Museum Heist

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!