Often times, in a Video Game, there will be unusually designed levels that present different kinds of challenges. Sometimes those levels will just deliver the game's content in a different way.
The Museum Level is a special place in a video game that can be encountered through normal play. There are a few variations of it, but the concept remains the same - it resembles or declares itself as a museum, and features things like objects, enemies, bosses, and environments from the game, often in their own "exhibits" showing text. This text often describes the exhibits (varying in Watsonian versus Doylist perspectives) and is sometimes accompanied by Concept Art or prototypes.
There is a distinct difference between an in-game encyclopedia or menu and a museum level. The difference is that the museum level can be encountered as a level in normal gameplay, while an encyclopedia has to be accessed from the main menu or options.
Also, this can't be just any level with a museum. In order to qualify, the Museum Level needs to have exhibits based on the game itself. A good rule of thumb is that the exhibits should feel more like they're leaning on or breaking the Fourth Wall than just being something In-Universe.
Not to Be Confused with Debug Room, Dummied Out, or Museum Game. Compare and contrast Developer's Room.
Examples
- Every mainline Animal Crossing game since the GameCube installments includes a large museum that can be filled with the bugs, fish, sea creatures, fossils, and artwork that you've given to Blathers. He'll describe each item you donate in most games, and they can be seen on display right after. Animal Crossing: New Leaf trades out Blathers' lectures for Flavor Text on each exhibit, while Animal Crossing: New Horizons restores the lectures for everything except artwork, which still has blurbs about the real-life pieces on their displays. The main purpose of all these items in the first place is to fill up the museum.
- Bioshock Infinite: Clash In The Clouds features the Columbian Archeological Society as the Hub Level; between battles in the various locales across Columbia, you return here to admire the galleries of advertisements and kinetoscopes - and collect ammo and equipment for the next mission. However, with your winnings from the various battles, you can also purchase plot-revealing voxophones, concept art, statues of various characters and enemies from across the game, and other expansions to the museum.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: A museum level is visible in (and playable after) the credits, showing characters from each of the levels in the game. The hallways between the exhibit halls have weapons from the game visible too, and can be equipped when the level is played. There's a hidden button which causes all of the characters from the exhibits to turn hostile and start attacking the player.
- The "Unforgettable" stage in Dead or Alive 6 is a museum whose exhibits are reconstructions of stages from previous games in the series.
- The third floor of Dungeon Man in EarthBound (1994) is comprised of a small zoo, with enclosures of various enemy types that are unable to reach and engage you in battle.
- Final Fantasy VII Remake: As the group infiltrates the Shinra tower to rescue Aerith, they wind up taking a tour of the Shinra Museum located there. The first part is a shrine to President Shinra, while the second deals with the Shinra divisions, and includes much of their technology and personnel. Lampshaded when Tifa says it looks so familiar, to which Barrett boasts, "'Cause we've destroyed a bunch of 'em already." It ends with a sort of holographic movie about Shinra's ultimate goals for the planet, and then Sephiroth hijacks it, showing them a vision of Meteor destroying Midgar.
- Freedom Planet 2 features the Gallery, a hub area where the player character can help repair the exhibits by creating model replicas of the bosses encountered throughout the game, and filling up all of the exhibits unlocks a special exhibit with a ton of beta/cut content.
- A level in Half-Life is a lab set that shows some of the game's enemies and in-game descriptions of them.
- The first level of Jonathan Kane: The Protector is set in a museum, where the titular hero needs to retrieve his Old Flame, Jennifer, currently working as the museum's curator in a terrorist attack. The subsequent shootout destroys a ton of display items, culminating in a grenade explosion that collapses the museum's dinosaur skeleton centerpiece.
- Ittle Dew 2 has the Art Gallery dungeon, with exhibits like paintings and sculptures based on other Ludosity properties (Business Casual Man, Apathetic Frog...)
- Kirby's Adventure features "Museum" rooms across the world map, where motionless enemies can be found on pedestals; these rooms exist mainly to give Kirby a quick way to gain specific copy abilities, including some that are otherwise rare.
- Luigi's Mansion 3 has the Unnatural History Museum, where the caveman ghost Ug is fought.
- Later installments of Paper Mario feature a museum dedicated to Mario's adventures, which can be accessed from the Hub Level:
- Paper Mario: Sticker Star features the Sticker Museum, where Mario can place stickers he finds in gameplay to unlock humorous profiles and detailed stats. There's also a music player and simulated battles against each enemy, unlocked as 100% completion bonuses.
- Paper Mario: Color Splash has the similar Prisma Museum, where Mario can deposit his cards for more details, view concept art, and listen to music tracks.
- Paper Mario: The Origami King continues this trend with the Musee Champignon in Toad Town. In addition to the Concept Art Gallery and Sound Test, there's a Monster Compendium featuring interactive 3D models of every origami character in the game. It also has a showcase of Mario's collectible treasures and trophies.
- The Secret World features the British Museum of the Occult, a Museum of the Strange and Unnatural accessible from the London Hub Level; here, every single enemy and boss of the game is given a modifiable display, complete with a plaque explaining it in detail. However, the twist is that you actually have to help build this museum by contributing XP to build the exhibits. On the upside, as a patron of the museum, you get a very nifty statue of yourself in the concourse.
- The Updated Re-release of BioShock featured an extra level called "The Museum of Orphaned Concepts"; essentially designed to look like the museums featured in Rapture's proving grounds, it displays concept art from Bioshock's development, including full-scale models of the enemies and creatures.
- The Stanley Parable has a "museum ending" which features a lot of the game's prototypes.
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The Subspace Emissary: There is a hallway in one level full of glass containers that hold an assortment of enemies from the game, including one enemy that doesn't appear anywhere else in the game, and since the containers have no way to open them there is no way to fight it.
- Warcraft III: The Culling of Stratholme has a zoo featuring exotic animals (that will be fought later in the campaign).
- Yoshi's Island DS features a Museum accessible from the level select screen, where Yoshi can travel across a large number of rooms exhibiting various regular enemies; hitting an enemy with an egg in the main game automatically adds it to the Museum.
- Yoshi's Woolly World has the Scrapbook Theater on the overworld. In it, Yoshi can view a slideshow of enemies that he has already defeated in-game.
- Included in the Developer Pack Downloadable Content in Metro: Last Light is one of these, where the player can use every single weapon in the game, as well as inspect each and every major character's and enemy's models, from their idle animations to how they peform in combat. For bonus points, the latter portion is in fact modeled as a museum complete with exhibits.
