Initially, a museum simulation game might not sound appealing, but with Two Point Studios’ signature touch, it becomes unsurprisingly engaging.
It only takes about 20 minutes for Two Point Museum to make you laugh and pull you in for an addiction filled adventure. Similar to designing college campuses, and hospitals, Two Points Museum sets you on an adventure to design and curate new museums.
Two Point Museum
Release Date: March 4th
Genre: Simulation
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC
Developer: Two Point Studios
The game begins simply, easing players into its complex management simulation with ultra basic tasks. It honestly feels like you’ve mastered the game early on when your first museum is making truck loads of money, and enticing countless guests. Early expeditions (we will get to that) even yield expensive art and profits, but after venturing a little further, intricate mechanics emerge, demanding way more attention. The gameplay becomes increasingly chaotic, and the potential for rapid failure becomes clear.
If you played a Two Points game before then you already know what to mostly expect from this game. However, some things have slightly changed from previous adventures. Now placement becomes slightly more important for several various reasons. In previous games you could load up say a dorm room with video games, and it would be a cheesy way to increase the students’ entertainment. Slowly your campus would go from a rather meticulous crafted design, to just spamming random areas with objects to meet demand. While Museum shares similar characteristics, the team did a better job overall of ensuring that the crafting aspect remains intact, and creates chaos when a location becomes too full of objects.
Like I said earlier, the more you play the more layers of the game are slowly revealed to you and it all begins here. Each object will relate to the object around it, you can then build rooms around certain themes (which break down into minor categories too), and guests will notice if your museum is a jumbled mess. Then each object will have design elements that will increase its buzz (or decrease it), each object needs an easy route for your experts to access, and so on. Every time you place something down a visible line will link it to nearby displays and kiosks, and breaking these lines will disrupt the flow of the whole museum.
If you do mess up, then even more chaos can happen like a caveman becoming defrosted and wreaking havoc on displays. Again, multiple layers. Each display needs an expert to learn about the topic, to take care of the displays, or the artifacts could outright die and devalue the location. Janitors need to learn skills to upgrade items and deal with guests, and so on.
One major change with this title is how you ultimately progress. Not only are there specific goals to be met to push forward, and of course money to be spent, but the game introduces new expeditions that you can send your crew out on. Each one costs money, and can cause potential harm (or have a member become “lost”), but the higher the cost and risk, the better item the team could potentially come back with.
It’s an overall interesting perk because you need experts roaming the museum, but you also need experts willing to communicate with ghosts in a dark canyon too.So if they all get sent away on a mission, then your guests will not get a great experience.
If a crew member is hurt on an adventure it could be anything from being sick, to possessed, to leaking tar all over the museum. I’ve had multiple encounters that affected my museum when they returned home. Each trauma needs specific care, most of which consists of letting them whirl around in the break room for a few days, or going on a healing expedition.
The expeditions are RNG based, meaning you send the crew out, they randomly have an incident, and come back with a glorified loot box. This is the aspect that is meh to me. So far in my hours of playtime, there is no real way to “guarantee” what the crew comes back with. I’ve leveled up my crew members, got them particular gadgets, leveled up the expeditions, and it’s still a rather lucky draw scenario.
It’s interesting because you overall just build what’s thrown at you, but when you are in the depths of designing a particular museum it can become frustrating when you get your 10th cobra skeleton, and not the missing piece to an artifact you’ve been waiting for. It’s also a way to add a little depth to the game because it really slows down the overall progression. The game is pretty “easy” to play and advance, after spending a ton of time playing the game I’ve never really felt like I had an opportunity to “regress” in any of my locations. If I need money, I just send out an expedition and put out whatever they come back with.
