Two Point Museum review – The memory of Theme Park and Theme Hospital lives on, as the latest Two Point business sim lets you play as Marcus Brody rather than Indiana Jones.
Two Point Studios really are a great British success story. Founded by former Bullfrog and Lionhead alumni, who were there for the golden age of Peter Molyneux before his travails at 22Cans, their games have followed what’s turning out to be a delightful and entirely replicable formula. The first, 2018’s Two Point Hospital, was a charming, mildly eccentric management sim that hid its depth and complexity under dry humour and layers of polish.
Two Point Museum review
Two Point University did the same job for further education, taking the original game’s design principles and Nintendo levels of perfectionism, while turning them to the business of running a university. Patients became students, and hospital departments turned into degree programmes, but the differences were way more than just cosmetic. They’re both beautifully crafted and thoroughly thought through ecosystems.
It’s no surprise that Two Point Museum takes precisely the same approach. Starting with an empty building and a dream of becoming a museum curator, you’re gently guided through the process of making that a simulated reality. The twin fuels that run your exhibitions are the knowledge and buzz they convey to visitors, the former administered via information stands near individual artefacts and the latter by well maintained and interesting objects to look at.
Finding new items to display is a core part of the gameplay loop, and you’ll regularly be sending groups of staff out into the field in the museum’s helicopter to plunder fresh antiquities. They return after a few in-game days with a big crate containing whatever they’ve found, which you then add to your collection, choosing where to place it in your museum for maximum thematic coherence and adding appropriate decorations, each of which helps it generate more buzz.
Expeditions are just one of the things your museum’s team get up to and each individual has their own specific role to perform day-to-day. Experts keep exhibits in a good state of repair, as well as providing specialist help for more far flung trips in the helicopter; assistants staff the ticket booth and sell trinkets in the gift shop; security guards collect money from donation stands; and janitors tidy up litter, restock vending machines, and mend broken lavatories and machinery.
Gamification of Natural history museum
As your museum grows and visitor numbers increase, demands on your staff escalate concurrently, making it important to invest in people. That means recruiting new ones to meet the challenge, and training existing staff to do particular jobs, more of which they can take on as they level up. That requires a fully equipped training room, and a separate staff room where they can relax, recuperate, and recover from injuries sustained on field trips.
To steer your progress there’s a list of objectives that permanently inhabits the right hand side of the screen. Ticking those off unlocks new decorations, installations, and areas of the map to explore, slowly expanding your horizons. You are of course free to ignore them and do your own thing, but doing so swiftly leads to disaster.
The museums is a sedate business
That’s because growing your museum is a sedate and cautiously metered business. Spend too much on exhibits, staff or facilities too early, and you’ll find your gradually growing visitor numbers aren’t enough to balance the budget, leading to monthly deficits, and eventually running out of cash. That’s not the end of the game, because you can always take out a loan or sell sponsorships, but as in real life both of those measures come with onerous contracts that make your life a little bit harder for their duration.
The best path to success is the one the game meticulously lays in front of you, and that includes setting up new museums as you reach certain milestones. Each of those has its own theme, complete with gloriously colourful artefacts and decorations, and in keeping with past outings in the series, none takes itself too seriously. It should come as no surprise that your Museum of the Supernatural involves helicopter sojourns to the netherworld to gather artefacts and apparitions to exhibit.
As you collect a greater range of objects, you’ll start finding more specific requirements for their preservation. Tropical fish need heated aquariums, ghosts prefer their rooms to be decorated in the style of a particular historical era, and if your deep frozen ice age man thaws, he’ll run amok in your gallery, causing all sorts of chaos for janitors to clear up. All that requires specialist equipment, regular maintenance, and occasional fire extinguishing.
Two Point’s magic is that none of this feels like a burden. Each element is introduced in its own good time and learnings in one museum are often transferable to others, so when you find out that planning your museum around visitor flow, ensuring there’s a natural corridor effect around your various themed exhibitions and the gift shop, the more fulfilled each sightseer will be when they leave, resulting in better reviews and higher donations.
If there is a criticism it’s that, especially for the first dozen or so hours, the experience does feel a little on-rails, the procession of objectives effectively limiting your agency; although you’re still afforded other avenues for creativity, both decorative and financial. Keeping up with staff salary expectations, whilst managing the prices of food and beverage vending machines, are just two of the many small jobs you’ll be dealing with as your museum empire expands.
You’ll also find the series’ trademark Tannoy announcements and radio DJs have a consistently wry take on life, which adapts to the theme of each museum you found. They do eventually get repetitive, but neither gets annoying, and can be turned down – or off – if they start to grate. It’s the icing on a cake that seems to offer a near infinite number of layers, with fresh sets of objectives popping up to stretch your enterprise in a variety of new directions.
Like the heyday of Telltale’s Walking Dead franchise or Traveller’s Tales Lego games, Two Point feels like a developer in the right place at the right time, its games offering everything you’d want from a well designed and gripping management simulation. Hardcore sim fans might not like the humour and handholding, but more casual players will find a garden of delights that sustains anything from a light dabble to a months long obsession.
Two Point Museum review summary
In Short: Another excellent addition to the Two Point series, bringing the customary levels of refinement and charm to simulating the business of museum creation and management.
Pros: A huge game that never feels overwhelming. Funny without being annoying. Lovely art style and controls that work brilliantly with a controller. Not a single bug anywhere.
Cons: You’re quite strictly guided at first, with deviation generally punished. Despite looking and sounding so British its prices are in dollars and its cleaners are called ‘janitors’.
Score: 8/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Two Point Studios
Release Date: 4th March 2025 (pre-order early access from 27th February)
Age Rating: 3