Two Point Museum’s Perfect Business Sim Gameplay Loop Will Consume My Life

Key Takeaways

• Two Point Museum enhances the classic gameplay loop, focusing on profitable exhibits and facilities.
• Explore exhibit themes like Pre-History and Ghostology, each with unique challenges and rewards.
• The game encourages players to revisit levels with new objectives, features, and exhibits for extended gameplay.

The more I play Two Point Museum, the more I’m convinced that it’s the new series peak. It maintains all the classic Two Point humour and wackiness we know and love, but it takes us to an exciting new museum setting, and Through the addition of new features, the Two Point studios team has perfected the business sim gameplay loop.

Perfecting The Two Point Gameplay Loop

If you played Two Point Hospital, you know the gameplay loop was fairly simple. Patients came in, you diagnosed them, you (hopefully) cured them, and you sent them on their way, while raking in the big bucks. Campus was an interesting way to branch out, but in some ways muddied this gameplay loop a little in the process. Students were in your schools for far longer and so you had to balance student needs alongside staff and campus requirements, which split your focus.

Museum returns us to a purer business sim loop. People visit your museum, you try to make as much money from them as you can by having the best exhibits and facilities possible, and then they leave. Job done. You use the money to improve your museum, all while you rinse and repeat the loop of visitors to ensure a steady cash flow on your way to museum greatness.

But there is even more depth to your museum than first meets the eye. Exhibits can be improved upon in different ways, such as fulfilling requirements of being close to specific decorations, exhibits, or other tasks such as renaming the exhibit (which was the case for the Haunted Doll). Knowledge given by panels and exhibits can also be increased using Deconstructors,which break down exhibits to learn more about them.

Then there are the children. Children are a law unto themselves in the museum. They’re not impressed by dusty old bones or boring knowledge panels. They want fun. That’s where you use your Workshop to create more interactive exhibits for them, such as climbable dinosaurs, or a giant musical fish.

There are also extra facilities, such as stores, where you can choose which gifts to sell and select themed items to match your exhibits. Get those kids in dinosaur onesies or sell some stuffed toy fish. You can also accept advertising and partnership deals to earn some extra cash, meaning you might have to place a poster in your museum, or sell a range of soft toy Cheesy Gubbins.

I have become completely obsessed with Museum’s gacha/collecting elements. The way you unlock new exhibits is by sending experts out into the world on different expeditions, and on their return, you obtain a crate to open. Each specific expedition has a variety of potential rewards, so this is where the gacha element comes into play. Some exhibits have multiple pieces, such as skeletons, meaning you’ll need to complete multiple expeditions to collect all the relevant pieces.

This collection element has me utterly hooked. I’ll stay in levels long past completing objectives because I want to collect as much as I can, finding all the pieces of any exhibits I may have, and uncovering every possible reward I can get from every area I have access to, or even trying to find the same item again but of a higher quality. Adding in a collection element to Two Point is pure genius.

But getting waylaid by collecting every exhibit item so you can be the best museum curator like no one ever was is only one way that Museum encourages players to make the most of each level. Whereas in previous games you’d complete all objectives, move onto the next level, and never think of the previous levels again, Museum encourages players to return to previously completed levels by adding in new objectives and features.

For example, once you complete all the objectives in your first museum, you move onto the next one but, later on, new objectives will be added to that first museum. Returning to complete these new objectives will unlock new features, such as museum tours and Deconstructors.

By the time you return, you’ve unlocked a whole new range of exhibits and decorations too, so you then find yourself tinkering away with your museum once more and perfecting every last inch of it. It’s a very clever way to get more mileage out of each level and ensure that players get attached to their creations more, as they’re no longer abandoning them and just burning through levels to never look back.

Getting To Grips With New Exhibit Themes

During my first hands on with Two Point Museum, I only had access to the Pre-History exhibit theme, which involves all the fossils, dinosaur skeletons, and frozen cavemen you could ever want. However, in this latest preview, I had access to Pre-History, Marine Life, Botany, and Ghostology, and the range in exhibit themes and how they work emphasises just how much love and hard work the team is pouring into this newest entry.

The basics are the same: you place an exhibit, it garners varying levels of interest depending on the item and how much buzz it generates, if you’ve installed perks, and how much decoration you have around it. But, each theme has different layers of gameplay attached to it. For example, when it comes to the frozen Pre-History items, if you don’t keep them refrigerated, they’ll melt. This means cave men will come to life and cause havoc in your museum or frozen bees might escape and terrorise your guests. And there’s no restoring these exhibits once they’ve melted. You’ve been warned.

Marine Life ups the antes by adding aquariums to your museum. The first Marine Life level you encounter also has Atlantis-style relics on display, adding a nice mythical element to your museum. Decorating aquariums is a whole other level of creativeness, especially as different fish like or dislike certain items or other fish being in their tank.

You’ll need different aquariums fitted to specific climates too, such as one for tropical fish, and you’ll need to feed them and keep the temperature in that sweet spot. When you go out to find exhibits, you’ll eventually unlock the ability to craft nets in the workshop to catch multiple fish during one expedition. And yes, the fish can die. I tried it so you don’t have to.

Yes, they float up to the top of the tank when they die. You can sell them to get rid of them. Weirdly, they’re still worth money when dead.

Ghostology was by far my favourite. I loved the gloomier, gothic setting of this museum level and this was the level I spent the most time on by far, largely because I was committed to collecting all of the animatronic band mates for the Roach Burger Animatronics exhibit. You’ve got the sort of haunted items you’d expect, spooky dolls, cursed figures, even a haunted toilet, but there’s an aspect I didn’t expect: active ghosts.

Ghosts are kind of like fish. If you have a ghost room to keep them in, they desire specific decorations in the room and there are a range of ghost types you can discover and place together. Ghosts can be found on expeditions, or sometimes in the museum level itself. Who ya gonna call? No one. It’s your job to catch them using the experts on your team.

Finally, the Botany exhibits were weird, wild, and came with their own set of requirements. These need to be kept hot and humid as they’re from a tropical climate, and your experts also need to keep them watered. Failing to do so means the plants will die, and once more, any ruined exhibits can’t be restored. If you want to replace them, you’ll have to try your luck at sending an expedition out again.

I had 24 hours with Two Point Museum, and while I played each level available and completed all the objectives, I was far from doing everything I wanted to do. It’s all too easy to spend hours and hours perfecting and decorating your museum, completing collections, trying to get higher quality exhibits, and generally just messing around and having fun, such as killing a fish or two and melting a cave man just to see what happens.

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