Two Point Museum Review

When I was much, much younger and living in Western Australia, one of my favourite places to visit was Scitech (I guess here in Melbourne you’d call it Scienceworks, or Questacon in our nation’s capital). This brightly-coloured maze of interactive science exhibits and demonstrations, situated next to a barely-patronised Harvey Norman in West Perth, was a hub of learning and play, sparking curiosity and creativity in children whose schools or parents weren’t sure what else to do with them.

Two Point Museum‘s science-themed map, in which the player must investigate an abandoned scientific laboratory and drum up public interest in technological wonders and curios to fund a climate-related mission, brought those old feelings of creativity and curiosity flooding back. It also drove home exactly what this game offers that elevates it well beyond what I was expecting. This isn’t just a game about foraging for and displaying dusty old relics – it’s also about catching and keeping exotic fish, containing and controlling haunted objects and ghosts, flexing your botanical chops and… communicating with aliens.

I call this The Bone Zone

Through five distinct museum types, which you’ll jump in and out of as your options, opportunities and expertise evolve, Two Point Museum pulls out the single strongest campaign that this franchise has managed to date. It’s a joy to unearth a new theme with its own unique challenges and idiosyncrasies, master it to the required standard, and then return to a previous curation armed with new skills and resources to push that to new heights. It really gives the impression that you’re building a museum empire with all of the benefits that come from expansion.

At its most basic level, this is an approachable management sim that’ll be familiar to those who played Two Point Campus, Two Point Hospital or really any Bullfrog Productions joint of the 90s. The beauty of the Two Point games has always been in how successfully they distill not only the structure but also the value of each covered industry into compelling management gameplay, through a razor-sharp combo of satire and approachability. Museum, like Campus and Hospital before it, and perhaps even more so, achieves this feat by exploring not only what makes a gallery of art or history or science tick but what value it contributes to us as humans.

It’s important, then, to make sure your museums and exhibits are as enriching to those who visit as they are attractive and lucrative. In-game, this is measured through two crucial KPIs, Knowledge and Buzz. These two metrics are easy enough to follow – Knowledge relates to how much visitors are learning and Buzz tells you how exciting and popular something is. But behind the scenes, there’s naturally much more going on including staff management, exhibit upkeep, research and more in an economy where cash and wisdom are of equal value. Your management decisions will decide the fates of not just your customers and employees but the very exhibits you’ve worked hard to host – how much are those old bones worth, really, on public display versus ground into a testable sample?

Keep all these guys away from the dinosaurs. I think you know why

And unlike many real-world museums, these exhibits in Two Point Museum aren’t simply “borrowed” items of history and culture that your global neighbours would very much like back, they must be sought out. This is achieved by sending your museum’s experts and accompanying staff on Expeditions to collect new pieces, whether it’s digging up fossils, catching wild aquatic life, calling restless spirits from the beyond or boldly going where no museum creator has gone before.

Expeditions are a fun aside to the rest of your management and curation gig, tasking you with scouting new locations to explore, weighing up the risks and potential rewards of any one mission and deciding who of your staff are capable and expendable enough to see it through. It’s all done through menus, so you won’t actually see or partake in any of the action, but it’s a good little set-and-forget activity that results in a steady stream of surprise crates landing at your museum doors, ready to unpack and display.

And that’s really how it all goes. There’s an inherent satisfaction in decorating and filling your warehouses of wisdom, and seeing the bodies (and donations) roll in, but it’s once the game starts mixing in the real nitty-gritty of being a custodian of curios that Two Point Museum truly comes alive. By the end you’ll be going as far as arranging exhibits to crack alien codes, but it’s the simpler things like planning and constructing tours – which send interested guests along a planned path to bring more attention to your best knick-knacks – that I had the most fun with. I tend to put a lot of thought into my building layouts and interior decoration in these games, so it’s nice to be able to give the little people living in my TV a bit of guidance on how to best consume my vision.

Pepper spray! Get it??

And look, I’m aware that this is Two Point Studios’ third go around when it comes to launching one of its quirky, approachable tycoon games on multiple home platforms, and the other two were also pretty good for this, but damn does Two Point Museum play nicely on a controller. The reason this review is dropping a fair bit later than the global embargo is that code was initially only available on PC and I’m solely a console player. I imagine many others are the same, and so it’s heartening to know they’ll be getting a stellar control/UX experience here, both in terms of how easy it is to steer and how well considered every menu and UI feature is.

What I don’t enjoy, though, is hearing an announcement that one of my Experts is thinking of resigning because of their working conditions, and not seeing any change in their attitude even after I’ve struggled to parse the game’s management screens and subsequently ignored their requests. Instead, I’ve taken to simply letting them go and rehiring someone who’ll do more for less. Now, I’m not suggesting I possess a shred of business acumen, but I’m starting to see a pattern in how I play these games that I think could take off in the real world. Unfortunately, it also means there’s nobody left to pick up the pieces when I forget to give my frozen caveman adequate cooling and he starts stealing from a donation stand, or when a poltergeist I’ve kidnapped for my zoo of horrors gets bored and starts terrorising guests.

Final Thoughts

Such is the joy of Two Point. It’s a lot of lessons about middle-to-upper management under capitalist rule, and it’s also a lot of slapstick gags and grueling puns. It could partly be because this is the richest and most polished effort from the team so far, but I reckon the Museum theme might have Hospital beat for what it brings to the little sim-lite niche that Two Point has carved for itself.

Reviewed on PS5 Pro // Review code supplied by publisher

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