You’ve got to hand it to the folks at Two Point Studios. After the success of Two Point Hospital, which riffed on the classic and fairly well-known Theme Hospital, they could’ve continued to go after that nostalgia for the days of Bullfrog and Maxis. Instead, the studio has been tackling its own ideas that play to its strengths in crafting small-scale, approachable management sims full of charm and humour. After 2022’s well-received Two Point Campus had us helping university students achieve higher learning, the stars of Two Point Museum are much, much older.
Thanks to SEGA and Two Point Studios, I recently had the opportunity to sit down with a handful of hours of Two Point Museum ahead of its release on March 5 next year, and I think there might be a career in archaeology in my future because I really dug it.
Opening on dinosaurs was a good move for me and others like me
I’ll admit, I kinda thought I’d already had Two Point Museum pegged before I even laid hands on it. After all, there’s a clear and working formula powering the Two Point games that doesn’t show any signs of changing. Whether it’s a hospital, a school or a museum, your job is to build little rooms inside big rooms and fill them with the right people and things to satisfy the public walking through your front doors. And while that still mostly applies, I’m pleased to say there’s more than just the old bones here.
Having access to the game from the beginning, my time with Two Point Museum’s campaign naturally kicked off with a tutorial mission of sorts. Your introduction to a life of museum management begins in the most obvious way – curating a gallery of prehistoric exhibits. It all starts out as you’d expect, with the game showing you the (velvet) ropes by having you place a few initial attractions, decorate them to increase their appeal and install a ticket gate in order to start generating income and keep out the poor. So far, so Two Point. But if there’s one thing the British have taught the rest of us about running a successful archive, it’s that you can’t just keep showing folks the same curios and artifacts forever – at some point you’ll need to venture out and “recover” some more.
I promise you, they don’t get paid enough for this
This is where Expeditions come in, and where Two Point Museum’s biggest point-of-difference appears, at least in these early stages. To obtain more exhibits, you’ll need to fly your staff out to new and exciting places to find them. And rather than just have you click a button to send them on their way and await their eventual return, Expeditions are a game of management and decision-making all their own.
There are a number of things to consider when embarking on a hopeful Expedition, limited not just to the time it’ll take to complete (and therefore the time you’ll be without a whole crew of museum staff), but also where you’re setting off to and the potential dangers and spoils that await. Hazards, tar pits in the prehistoric dig sites for example, can hamper your efforts and even have lasting effects back at the museum with affected staff traipsing tar across the floors unless you give them the downtime to get cleaned up in the appropriate facilities. Having staff gone too long can obviously be detrimental to museum upkeep, but rushing an Expedition makes the risky bits all the riskier, as does going after bigger rewards or attempting to scout new territory to plunder. It’s a wonderful little parallel to your work managing the actual museum and shows plenty of promise for added spice down the track.
Exhibit A. Or is it… Bee?
Those who get a kick out of meticulously laying out and decorating their venues also have a lot to look forward to. A museum is a largely visual endeavour, after all, so interior design is more important than ever. Even early doors, I found a plethora of bits and pieces to play with and a ton of customisation options for the many structural surfaces of my museums, which is pretty encouraging for those of us who prefer wallpapering to paperwork.
While you’ll still be building plenty of rooms for things like staff lounges, workshops and gift shops, your exhibits will thrive in large and open spaces where they can be seen by all, which definitely changes the dynamic of planning layouts. How you present your exhibits is important too, so placing decorations in proximity and collecting multiple pieces into one area to all benefit from the embellishments are surefire ways to up the quality and appeal of your amazing finds.
Your measures of success in Two Point Museum come from how much Buzz and Knowledge your exhibits generate, and how well your museum reviews, which naturally all affect the likelihood of attracting more visitors who’ll spend more money on entry, donations and tacky gift shop goods. Like the other Two Point games, this certainly isn’t a hardcore management sim, but I appreciate the very appropriate considerations that I had to make when it came to meeting the needs of my guests – like ensuring children were catered to with more hands-on exhibits.
This is either the Toy Story kind of living doll or the non-scary kind
Although I only had a few hours with Two Point Museum, I did have the chance to dabble in two other campaign levels outside of the Prehistoric theme. One gave me the opportunity to scare up a spooky, haunted exhibition full of cursed, paranormal artifacts and the other saw me get my feet wet with a Marine Life museum. The obvious appeal of distinct and varied themes with their own aesthetics and gimmicks aside, it was also neat to see what new challenges awaited in Expeditions – and with persistent Expedition progress across maps you could even go spelunking for ancient fish to populate your ghostly mansion, if you felt the need.
I didn’t spend nearly as much time in these other themes as I did the Prehistoric level, but I’m absolutely champing at the bit to see more of what Two Point Museum has to offer after this brief hands-on time with it. If the rest of the game has as much charm, as many fun things to see and decorate with and as many wonderfully terrible puns as I’ve seen so far, it’ll be a real treat come March.
Previewed on PC using code provided by the publisher
Click here for more information on WellPlayed’s review policy and ethics
