The older I get, the more I appreciate things I didn’t when I was a kid. Field trips are wasted on the young, and at 31, what I wouldn’t give to have a day off where my parents pay someone to take me on a guided tour. Regardless of having been that bored kid once myself, I was annoyed when the first child walked into Memento Mile, my Prehistoric location inTwo Point Museum.
What do youmean, you don’t care about the carefully manicured rows of informational displays I just finished organizing, or the purposeful placement of the hanging amber and fake plants I arranged around my fossils? You just want to go play on the dinosaur playground at the back of the museum, and grab a cool plushie on your way out the door? Yeah, actually, that tracks. Enjoy my Interactive Display on fossils, sport.
Several Themes, Dozens Of Patrons, Hours Of Fun
Two Point Museum, the third management title from Two Point Studio after Two Point Hospital andTwo Point Campus, tasks you with operating a series of five museums throughout the campaign mode. You’ve got standard museum topics like Prehistory that focuses on fossils, Science museums exploring human advancement, or Marine Life aquariums with huge tanks and conservational breeding projects in the works. But have you ever wanted to plan outer space expeditions and collect exhibits from among the stars, orsend teams into the netherworldto bring back human spirits that take up residence in your supernatural museum that was once a hotel very much like the one in The Shining? Well, do I have the game for you.
Two Point titles are renowned for their absurdist sense of humor layered carefully into the detailed work that goes into running a colossal network of specialized locales, and Two Point Museum carries that torch gallantly into the third entry with the silly names, goofy visuals, and occasional sassy audio message over the PA.
Your Marine Life museum serves as the bridge between modern society and the long-lost city of Wetlantis, where you’ll house all kinds of oddball fish from the Clown Fish in face paint with red noses to the delectable-sounding Nigiri Fish. Back at the Prehistory museum, you’ll notice Yeti visitors coming to check out your frozen exhibits, passing fossils from creatures such as the Sharpontops and the oh-so ancient technology of fossilized floppy disks. Hopefully, if you manage to get any cavemen visitors to come through your time machine later in the game, they don’t get confused by capitalism and destroy your donation stands. On the whole, if you take your management sims with a strong dash of the giggles, Two Point Museum delivers faithfully.
As you work to satisfy guests’ wacky and assorted dreams for the perfect museum day as they pursue your comical exhibits, you’ll run the show with a strong network of oddball staff members with names like Joanna Dogflud and Archibald Casserole. While you begin with human staff, who can (and very much might) die during your expeditions and have pesky things like the need to use the toilet every now and again and pay requirements, you’ll eventually work your way up to engineering robotic staff members. It’s harder for thieves tomake off with your priceless findswhen your security guards are literal supercomputers.
Intricate Ideas Come With A Steep Learning Curve
At first, like Hospital and Campus before it, the sheer amount of information to take in at the start of Two Point Museum can be daunting.You control everythingfrom the staff hiring process to the museum layout to the expeditions the team goes on to ticket prices and more - when they tell you you’re managing museums in this title, they’re not lying. Having dabbled with both previous games, I still found myself grateful for the in-depth tutorials as I began the campaign mode.
One of the more exciting additions from the other Two Point games is the level of minute creative control you’re given over every location. We’ve got things like one-way doors to herd guests in specific directions, custom decorations, and you’ve got access to a variety of flooring and wallpapers, with custom-color for plenty of items around the museum. Looking to make Wailon Lodge even spookier? Recolor all the furniture in shades of black and red to amp up the ambiance. Like that jellyfish lamp at Passwater Cove? Sweet, buy a few in every shade of every color your little heart desires.
In fact, it was in getting a little wild with my decorations that I encountered a game-breaking bug. After discovering my first few exhibits for Wailon Lodge, I went to load into Two Point Museum one morning to find the game absolutely blocking me out of campaign mode. Sandbox was operating as intended, but trying to load into the campaign crashed my game every time. After sending my save file off to the developers, they realized it was the code for a decorative plant that had rendered the game completely unplayable. The problem was fixed, but a plant hard-locking me out of my campaign museums for an entire weekend was limiting, to say the least.
With a launch date approaching and a review yet to write, I spent the time messing with the sandbox mode for the first time. Every single museum, Place of Interest, exhibit, upgrade, and more is available right from the start (rather than being unlocked as in the campaign), and seeing it all in front of me at once was overwhelming. I felt immensely grateful for the knowledge I’d brought over from the campaign, because everything is on the table all at once off the top, which is a blessing and a curse depending on your gameplay style. For example, I had a plethora of fish, but no clue how to feed them - I skipped the Marine Life museum in favor of the Supernatural one in campaign. If you’re anything like me and struggle to pace yourself, it can feel like information overload.
There are tutorial steps in sandbox, too, but I felt like I went in with a leg up in my museum mission having played through the first two museums in the campaign first. I knew what each museum needed to thrive, I knew how to find the best staff members, and the information overload felt mitigated a bit by having a dozen or so hours of campaign on my curator resume. You don’t have to begin with the campaign, but it’s easier to get the lay of the land if you do. After all, it’s not often we see management sims with ideas this unique - I love a good theme park or zoo, don’t get me wrong, but we haven’t really had museum management sims before.
Once you’ve gotten the hang of running a museum, there’s so much to keep you coming back to in Two Point Museum. Even after playing for a few weeks now, I still have more fish to breed, ghosts to accommodate, Places of Interest to explore, and cavemen to stop from messing up my donation stands. My work is far from over. Now that I’m old enough to appreciate this Interactive Display on how to curate a museum that’ll keep them coming back for more, I don’t foresee myself hanging up my name badge anytime soon.
