Video Game / The Museum of Anything Goes

Stick around for Amateur Night!

The Museum of Anything Goes is a very surreal game from 1995 made by Wayzata Technology.

Perhaps best characterized as an Environmental Narrative Game minus the narrative, the game presents the player with the eponymous museum, where they can enter the various paintings strewn about and come across quirky FMV clips and interactive segments. The FMV clips were primarily filmed around the Chicago area.

Not to be confused with The Museum of Everything.

---

"You're a real smarty, aren't you?"

• Bleak Level: The dark stone hallway in the back of the museum has grimmer paintings along its walls, including the infamous coffin corpse scene.
• Creepy Doll: There's a CG-animated teddy bear sitting in a dark room if you enter the painting of two eyes. If you click on it, it says "You're a real smarty, aren't you?" in a weird voice, then walks by itself and turns on the light switch, revealing what seems to be a child's playroom with a creepy clown head in the back.
• Dem Bones: You come across many reanimated skeletons of people and animals, including on one of the first screens of the game:
  Skeleton: Don't go in there! Look what happened to me!
• Monster Clown: One painting features a playroom with a mural on the back wall of an evil-looking clown's head.
• Mood Whiplash: While browsing the paintings, you can go from goofy clips of animals with funky sound effects to depressing collections of nihilistic poems and letters from dead people.
• Museum of the Strange and Unusual: The whole thing is literally this trope in software form, except that all the weirdness came from the minds of the creators rather than real life. The real life stuff is pretty mundane, though it's often presented in a lovably bizarre way.
• Pre-Rendered Graphics: As you walk around the museum, you'll see a bunch of random video clips playing. Usually it's just people or skeletons walking across the screen.
• Puzzle Game: Some of the paintings have simple puzzles, including several jigsaw puzzles.
• Surreal Horror: The aesthetics of the museum, as well as some of the strange beings you find there, lead to this feeling. Such as going into a dead end in a cavernous hallway and running into a creature made of small spheres that can reassemble itself, saying "I'M GONNA GET YOU!" in an ominous voice.
• Waddling Head: Many of the CG creatures have this design.
• Word Salad Lyrics: You can come across some very surreal songs.
  pulsating within distortion's electrifying presence
  disfigured beyond imagery's symbolic recognition
  inversely reversed inside out contrary to contradiction
  i'm just a vibration

---