a Museum of Dubious Splendors
Released Mar 2018
a Museum of Dubious Splendors, is a storybook from the world of Somewhere. A quiet game about prosaic objects and spurious histories, it is an irreverent rumination on the nature of an archive and forms of recollection.
77% positive · 171 reviews
Done
All announced content has been released
High confidence
Done
All announced content has been released
High confidence
Where to get it
Free on Steam
Evaluation
a Museum of Dubious Splendors launched on March 6, 2018 as a free-to-play exploration and storybook game. The only developer news post from this game's Steam page, dated March 7, 2018, is an announcement for a separate game — Under a Porcelain Sun — and does not indicate any planned additions to this game. There are no DLC listings, no roadmaps, no post-launch content updates, and no developer statements about future content for this title. The store description presents the game as a self-contained adaptation of a specific literary collection. The studio's last communication on this game's page was on March 7, 2018, and no further posts have appeared since. This game launched as a finished, standalone product and has received no post-launch content development.
Evidence
The store description presents the game as a self-contained adaptation of a specific literary collection, with no mention of planned updates, expansions, or ongoing development.
The only developer post on this game's Steam page announces a separate game (Under a Porcelain Sun), with no mention of additional content planned for a Museum of Dubious Splendors.
Media
Details
Developer
Publisher
Studio Oleomingus
Achievements
—
Platform
Windows, macOS, Linux
Controller
partial support
Steam Deck
Not rated
Players
Single-player
About this game
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.
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.
Are these done yet?
Last evaluated Jun 27, 2026
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