Wander through peculiar rooms in this indie casual adventure that blends storytelling with exploration. It draws from a contested collection of Gujarati folklore tales by poet Mir UmarHassan, originally penned in 1962 and tangled in India's first court case over authorial rights. Scholars still debate the exact text used here, adding layers to each recounted oral tradition.
Players roam a half-storybook world, encountering these mellifluous narratives amid free-to-play PC wanderings. The core loop mixes narrative discovery with room-by-room progression through dubious splendors. Casual explorers and folklore fans find a quiet fit in its unhurried pace.
The Museum of Dubious Splendors is half a storybook and half an exploration game.
It is a collection of folklore and oral tales, punctuated by peculiar rooms, that you wander through.
These tales, have been recreated from a collection of stories by Mir UmarHassan, a Gujarati poet whose works have proven notoriously difficult to translate because of the mellifluous use of Urdu and Hindi in his compositions.
The collection, entitled "in Dubious Splendor", was written (in Gujarati) in nineteen sixty two for the Malwa Chronicle, but the stories therein were mangled and edited without the author's permission prior to their publication in serialized form.
This contested collection of stories, became momentarily infamous as the subject of the first court case to arbitrate authorial ownership in Independent India.
Even today, despite countless restorative efforts by scholars, it cannot be said with with any certainty that the text that we used for this adaptation was the original as written by UmarHassan.
