Mewseum: Film Festival – A Puzzling Trip to the Cinema

“When the cinema lights go down, and the movie starts, it’s such a relaxing moment knowing you can get away from your problems in the real world temporarily.” – Stewart Stafford

Overview

Mewseum: Film Festival is an addictive shikaku-style puzzle game where each solved grid reveals a section of a famous film poster. It is also the sequel to Mewseum: Masterpieces, an art-themed game of the same ilk.

Gameplay

Mewseum: Film Festival offers around 8-10 hours worth of shikaku-style puzzles. There are six in total, but each one can easily take over an hour to complete. The museum consists of a number of well-known film posters, including The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Titanic. Each one is made up of a series of grids that need to be solved or ‘painted’ with squares and rectangles. Each grid has different numbers on it, indicating the exact size of the section that needs painting, and each section must only contain one number.

The game has a hint system available, and since completing each poster can be time-consuming, it also has regular autosaves. This allows players to either get lost in the gameplay or dip in and out at their leisure. In the previous game, the player filled every square of the painting manually; this time around, completing a series of smaller sections will also reveal some of the surrounding area. This gives the illusion of speedier progress, but feels less satisfying.

Mewseum: Film Festival is currently only available on Windows, but would make a great mobile game as the controls and style of gameplay lend themselves to touch screens and portable platforms.

Narrative and Styling

The game does not consist of any narrative elements as the focus is on the puzzle aspects of the experience and the artistic theming. This suits the game, and any attempts to shoehorn a story in would have felt forced and unnecessary.

Mewseum: Film festival uses a pixel graphic art style to depict the museum and the film posters, and utilises a range of both muted and vibrant colour palettes. The primary setting is somewhat minimal, but the different film posters are much more visually interesting. Each one is true enough to the original to be instantly recognisable, but features some feline touches such as slightly altered film names (Jurassic Purrk, for example) and cat characters!

The soundtrack consists of a selection of jazz numbers that can be chosen by the player using a control panel that allows them to skip songs and pause. Unlike the first game, where the classical music and art theme suited each other very well, the jazzy soundtrack feels largely separate from the main subject of the game and does nothing to complement the film theme.

Summary

Overall, Mewseum: Film Festival is a very enjoyable game with satisfying and engaging puzzles. The premise is quite simple, but the individual puzzles vary in difficulty and are easy to get lost in. The film posters are depicted in a good amount of detail using pixel art with fun cat additions, but the jazz-heavy soundtrack feels out of touch with the cinematic theme. I have very much enjoyed this game, and despite not being enamoured with some of the changes since the first game, I would still definitely recommend it to puzzle fans, especially those who like a more traditional style of puzzle.

Prefer more traditional puzzles? You may also enjoy these reviews:
Anagrams – Zodiacats – Tiny Lands 2 – Poems and Codes

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