Very Good, Very Wacky, Maybe Too Big

Two Point Museum—out March 4 on PC and consoles—is the latest game in the Two Point series of wacky British business simulators. This time around, instead of running a hospital or building a profitable college, you are tasked with building and maintaining a successful museum. Doing so is tricky, but in a perfectly irresistible way that has sucked hours of my life away in a blink of an eye.

Two Point Museum, like Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus, shares a lot of its DNA with the old ‘90s PC tycoon games. Stuff like Roller Coaster Tycoon, Theme Hospital, and Zoo Tycoon. These games might contain loads of jokes and wacky, ridiculous situations (for example, in Museum you have to manage ghosts and keep cavemen frozen or they wake up and go wild) but buried beneath all that silliness are real numbers, systems, and things to manage. And Two Point Museum nails this key part of the genre.

The basic loop of Two Point Museum and its various maps is this: You show up and are put in charge of a failing or unfinished museum. Then you use resources like money to build the place up while you send your staff—who you must hire, manage and take care of—off into various parts of the world to bring back artifacts, fossils, living creatures, historical items, and more nifty stuff that you can put in your museum.

The idea is to bring in more guests using the lure of more cool shit you’ve gathered from around the world and then build walls and displays that funnel those guests into gift shops where they spend the money you use to keep growing and growing the museum. Repeat until you’ve created the ultimate museum.

I do wish Two Point Museum aimed its dry, satirical British wit at the practice of stealing artifacts from other cultures and displaying them in places far away from the people who rightfully own said items. That kind of barbed social commentary is something I loved about Two Point Hospital, whose humor was directly aimed at satirizing profit-driven hospitals and did a great job at it. In Two Point Museum, however, nobody jokes about where the stuff you’re displaying actually belongs, and it feels like a missed opportunity.

Perfectly managing controlled chaos

Regardless, pulling off the perfect museum (one that is profitable, pretty, and informative) is much harder than you might think as Two Point Museum loves to throw curveballs at you.

You might send some staff out on an expedition to collect fossils and one of them gets injured and needs to be healed. And perhaps that injured employee was your one expert on fossils, who you needed to clean and maintain the exhibits. Now all your stuff is getting dusty, attendance is down, and you’re losing money. This kind of thing happens a lot in Two Point Museum.

Thankfully, the menus, UI, and controls in Two Point Museum are wonderfully designed and extremely easy to use. So managing all the tiny disasters, mistakes, and chaos doesn’t feel like tedious work, but is instead a ton of fun.

It’s very nice to hit two buttons and raise all your staff’s pay (and make them all much happier in the process), especially when you’re trying to avoid having some of them quit on you right as you’re dealing with an increase in mole people drilling into your museum to steal your exhibits. (Luckily my guards with pepper grinders saved the day. Did I mention Two Point Museum is wacky?)

The great UI and controls also make decorating and tinkering with your different museums a joyous activity. I spent many, many hours in Two Point Museum building elaborate exhibits using decorations, props, and other cosmetic items. I also greatly enjoyed setting up barriers, ropes, and walls to block guests from areas or corral them into certain parts of the museum. It’s not just a power trip, either. It’s very creatively satisfying to build the perfect themed section of your museum.

And doing so rewarded me with happier guests who learned more about the items and (importantly) donated more money to the museum as well.

Too Much Two Point Museum

My only big complaint against Two Point Museum is that it almost feels too big at times. You don’t just build museums in this game, but also aquariums and ghost hotels, too. (It’s weird.) All of this is fun, and mixing the different types of exhibits together into one cohesive museum is challenging but rewarding.

However, it’s a lot of stuff to pile onto a full biz sim management game that also features staff upgrades, research rewards, crafting, and exploration. Now you have to deal with living creatures, escaping ghosts, and unlocking new spots on three expedition maps, too. It’s a lot, and while it never ruined my experience it does feel excessive.

It also made me wonder what a full Two Point game based on aquariums would look like, instead of them basically being crammed into this already great and involved museum-focused sequel. Perhaps later Museum expansions will build out these other parts of the game and make them feel more fleshed out and developed. For now though, Two Point Museum seems like it contains a bit too much, like an extra layer of frosting on an already sweet desert.

Still, Two Point Museum being a bit overstuffed isn’t a deal breaker at all for me. I highly recommend that folks who loved the past Two Point games or older ‘90s-era tycoon sims check out Two Point Museum when it arrives on PC, Xbox, and PS5 on March 4.

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