Museum Disarter tasks you with rehanging a museum’s scattered paintings, matching classic artworks to titles and irreverent descriptions.
Museum Disarter. Credit: Dusty Frame
Museum Disarter is one of many games in the recently popular “tidy up” genre. I wanted to check it out because it seemed similar to one of my favorites, Cleaning Up the Puzzle Gallery. It left me disappointed.
Museum Disarter drops you into the lobby of an art museum, with classic paintings lying in piles on the floor, and tasks you with finding the right place to hang each one. Rather than grouping paintings by artist, style, or time period, the museum is organized into broad categories such as “fruit,” “horses,” and so on.
The empty spots on the walls have the paintings’ titles along with vague descriptions like “Two girls with ZERO survival instinct playing with a cute little animal.” You need to find the painting to hang there based on whatever nonsense the developer wrote about it, none of which is very clever. What I especially couldn’t get over was that the game never names the artists. Would it be so hard to put the artist’s name on the wall, and maybe a year? I enjoy games like these partly because I get to look closely at art and learn about artists’ bodies of work.
Museum Disarter. Credit: Dusty Frame
The game’s graphics are fine. It takes place in a modern-looking, brightly lit, white-walled museum with wood flooring. The space isn’t remarkable. The resolution of some of the paintings could stand to be a little higher.
To the developer’s credit, they’ve ironed out frustrating gameplay issues through frequent updates since I first played the game. I still find it a dull experience. I’d recommend playing Cleaning Up the Puzzle Gallery instead, which is cheaper and has more going on. There, all the paintings are actually jigsaw puzzles that you have to rebuild in the right locations, and you deduce where a piece might belong by observing the style. Museum Disarter was just boring.
Museum Disarter
Museum Disarter is boring. The clues aren’t clever, and the artists go unnamed. Play Cleaning Up the Puzzle Gallery instead.
Museum Disarter tasks you with rehanging a museum’s scattered paintings, matching classic artworks to titles and irreverent descriptions.