Mystery Museum

What these figures mean for Mystery Museum

Mystery Museum looks like the most traditional game in Push Gaming's set here — a 5x3 grid with 10 paylines — and has the least traditional decision attached to it. Before the mechanics, though, the price. Push publishes two return settings, 96.58% and 94.01%, and says the one a casino runs is displayed on the loading screen and in the user panel. The lower figure is the weakest of the twelve Push settings on this site, and the gap of 2.57 points is the second widest of the studio's six games, a hundredth behind Jammin' Jars.

Converted into house edge, that is 3.42% against 5.99%. A player using the £2 ceiling that applies to under-25s, over five hundred spins, stakes £1,000 and should expect to give back about £34.20 on the higher setting and about £59.90 on the lower — a difference of £25.70. Put another way, the weaker build of Mystery Museum keeps three-quarters as much again as the stronger one, and it sits 0.66 of a point below the weaker build of Wild Swarm, the best fallback figure Push publishes for any game here. Most players will not notice that in a single evening, because the swings of a high-volatility game hide it, but it is there on every spin.

Now the decision. Wins of more than 2x the stake trigger Power Gamble, which offers three gamble options. Depending on which you choose and how it lands, you climb towards the free games or towards a larger cash prize; reach the top and the collect is at least 100x, which on a £2 stake means no less than £200. Two things follow from that description. The trigger is low — a modest line win qualifies — so the choice comes up often, not once a session. And a gamble does not change what a spin was worth on average unless the odds offered differ from fair, which the studio does not publish. What it certainly changes is the shape: fewer small wins survive, and large outcomes become more frequent than they would be without it. A player who gambles every eligible win is playing a far more volatile game than one who never does, on the same reels and at the same setting.

That makes Mystery Museum unusual among the games on this site. The volatility label Push gives, High, describes the game as designed, but the volatility you actually experience depends partly on you. Someone who banks every 3x win is playing something gentler than someone who sends each one up the ladder.

The free games run for between 8 and 12 spins, entered by landing three or more samurai scatters. Their distinctive rule is that mystery stacks become sticky for the whole round and only reveal when the reveal could produce a win — so a round can carry a growing set of stacks that sit dormant until they line up with something. In the base game, three or more mystery stacks on the reels set off a nudge and reveal. Both features lean on the same symbol, which is why sessions here tend to feel quiet until a stack appears.

The range of 8 to 12 free spins is wider than it looks: the long end is half as many spins again as the short end, and with sticky stacks accumulating through the round, those extra spins tend to be the most valuable ones, because they arrive when the most stacks are already in place. Push does not say what decides the count — whether it is random or tied to the number of scatters — so it is worth reading the game's own rules before treating a twelve-spin round as anything other than luck. Of the six Push games in this catalogue, this is also the only one on a classic 5x3 layout; the others use 5x4 or larger grids, or do not state one.

The ceiling Push gives is 17,500x, labelled — as all of the studio's ceilings are — the highest observed win. It is the second lowest of Push's six titles here, above only Wild Swarm's 3,069x. Against the usual modesty of a ten-line game it is large: NetEnt's ten-line Starburst lists 800x. No odds are attached to it. The page also marks the bonus buy as coming soon rather than available, so for now the features arrive only through play.

What to do before a session follows directly. Read the RTP on the loading screen: 96.58% is the better configuration, 94.01% the lowest any Push game on this site is published at. Settle your Power Gamble policy before you start — always, never, or only for small wins — because deciding it win by win is how sessions drift. And measure the session by its stake rather than by the 17,500x; nothing on the page says how often anything close to it happens.

In short: a classic-looking frame, a better-than-average top return, the weakest Push floor in this catalogue, and a gamble feature that hands control of the game's volatility partly to the player. Check which build you are on, and decide the gamble question in advance.

The RTP you get depends on the casino

Push Gaming publishes 2 different RTP builds of this game and each casino chooses which one to run. Most review sites print a single number; these are all the builds the studio publishes for Mystery Museum, highest first. Push Gaming names no default among them, so the figure at the top of this page is simply the highest it publishes.

On £100 of turnover the gap between the highest and lowest build here is £2.57. A casino is not obliged to tell you which build it runs, so treat any single RTP figure — including ours — as the best case until you have checked the game's own info screen in the lobby.

How Mystery Museum compares with the rest of our catalogue

Against every other game here whose studio publishes its maths.

Volatility as the studio states it — what the index measures.