Two Point Museum is a game about how the practicalities of life eventually force you to spend less time on the things you care about. More specifically, it’s a game where you start as an enthusiastic interior design enthusiast and gradually become a dispassionate bean counter willing to sacrifice aesthetics for profit. Feast on snacks, you swine. Feast so I may unlock a wall hanging that looks like melted cheese.
Like the studio’s previous management games, it’s about running a successful business by keeping customers and staff happy. Visitors want an educational, entertaining, clean, and attractive museum with a snack-to-piss pipeline. Staff want training, comfortable furniture, and fair pay. It’s the biggest and most interesting Two Point game, but also the most exhausting because it feels like multiple sequels in one.
It is stuffed to bursting. A good writing trick Alice Bell (RPS in peace) taught me was to cut 10% off your word count. Museum could have shaved off a similarly sized tuft of new ideas and ended up more aerodynamic and fun. Still, it buzzes with the creativity of a team let loose to be weird, ambitious, and a little reckless.
Most exhibits are single-use plonkables you dig up by sending your staff on expeditions. If they get stolen or you deconstruct them, you have to dig up more. This changes something you’d previously barely think about into a finite resource you have to plan for, like toilet paper when you first move out of your parent’s house.
Sometimes the sofas are plants that look like deck chairs, and sometimes you have to pop them in a fancy science blender so the rest of your botany bits get a bump to ‘knowledge’. That’s a secondary resource that joins the tertiary ‘buzz’ in determining how successful your Museum actually is.
For that, I need to send my staff to the jungle, preferably equipped with medical supplies or ghillie suits or the right training perks so they don’t get Audrey II’d or come back traipsing tar all over my immaculately screen-surface-reflecting marble floors.
Sometimes staff get into choose-your-own scrapes and sometimes they get possessed by ghosts which tends to make your visitors run off screaming. I love the space for emergent yarns here but the expeditions smear on the jammy micromanagement thick.
So: I’m back at my first museum trying to get a third star. The campaign is much more freeform this go around, giving you overarching objectives to increase your ‘curator class’ which you can – and sometimes must – do across multiple museum locations.
To get that star, I need to first unlock 14 expedition spots on the bone belt map. Two are behind blockers, which means I need to make two drills in my workshop, which means sending janitors on an exhibition to source the metal I need to build the drills, then sending an expert to make them in the workshop.
To get through the unlocks because I’m ultimately enjoying myself with how much novel detail is here and how Museum merges tools for creativity and efficiency so well. They bear the load of my heavy heart and I love them dearly for how transformative they are.
Those gift shops are just one added layer of thoughtful simulation. Build one selling sea-themed plushies filled with speakers blasting aquatic ambience next to an actual aquarium, and visitors suddenly very into fish throw money at you.
I’m left impressed by Two Point Museum more than I actually enjoyed playing it. It’s as thematically endearing as ever, crammed with detail, and the new design customisation features are brilliant. But I also think it should have slammed the breaks on shoving in so many new, granular systems. It doesn’t take long before you’re pulled in too many directions and distracted from the stuff that’s actually enjoyable.
“Nice bit of cheese” you think, your environmental satisfaction rising as you pass. I smile, but do not fool yourself. I am not smiling because you’re happy. I am smiling because the numbers went up.