How Two Point Studios Created Unique Museum Exhibit Themes

Key Takeaways

• Two Point Museum will feature diverse museum themes with unique gameplay twists and mechanics.
• Marine Life has been the most challenging theme to implement due to the complexity of fish behavior.
• The game encourages players to invest time in decorating and customizing their museums for a unique experience.

The last time I spoke with Two Point Studios, it was hot off the heels of playing Two Point Museum for the very first time. Now, I’ve sampled an extended preview with far more freedom, and once again caught up with design director Ben Huskins, executive producer Jo Koehler, and design lead Luke Finlay-Maxwell to pick their brains about everything I experienced.

How The Team Came Up With Different Exhibits

During this latest preview, I experienced the Pre-History, Marine Life, Botany, and Ghostology museum themes, but the Two Point team teases that it has more exhibit themes that it’ll be announcing in the run up to launch. While they couldn’t give me any clues or even a rough number on how many themes in total there will be, they did promise that they’re “just as big as the ones we’ve seen already” and that “they’ve all got their own USP, they’ve all got different mechanics.”

“They’ve all got their own gameplay twists,” Huskins says. “So we’re very much keen to make sure that each new set of things you encounter and each new map you find actually comes with a whole new set of things to think about.”

Of the four exhibit themes we know, the team tells me that Marine Life has been the most challenging to put into practice, with Finlay-Maxwell saying it “was a huge undertaking from the start” to get the fish to work well within the aquariums as they have subtle behaviours, such as fish of the same species swimming together in schools.

“There was loads of research done into fish locomotion by one of the programmers,” Koehler explains, before Finlay-Maxwell quickly adds, “Me.” The team laughs at the revelation, with Huskins asking, “Were you like reading academic papers on fish locomotion?”

“I was, yeah,” Finally-Maxwell chuckles, “Like box fish versus salmon and how the back moves and all that kind of stuff. It was a lot.”

The team tells me the Marine Life theme expanded to be “bigger than we initially expected” as they wanted to keep pushing the idea and perfect the fish tank feeling. The aquarium features I saw during this preview were just the tip of the iceberg, as they promise there is even more to be unlocked as you progress.“It felt like a really good opportunity for the decorative side of things, because the tanks look amazing with the lighting,” Koehler says.

Favourite Themes

When asked which theme they are most proud of, at least of the ones we’ve seen so far, Finally-Maxwell unsurprisingly says Marine Life, but mentions it’s particularly interesting to see players get attached to fish after naming them. Huskins chooses Botany as his favourite theme, “Some of [the exhibits] are really interesting or make me laugh.” For example, there’s a clown plant that turns visitors into plants, and during the latest trailer we saw the giant carnivorous plant that grabs people, chews them up, and spits them back out.

Finlay-Maxwell explains that Botany was the first perishable exhibit theme the team came up with, as the plants will wilt and die if players don’t take care of them with temperature and watering. “It was the first time, design-wise, we were like, ‘Well, what happens if they die?’ Because they were before the fish, right? It felt a lot more special, when you had to maintain it. And then it was like, ‘Oh, maybe we should do fish. Maybe we should do other things that can perish.’”

My favourite theme was Ghostology, in fact I spent ages going on the same expedition so that I could collect all the pieces of the Roach Burger Animatronics band. While I did receive some of the non-band pieces during my collecting spree, I never received any duplicate band pieces (at least, not until I had completed the whole band), which made me wonder how random the gacha element of retrieving exhibits from expeditions was.

“We do bias the numbers a bit,” Huskins says. “Basically, we’re sort of biasing stuff in the player’s favour when it comes to the random number generator, just to kind of make it fun.” with Finlay Maxwell adding “Especially with the collection stuff, the focus is less on frustration.”

The team tells me that even with their internal playthroughs, they’re only just getting to the point where people have collected every single exhibit. “Ten you’re thinking about, how do I find the higher quality versions of each exhibit?” Huskins says. “Because they’ve got higher buzz, and I can install perks on them. You can just keep coming back, and there’s always that extra thing that you can do, which I think is cool. “

“With the way we’ve designed the expedition maps, there will be situations where you’re just like, ‘I never even knew that exhibit existed’. There are some special ways of getting exhibits that you just have to find,” Finlay-Maxwell adds.

Huskins tells me the team looked at real world inspiration for the Ghostology exhibits. “We looked at real-world ‘cursed objects, but also just all the pop culture references, which quite a lot are based on real-world creepy dolls, or haunted toilets from history, you know? I don’t know where that one came from.”

“You were adamant,” Finlay-Maxwell chimes in. “Yeah, I was like, we’ve got to do something with the toilet,” Huskins laughs.

Creating The Perfect Two Point Game

It seems as though Two Point Studios has perfected its formula with Museum, and as much as I enjoyed both Hospital and Campus, Museum feels bigger and better in every way. “Every game we make, it always feels bigger or we’ve done more,” Koehler says. “ I think, for me, Museum is extremely exciting. It feels like the perfect game, especially decorative.”

“The level of creative control you’ve got and the level of customisation is so far beyond what we’ve done before,” Huskins tells me. But also it’s got that whole unique aspect of the expeditions and that sense of adventure and exploration, which I think really makes it feel quite unique. From early on, we realised that the game loop just kind of clicked naturally.”

There is so much for players to build on in terms of decoration and customisation on top of the core gameplay loop, with the team emphasising there are “so many layers to it”. They tell me that one of the things they’re most looking forward to about launch is seeing all the screenshots and videos of players’ museums. “Everyone does something slightly different with things like the flooring and the partition walls,” Huskins says. “Everyone just has their own take on it.”

“I don’t know if you’ve seen Gary [Carr]’s latest museum,” Koehler says. “The stuff he’s doing on the floor is amazing. It’s like floor art. It’s like little arrows that sort of guide people through the museum.”

Unlike previous Two Point games, Museum encourages players to return to previous levels. Though you can complete your objectives in your first museum and move onto others, you’re later prompted to return for more objectives and unlock more features by doing so.

“We were really keen to get people into that mindset of not seeing their museums as throwaway,” Huskins says. “Like seeing them very much as a long-term investment and getting attached to them and wanting to spend that time using all the customisation tools and finding the best exhibits because you know that you’re going to come back to it later on. It does make quite a big difference to how you approach it.”

For anyone who’s walked into a museum recently and felt pain at seeing their childhood console alongside the other antiques, I leave the team with the suggestion of creating a Video Game museum exhibit, which can be specifically tailored to Sega stuff.

Two Point Museum launches on February 27, 2025 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.