Just as it seems they are in real life, the museums of Two Point County are in a right old state. Luckily, you’re on hand to become the curator in Two Point Museum, taking charge of these underfunded, understaffed and under-exhibit-filled establishments while pioneering the exploration of everything from dinosaur skeletons to ghostly apparitions and even the wonders of outer space!
It’s easy to lump the Two Point series together, each of them being management sims with a homely art style and a love of puns that could only come from British developers. At a baseline, you’re creating rooms and flows for patrons to pass through, managing the happiness of your team of employees, and trying to make as much money as possible, but each of these games has some striking differences.
For Two Point Hospital, it was about creating a sequence of rooms, taking a patient from diagnosis through to treatment. Two Point Campus upended that with students locked in for a full year of learning, going through term time lectures as you also try to encourage their extra-curricular activities and foster lasting friendships and relationships, hoping to get good grades out of them at the end of the year. Two Point Museum swings back the other way, now with the most freeform and customisable layout for your buildings full of exhibits, and a separate layer that sees you sending employees off on expeditions to find things that belong in a museum.
There’s five overarching themes that run through Two Point Museum – Prehistory, Marine Life, Supernatural, Science and Space – each of which is the basis for the five main museum locations in the game. There’s some really fantastic variation between the five, all permeated by Two Point’s typical sense of humour. Prehistory has that classic dino skeleton museum look to it, that’s immediately contrasted to having to put up aquariums that cater to various fishy demands, the spectres and haunted mannequins of the supernatural, and how the Science museum puts more emphasis on creating steampunk-adjacent exhibits in your workshop. There’s also plenty of crossover between them, so you’ll be hiring experts from other disciplines to support your work in other museums.
That’s felt most heavily when sending teams out on expeditions. There’s a five regions, each filled with points of interest that are home to certain finds, and each with certain requirements and potential dangers. You’ll need to create a team with experts, and sometimes taking janitors, assistants and security staff alongside. Their particular trained skills and perks will give certain advantages to, alongside the single gear slot, cancel out dangers, boost your potential finds, and more.
It’s a good meta layer that you’ll constantly keep returning to, though it can also be a sticking point as you have to keep rolling the dice to try and find that one particular exhibit of the 3 or 4 available, or require you to level up staff and craft particular items to bypass obstacles.
In terms of raw numbers, having five museums (plus a few high score tasks) is a bit disappointing when compared to the 12 distinct campuses and themes in the last game. There’s hundreds of exhibits to uncover, though, and Two Point Museum’s structure through the career is different, having you flit back and forth between museums as you reach each milestone and earn a star, finding new narrative beats at each stage, and with each level having more than just a three star rating to hunt for. Of course, there’s also a sandbox mode that you can play across those core maps.
You’re given more freedom than ever before in how you want to construct your museum. The concept of placing individual rooms is still here for staff rooms, research, gift shops and the like, but the main areas through which visitors meander is as plain a canvas as you could want for. You can just have a totally open sprawl, if you want, but there’s a new kind of partition wall that you can use to create freeform rooms and layouts, adding structure and a flow to how you want visitors to experience your museum – and it’s also important when certain exhibits have particular environmental requirements.
These walls break from the strict grid layout that regular rooms and buildings still have, letting you block things out with diagonals and on the grid’s midpoints. That’s a huge increase in the flexibility it gives you, and in tandem with now being able to paint floor tiles with quartered triangles, it means that you can really customise the look of different areas, but it doesn’t always hang together quite right. In particular, setting a new wallpaper on the building proper won’t stop at a partition wall attached at the half grid, so you have a bit of orange (let’s say) sticking through to the cool blues you wanted next door, and the fill tools to quickly slap a new look down sometimes get confused and paint through to other areas. It can just be a little fussy. Thankfully, placing items is better than ever, defaulting to the grid an 45º angles, but letting you make micro adjustments from that to perfect their placement.
That’s important, because each exhibit needs to be situated in a good spot with access, but also have plentiful decorations, information boards, and more surrounding it to generate as much Buzz and Knowledge for your visitors. It’s can be generally quite straightforward, grouping exhibits together that come from a similar branch of research – all the prehistoric plants in one room with heaters, misters and other plants for decoration, all the dino skeletons together with interesting fossils nearby with thematic tusks, torches and dino footprints on the floor – but each will also have a particular decoration requirement to fulfil to help bump the Buzz level up further.
Your curated experience is really tied together by creating tours that your experts run, walking guests to a sequence of exhibits, explaining things to your patrons (with a bit of playacting), and looking to boost their enjoyment from their visit to your museum. A tour has a bunch of criteria that gives it a rating out of 5, including the overall Buzz, the length (sometimes less is more), the cohesiveness and the quality of the exhibits featured. The better the rating, the bigger the donations you receive, but it sometimes feels impossible to inch a tour past a particular rating – a regular objective – and can lead you to throwing money at expedition after expedition to get there.
Because, believe it or not, it is still all about money, and museums can’t live on entry ticket fees alone. No, there’s obviously the various vending machines, cafeteria and the plushie-filled gift shop to drain your patrons pockets, but if they’re enjoying their time, they’ll also throw any other cash they have into a nearby donation bin.
Each guest will have particular hopes for what they want to see. You’ll need to cover the basics of food, drink and loos, keep the environment neat and tidy, the exhibits in good condition, but they’ll also have a particular dream that you will want to fulfil. Kids might want to have a bunch of interactive exhibits, Cheese-moongers might want some cheesy food, Goths might want to be transformed into a vampire by a prehistoric chair. The usual kind of museum activities…
It’s easy to gloss over some of these finer details, just work on the fundamentals and still generally keep your museum growing and improving. If there’s a really pressing need, icons will pop up over someone’s head to let you know, and you’ve got a lot to juggle with adding security patrols to combat thieves, sending out expeditions, and doing the research and training in-house as well. Still, you can really dive in a get a deeper understanding of how things are going, boost you exhibits with upgrades, train up staff to specialise in particular areas, assign them to specific jobs, mark out zones and more. It’s often good to overhaul your museum’s layout, remix the exhibits you have and make efficiencies, just as it is to buy adjacent plots of land and expand, but this relies on nitty-gritty adjustments without a click and drag to select multiples.