You can take certain pieces to an analyzing machine, which will help level up your museum pieces and overall expedition runs as well, so every time you send a team out at least rewards something of value. The machine will decode the piece and turn it into skill points for similar artifacts, and destroy that particular one. So no, you don’t need 10 of the same object, you can instead do this to strengthen a single one instead. Overall the whole game is designed around making your team knowledgeable about the artifacts in the museum. The more they know about things, the more information that is provided to guests, and the higher “buzz” will be rewarded.
Buzz seems to be the centralized statistic in the game where everything from artifact placement, to pricing, to layout is affected. The more buzz you generate, the more people visit, the more money you make, and the higher overall level you attain.
A lot of the artifacts have a soft timer as well, needing experts to come clean and repair them continuously. For most of the early displays this just means they become dirty and unattractive over time, but an expert will fix it right up. For artifacts you discover later this means the object could quite literally die. If you find a very valuable plant that brings a ton of buzz to the museum, but the expert in charge of feeding it is constantly on an expedition, or has little to no access to it, then it could be a huge loss when it eventually wilts.
Thankfully the awesome narrator returns with this iteration, which will make snarky remarks to guide you to what needs attention. Not enough donation bins? Too much trash? The office is on fire? She will let you know that maybe you should go glance at the issue.
The 4th wall breaking is what makes Two Point titles so much fun to me. The snarky attitude of the narrator, to the fact a floppy disk is an artifact in a case in my museum. Every fine detail about Two Points Museum makes me smile and laugh the whole time I’m playing it.
But what really sold me on Museum vs the previous titles is that there is a tiny bit more managing going on. While it is overall easy to print money at any location, the various curve balls thrown at you can quickly diminish the returns easily. It becomes fun to then dive into the depths of finances and see what’s making money, why it’s making money, and how to make more money. Museum does a good job of letting you step back in these moments and re-organize staff or figure out why money is flowing out the door. It becomes a really intricate business simulation as you advance.
As you begin to become more interested in these aspects of the game, you start to appreciate how well everything is laid out. All aspects are easily accessible and easily organized to figure out the source of problems. For example organizing staff by happiness, and seeing their needs and possible training opportunities. Combine these finite details with a narrator constantly cluing you in on what to pay attention to, and you always have something to do.
But then the game expands upon itself as well. Each location you unlock will also have a unique aspect to it, such as an aquarium or haunted museum. Within these locations you are encouraged to build towards that theme and it’s pretty interesting how much the dynamics change entirely. You then have to study fish, what they eat, how they interact with each other, and build proper tanks to house them. Some rooms need to be hot, others cold. And your guests probably just got possessed by a ghost….
So many quirky and fun issues arise as you progress and it makes you never want to stop playing. The simulation that is behind it all never really dulls out the fun. Once you think you’ve mastered something, or designed something perfectly, the game introduces a new mechanic or tool to use, and now you need to redesign an entire staff room. Expeditions also further enhance everything by themselves because you will spend a lot of time training or finding staff that can go on higher level adventures, and often feel the pain of them not returning safely. Any direction you look in Two Point Museum there is something to level up, polish, or fix.
The only aspect of the game that I felt was a bit unbalanced was when crime began to hit my museum. Once you progress far enough you will unlock criminals which can sneak in and steal entire exhibits, even ones that took multiple expeditions to unlock. There are various security perks for guards, camera rooms, and other outlets to keep a close eye on intruders, but the game offers so many alternatives for criminals that it’s hard to keep coverage without outright spamming guards and camera’s to a point of making visitors uncomfortable. For example if you secure the entrance fairly well, the game will introduce a gang that enters through restrooms, or outright digs holes into random rooms. If you have a rather large museum then it’ll be hard to pinpoint where these guys come in, and where you need a guard at.
The events are slightly counter acted by cheesing the system and placing a newly hired guard near them, or just racing to whatever they attempt to steal and putting it into your inventory, but as far as I know there is no real reward for capturing them.
Overall it’s such a minor complaint that it didn’t draw too much from my overall experience. It just took an otherwise perfect game and scaled it down a tiny bit, and gave them something to work on for future iterations.
