Two Point Museum Review: A Charming, Well-Preserved Exhibit

If you’re coming to Two Point Museum hoping for more of the same charming and silly business management sims you’ve come to expect from the guys at Two Point, you certainly won’t be disappointed. However, I can’t help but feel they may have missed a bit of a trick.

The follow up to both Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus, Two Point Museum has you developing a series of (you guessed it) museums! You’re tasked with developing and managing a whole range of historical institutions, covering everything from dinosaurs, to marine life, to supernatural worlds and artefacts. 

Building your museums will be familiar to those who’ve played titles like these before in terms of gameplay. You build rooms, place exhibits, decorate and maintain your museum, and try to bring in as many visitors as possible. Despite leaning on the same formula, there are some unique aspects to Two Point Museum. Unlike the previous games, not everything has to be contained into rooms. Partition walls allow you to fence off areas, with one-way and staff-only doors introduced to help keep crowds flowing in a particular direction. These allow for a more open plan style of building development, and more free-form design in terms of layout.

Another new feature lays a heavier importance on decorations compared to previous games. Previously decorating was only really done for your own enjoyment. Sure, it helped improve the overall happiness of staff and visitors, but it didn’t really matter what you placed or where. But in Two Point Museum, placing the correct decorations near the right exhibits helps improve their overall ‘Buzz’ score, which generates more visitors. And whilst this does sometimes lead to you throwing in items basically anywhere just to fill out a gauge, it’s still a nice way to incorporate this aspect into gameplay.

Once you’ve designed your museum you also have to hire and manage staff members. You’ll need experts to look after exhibits and research, assistants to work the ticket booths and gift shops, janitors to clean up the mess, and security to catch pesky criminals and collect donation money. Staff will also need training with more specialised skills, as well as somewhere to take a rest during the hectic work day. Budgets will also need to be managed, with employees looking to be rewarded for their efforts with raises, alongside the need to continue developing your museum. Although if you do fancy playing without restrictions, the game does have a Sandbox mode alongside its regular campaign, meaning the museum of your dreams can be a reality.

Two Point Museum’s campaign isn’t the most difficult I’ve ever played, and generally you can complete all the objectives without too much trouble so long as you’re paying attention. But that doesn’t make it any less rewarding, as your success grants you new museums to manage and new areas to explore. There’s also a scoring system which is essentially endless, encouraging you to keep developing your museums even after all your initial objectives have been completed.

So far, so tycoon game. Where Two Point Museum differentiates itself is in how you get the key exhibits that generate Buzz, encouraging more customers to visit. In order to get these, you have to send researchers on expeditions to discover new lands and bring back the artifacts they find.

But it isn’t just as simple as shipping them off and waiting, as each adventure contains perils that may cause both short and long term effects to those you send away. At certain points your budding explorers will also run into scripted events, where you have to decide how they respond. Depending on your choices, you may find extra items or receive a bonus to your party in the form of XP. However, choose wrongly and it may have more adverse effects, forcing your adventurers into a period of downtime, or even a trip to the hospital. In the most extreme cases, you may lose one of your explorers forever.

This is all done through a map screen with you selecting who to send off, where to send them too, how long for, and what you’ll send them off with to potentially help in their expedition. This is where I feel the game is missing something. 

YouTuber Yahtzee Croshaw once said:

“I'm reminded of a piece of writing advice I was once given: is this the most interesting period of our character's life, and if not, why aren't you showing us that?”

Essentially, a good story is one in which we are seeing the most interesting aspects of it play out, not hearing about them instead, or finding out they happened off-screen. And I honestly feel like you can apply something similar here. The most exciting part of this game sounds like it’d be exploring new worlds and discovering artifacts. So the fact that this all happens behind text boxes and map markers is a real shame. Now, I wasn’t expecting some Uncharted or Tomb Raider-style bombastic gameplay. But occasional mini-games or even short cutscenes showing what’s going on during these expeditions would have gone a long way. A lot of the game’s best and most unique stuff, unfortunately, is not the stuff the game chooses to show us.

That’s not to say there isn’t lots of fun to be had in what we do see. As is typical for a Two Point game, characters, animations and the overall art style fills the game with personality. The developers clearly have a keen eye on the details of animations, meaning even basic interactions like buying a ticket or conducting research are fun and entertaining. The variety of silly customers you get will always delight and surprise you; from goths and clowns, to yetis and scuba divers, you’ll never not be amused by who’s walking through your doors. This is combined with the excellent writing littered throughout the game’s world, brought to life through both the exhibits you find and the messages you receive updating you on the museum’s goings on. 

The music and audio design too is delightful and charming. The warm jazz soundtrack is a perfect accompaniment to your museum building ventures, and the interspersed voiceover from the museum’s tannoy is both brilliantly written and expertly delivered. This sort of constant interruption could easily become annoying or repetitive. But fortunately, because of how well it’s done, it never does.

There’s a lot of fun and discoveries to be had with Two Point Museum, and it certainly scratches that same itch other Two Point games do. As a business management sim it’s rock solid, though not the most complex systematically, but that fits with its charming overall aesthetic. It’s a shame that more couldn’t have been made of one of the game’s biggest mechanics, and for those seeking out a challenge they may wish to look elsewhere. But what there is here is still very enjoyable on its own merit.