We’re far from the tycoon and simulation game boom of the 2000s, where you could find a game about managing pretty much any kind of business. However, Two Point Studios and Sega have kept the spirit of that era of PC gaming alive with their games. Two Point Hospital was an excellent spiritual successor to Theme Hospital, while Two Point Campus let players build and manage universities. Now, the pair is back with Two Point Museum.
As you can probably gather from its title, Two Point Museum is all about building and managing museums. I’ve lived near both Chicago and Washington, D.C., which are great cities for museums, so I enjoy visiting them. Because of that, Two Point Museum was immediately appealing to me. While there are some ethical questions that the comedic management game will need to address, I thoroughly enjoyed what I played of Two Point Museum prior to its announcement.
My preview of Two Point Museum began right at the start of the game. I was given the keys to a completely abandoned and empty museum, and it was up to me to get it up and running again. If you’ve played Two Point Hospital or Two Point Campus, the UI and general gameplay loop of the experience will feel instantly familiar, just with a museum-focused twist. Adding furniture and designing rooms feel very intuitive, and there’s a lot of room for personal flair and customization.
Rather than building hospital beds or classrooms, you’re building up exhibits and hiring staff to sell tickets, maintain the museum’s cleanliness, collect donations, and more. To discover new exhibits to bring to the museum, players have to send some of the experts they hire on expeditions around the world. These take time to complete and can potentially injure the experts and put them out of commission for a while, so there is risk involved.
But to ensure you keep getting donations and have exhibits with a lot of buzz, you’ll constantly need to send people out on expeditions. That’s the biggest new feature that makes Two Point Museum stand out from its predecessors, although it’s also changing things up by letting children visit museums and removing the star-based level objectives that helped streamline the progression of previous games. While players will build multiple museums, Sega wants players to return to and enhance the ones they have already built with exhibits found on expeditions.
While I didn’t get to see some of those more meta-game systems in play, I had an amazing time with what I did see. I have confidence that this will be a distinctly fun management game and already see that it will retain the humor and charm of its excellent predecessors. However, I’d be remiss not to address that, esoterically, Two Point Museum could potentially feel more ethically dubious than its predecessors because of its British stylings.
Gamifying museums is a touchy subject when many in England have a reputation for housing art and other items stolen from other cultures around the world when Great Britain was a massive colonial power. Of course, Two Point’s world is entirely fictional and comedy-focused, but those feelings still stand. The demo completely circumvented addressing this concern in any way, as the items I could go on expeditions for were solely archeological items from the prehistoric era.
Hopefully, Two Point Museum will find a reasonable way to address that ethical quandary as players start to collect items from more recent history. Or maybe it can avoid addressing the subject entirely if all the exhibits players find are as funny and nonsensical as a computer made out of stone or a frozen caveman that can wreak havoc in the museum if the ice around him melts.
Two Point Museum is in development for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
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