... and breaking toilets?!
For years I’ve been aware of Two Point Studios and its efforts to revive the quirky British business sim genre of the 90s. I’d never really made the time to play the studio’s games before now though. I held a deep love for Theme Park on the Mega Drive as a kid, but having not become a PC gamer until the early 2000s, the golden era of such games largely passed me by.
It didn’t take long at all for Two Point Museum to both make me realise just how sorely I’d been missing those good Theme vibes for all these years. It also got me trawling GOG for some of the classics I’d missed out on that influenced it.
The lengthy preview build dropped me in an inner-city museum to begin with, teaching me with impressively gentle detail exactly how my empire of museums will rise. The accompanying presentation highlighted exploration and discovery as being the guiding elements behind Two Point Museum’s conception, and after a short period of play it’s easy to see how these things permeate every facet of its design.
Laying out rooms is obviously going to be a big part of a museum sim, and Two Point Museum’s construction system makes expanding, chopping, and changing your floorplan a breeze. Of course all of those lovely rooms are nothing without exhibits to fill them, and that’s where adventures in the big wild world come in.
Displayable relics, fossils, plants, animals, and all-manner of other such attractions are chiefly recovered by mounting helicopter expeditions into the wilderness. You pick a spot, assemble the required crew of experts and whoever else from your museum staff, and await your glorious plunder. Few locations will be available at first, but more will spiderweb out and unlock as certain milestone conditions are met.
Expeditions cost money of course, and each brings with them varying levels of risk that change depending on the time of year, how long the journey is, and whether the team has taken any special gear with them into the field.
Curveballs can arise during them also which will require a choice be made. In one such instance my archaeologist discovered a random flask mid-journey. I decided that she should investigate it, and she ended up doing so by gulping down its fetid contents. Upon returning home my esteemed expert in all-things prehistoric had developed a seemingly permanent character flaw that caused her to inflict a dramatically sharp amount of maintenance damage to any toilet she uses within the museum. I laughed.
Of course if you really want to please the punters, you can’t just dump any old thing anywhere. Attendees will flock to your museums and happily donate money only so long as you can feed them a steady supply of Buzz and Knowledge, each of which dramatically increases when you theme your exhibit areas appropriately with matching displays, decorations, and information signage.
Children being as children are, they won’t care to read a plaque next to a display though, and will demand more interactive exhibits to satiate them. For these you’ll need to build a workshop room and invest in some R&D.
Not all exhibits of a certain era are alike for that matter either. Despite still being broadly prehistoric, ice-age displays must be kept cool lest the ancient bees or cavemen frozen within break free and run amok.
Naturally you’ll need to keep relevant experts on staff to maintain the collection, as well as janitors to keep things tidy, security guards to patrol as well as empty out donation bins, and assistants to work the counters and restock gift shop inventory.
None of them can do their on-site jobs while out on an expedition of course, and none will stick around long if they’re not being paid well, provided with good break facilities, and given adequate time to make use of them on shift.
You’ll sense by now that a pattern has emerged in how Two Point Museum flows. There’s always a new goal to strive for, which requires investment in a new thing, which then opens up a whole other thing.
The developers at Two Point have stated that they’re very conscious of the fact that most players of Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus tended to feel as if they were kind of done once their facility reached a three-star ranking, and that they’re determined to keep players of Two Point Museum motivated with things to do beyond that.
Once your museum is well established though you’ll be able to expand to whole new locations. Two were on show in the preview build, sporting a boardwalk water park theme and a haunted mansion one respectively. The demands of each are quite different to one another as well as to the prehistoric beginning museum also, and the preview left me tremendously excited to see just how weird and wild things get even deeper in.
That’s really my parting sentiment after several hours with Two Point Museum actually, a tremendous enthusiasm to experience more of it. It’s fiendishly engrossing while also being gleefully silly. Intensely accessible while also offering just enough depth to keep you on your toes.
The addictive rhythms and cheeky charm of it all will no doubt be familiar to those who played the prior two entries in the loose series, but for me, an afternoon with Two Point Museum threw me straight back to sitting cross-legged in front of the telly as the Mega Drive blasts “Entry of the Gladiators” from the well-loved Theme Park cartridge slapped within it. I was very happy indeed.
Two Point Museum is planned for a 5 March 2025 release on Windows PC, Mac, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and PS5.
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Two Point Museum4 March 2025PC PS5 Xbox Series S & X
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