Museum Heist

This is a fun “how much loot can you take with you” optimization puzzle. The construction is tightly focused on that objective (not a lot of gilding the lily or providing backstory, etc.). I liked the barebones approach--it just sucked me into the puzzle faster.

All of the details are very clearly explained, and everything runs smoothly. There’s also a lot of helpful quality-of-life features. I really enjoyed my attempts to get a better load-out of saleables, and I had one VERY intense eureka moment. A fun time!

The randomizer continues tracing its whimsical path through my to-play list, putting the two remaining Kenneth Pedersen games back to back. They make for quite a contrast, though, because while Museum Heist has some things in common with The Way Home – the ADRIFT format, terse but effective prose, bug-free implementation – this is no old-school treasure hunt; while you are an art thief looking to lift as much loot as possible from the eponymous institution, the game operates in the thoroughly modern optimization-game framework. Just as in Ryan Veeder’s Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder, which is largely credited with kicking off the sub-genre, you need to search a small map stuffed with riches, solving individual puzzles to obtain each, while using trial-and-error over repeated runs to figure out the metapuzzle of how to get the richest possible haul before time runs out.

The theming is obviously a great fit with the gameplay – the time before the police arrive provides an obvious ticking clock, it makes total sense that a museum would be stuffed with more art and antiquities than one thief could reasonably make off with, and that some would be easy to simply smash and grab while others would be protected with more robust security measures or present logistical challenges to obtain. And while this isn’t the kind of game where you can linger over descriptions, the various galleries and objets d’art are effectively chosen to communicate the idea that you’re grabbing exciting, valuable stuff (look, I’m going to like any game where I get to lift Etruscan artifacts and something made of porphyry).

The game’s relatively compact scope also makes it more approachable than a sprawling example of the subgenre like Sugarlawn. The greater part of the museum is just a three by three grid, and unlike the slowly-flooding ship of CVP, you just have to worry about one timer. You’re also only required to solve maybe two and a half puzzles in order to liberate individual artworks; one of these, which requires some lateral thinking on how to get a massive Rosetta-Stone style inscription, takes some enjoyable outside the box thinking.

The flip side of this, though, is that I quickly found myself grappling with the optimization puzzle rather than trying to figure out its component parts, and the metapuzzle here is largely focused on inventory juggling. If you had infinite carrying capacity, the 40 turns you’re given would provide a comfortable margin for hoovering up everything on offer; the issue is that you can only carry so many items in your hands before you start automatically dropping things. You do have a backpack – and a tube for carrying rolled-up paintings – which makes life easier, but the order things go in matters, with higher-up objects needing to come out to get to the stuff you first stored away, and there are a few puzzles that require swapping things into and out of your carryall.

In the abstract it’s a reasonable enough set of constraints to layer onto the more traditional optimization-game challenges, but I suspect like most people, I don’t really enjoy faffing about with carrying limits, so I found I didn’t have much appetite to really push for the high score, all the more so because I was a bit demoralized when I thought I’d found an optimal solution, only to discover waiting out the time limit rather than manually triggering your escape means you drop everything you’re carrying, so I’d actually need to eke out two more turns somewhere. For all that, Museum Heist is still a solid introduction to this fun, contemporary IF subgenre, providing a manageable sample of why it can be so enjoyable; beyond that, seeing it paired with a more throwback game definitely demonstrates the author’s versatility.

I enjoy this sort of item-gathering optimization game (someone on IFDB has dubbed the genre “Verdeterrelike”), and I had fun with this one! A brief introduction explains that you’re at this museum to steal the famous “Mon Alicia” and then grab as many additional items as you can in the next 10 minutes before you leave. Like other Verdeterrelikes, it’s meant to be replayed multiple times, so on my initial playthrough I took my time examining everything I encountered, exploring the museum to see how big it was and understand the layout (ADRIFT’s automapper was helpful for this, although not strictly necessary as the map is quite simple).

Every action you perform takes 15 seconds, and you’ll need to be efficient if you want to maximize your score. Acquiring all the items requires solving small puzzles revolving around access and transportation. If time runs out before you’ve manually escaped, the game has you escape automatically—at the cost of dropping everything you’re carrying. So you have to make sure you leave enough time to go through the departure steps after grabbing your items. A single playthrough is quite quick, and I was sufficiently motivated to replay many times in order to keep increasing my take (ultimately hitting $681 million, which I was happy enough with despite knowing a higher score is possible).

The game was made over a brief time period, which shows a bit as there are some rough edges that could be smoothed out. Every turn takes 15 seconds, whether you successfully perform an action or not—so typos and commands that don’t work will cost you as much time as anything else. I also encountered a bug in one playthrough where I was able to do an action I don’t think was supposed to work ((Spoiler - click to show)pushing the Corvette Stone into an adjacent room without the wheelbarrow), because when I tried the same thing in subsequent playthroughs I was told it wasn’t possible. Still, for anyone looking for a quick little optimization puzzler, I recommend checking this one out!