player with a lengthy list to uncover, in this case a selection of priceless artefacts that Susan has, somewhat tactlessly, been told to secure by her colleague whilst en-route to rescuing her daughter. These sections seem to offer no form of penalty for taking too long or making the mistake of tapping erroneously all over the place, yet the game does take into account every incorrect move, reducing the overall Global Accuracy rate, which acts as a personal guide to how you are performing. Every now and then, there is a large painting with many pieces missing that appears and must be completed by grabbing the shredded parts from the nearby vicinity and dragging them back to their rightful place. Achieving this goal opens up extra Hidden Objects stages, with there being a total of 37 unique rooms to play through, and more than 110 levels included in Escape the Museum in total to help make this a surprisingly robust package for DS, and a pleasant change of pace for the bustling genre.