"Escape from the Museum" has the foundation for a first class hidden object-adventure game. The problem is that the designers tried to tie in sophisticated environments and sophisticated little mini-puzzles with cartoon-rendered drawings and really boring and inane dialogue directed at kids. The beautifully rendered scenes of a great natural history museum in collapse after a huge earthquake are worthy of the purchase price of the game, but the drawings of you, as museum curator, and your daughter Caitlin, who are apart and trapped in the museum, are second-rate. The two halves don't match, don't blend, don't work together. The environments get an A, the cartoons and dialog get a C.

"Escape the Museum" is rather unusual for a hidden object game in that it is interesting- interesting in that you are literally thrown together with an incredible amount of stuff you might encounter if you were in a natural history museum and an earthquake occurred. Boom, the earthquake hits! You, a museum curator, are trying to reach your young daughter who is trapped in the administrative area far from where you are. You have to laboriously claw your way out of one room into another, often employing ingenious techniques. which are sometimes logical and sometimes pure fantasy maneuvers. These maneuvers, such as freezing a water leak with liquid nitrogen, are entertaining and often funny.

Along the way you have to locate hundreds of hidden objects, and these are so well camouflaged you have to have eyes like a hawk to find them as they are often very tiny and the various rooms are in a vast state of disarray with a vast number of objects cluttered about. You will be rummaging around Neanderthals, trilobites, medieval armor, Egyptian masks, wild West artifacts, dinosaurs and much more and the detail is positively amazing and as noted above, down right interesting.

It's entertaining to see what is included among the various exhibits- and assembling the objects in each area must have been a mind-boggling task as the artifacts seem to be very authentic and authentically related to each other, a different era and theme for each room you're trapped in.

If you're a hidden object aficionado and enjoy natural history museums, you'll be right in your element with "Escape the Museum" in spite of the inferior cartoons and story dialog. I'm giving the game four stars on the basis of the environments and the mini-puzzles alone which are worthy.