Two Point Museum review – a mighty, moreish museum management game

I played an ungodly amount of Two Point Hospital during Covid. In hindsight, there’s something slightly morbid about devoting hours to a satirical hospital management sim at the height of a global pandemic. That said, Two Point Studios has consistently proven that its brand of British snark makes for great games that will gobble up your hours, and as Two Point Campus showed a few years back, there’s ample space for the series to expand in scope. The latest installment, Two Point Museum, is my favorite yet, and not just because it once again lets me relive my real-world experience in-game.

As you may have guessed from that opener, I spent several years working in heritage, so to say I love a good museum is a bit of an understatement. If you’ve ever been to England you’ll know that we’ve got quite a lot of old stuff lying around the place – a fair amount of it not necessarily being from here. Two Point Museum takes the British spirit of discovery (and repossession) and amps it to the max, to the point that you can even yoink the spirit of someone’s dead great-great-gran from the management game‘s Netherworld – one of several themed regions to which you can mount expeditions – to flaunt to the paying masses.

However, you won’t be able to stuff the ghost of Winona (or Dorothy, or whatever meemaw’s called) into a soul-tight container until you’ve made your way sufficiently far through Two Point Museum’s campaign, which serves as a fabulous means to tutorialize core aspects of the experience in a way that isn’t overwhelming. Beginning with the prehistoric palace that is Memento Mile, you’ll need to cultivate visitor buzz, exhibit knowledge, and the almighty dollar through donations and sales across a total of five themed museum spaces.

Each museum introduces unique mechanics and new tools for you to wrap your brain around. The nautical Passwater Cove, for example, serves up aquariums that have to be tailored to fishy needs, while the barren Bungle Wasteland urges scientific advancement and a touch of botany to help solve a crisis plaguing its oasis. This all culminates in the futuristic Pebberley Heights where you can build your space-aged museum from scratch. These distinct locales are well-designed, and at no point did I feel my brain coagulate from information overload.

Key concepts not included in the main museums, such as orchestrating museum security and marketing, are instead housed in challenge stages known as ‘pop-up museums.’ They do an excellent job of drilling these important aspects of curation into you, though I will forewarn the security exhibition at the County Archives is a slightly stressful experience. Here, I was tasked to prevent various criminal syndicates with off-piste museum entry methods from looting the loot that I had legitimately looted – rude. However, no sooner had the challenge started than I found myself inundated with looters burrowing up through my freshly laid tiles or flying out from the toilets faster than I could detect them with the security I could initially afford. Crime never sleeps, nor does it pay the entry fees.

As for legitimately looting said loot, Two Point Studios has seemingly placed an even greater emphasis on the macro-level experience than ever before. While it’s still important to pander to the populace and fulfill their ‘dream visit’ criteria so they’ll part with even more of their precious pennies, I found this took more of a back seat to decking out your crib than it has in previous games; a direction I love.

This sense of impetus is achieved by having to send various staff members out on exhibitions to uncover shiny new exhibits and other elements that will bolster your museum’s collection. These range from simple artifacts such as the Honeyed Bee to more sophisticated displays requiring multiple parts to complete such as the Five Nights at Freddy’s-style Roach Burger Animatronics. Certain POIs have specific unlock criteria, making for a rewarding progression track as the hours tick by.

Some exhibits, such as the amphibious Sarcofrogus, can serve as natural transition points between museum areas; in this case, marine life, space, and the supernatural. You can even build interactive exhibits in the workshop such as the Seance Simulator to keep kids entertained, so striking a balance is crucial to your success. Building out this collection is immensely satisfying, and over time the firm thematic boundaries between areas blur, making for a seamless visitor experience.

Duplicate exhibits can be deconstructed for Enlightenment, which provides bonus knowledge to that exhibit type as well as more decorative drip. What’s more, heading to the same regional POI repeatedly improves its survey level, yielding higher-quality versions of the exhibits in its loot pool. It adds a bit of bulk to the gameplay loop, and while it quickly becomes repetitive it does fit conceptually. ‘Loot pool’ sounds like something out of a gacha game, I know, and that’s because Two Point Museum is a gacha game. Kinda.

Some say Overwatch 2 brought loot boxes back because of the risk hero shooter rival Marvel Rivals posed, but to that I say nay: Overwatch 2 brought loot boxes back because it saw Two Point Studios was about to drop. You see, each time your staff brings a goodie-filled crate back from their excursion, it will randomly roll one of the artifacts from its pool, fancy animation and all. All the dopamine of modern live service monetization without having to actually spend a dollar. What a treat. It’s things like this, the plenitude of sarcastic quips from the museum announcer, and the general weirdness of the Two Point series that keeps me coming back, and I hope this never changes.

Speaking of staff, I should rattle off the roster. My museum dream team includes intergalactically renowned space expert Noddy Hoofalump, marauding mariner Howard Rambo, and supernatural superstar Callum Bright who, ironically, has just foolishly gotten himself possessed by Winona-Dorothy and is now scaring the shit out of the visitors. Museum employees are broadly categorized as ‘Experts,’ ‘Assistants,’ ‘Security,’ and ‘Janitors.’ Certain jobs require specific training, so it’s important to have plenty of skilled labor on hand. This was certainly the case when I discovered that setting up more tour guides in shorter blocks yielded higher-quality tours, which brought a smile to my face knowing that was exactly how our volunteers liked to operate when I was in the industry.

Sadly, keeping a museum afloat can be an expensive pursuit, and you may need to trim a few jobs to balance the books, or, you know, bump up your bonus. Fortunately, with the advancement of technology, we no longer need to shell out for human labor to keep heritage ticking. At one point in Two Point Museum, I was able to start producing robot staff, though their charging station quickly caught fire and required human hands to put out – a big win for luddism.

Alternatively, you can delve into the management menus and tweak museum pricing, take out loans, or even accept lucrative sponsorship deals for all sorts of tat – I mean top-tier goods – from very reputable local businesses. You shouldn’t have to keep too close an eye on all the fancy performance graphs and charts if you’re muddling through an easy sandbox save, but if you dial up the difficulty in the free-form mode then expect to make more liberal use of these levers. To this extent the experience is multifaceted, providing an approachable entry point for those who simply want to explore alongside the possibility for more hardcore number crunching for those seeking a proper challenge.

One important facet of museum life I wish Two Point Studio leans further into in future content updates is learning and engagement. Yes, you do get random school visit events, but I would love to be able to build out dedicated educational workshop areas for structured visits (to earn me more money), as well as the chance to send experts off to fictional outreach events (to bring in more visitors… and earn me more money).

If you do find yourself with a spare wedge of cash in your coffer, then it’s time to become the interior designer you never knew you could be. At launch, Two Point Museum boasts over 300 decorations, including goofy dinosaur heads, floating model planets, and a mugshot – I mean portrait – of Winonathy that definitely wasn’t hastily taken mid-transit. I spent a large amount of my review time making little trails out of turtle decals, strategically placing candles, and ensuring each area was properly wallpapered and tiled. As any MMO player will attest, the pursuit of aesthetics trumps all, and I was more than satisfied with my options. If you’re on PC and desire more, though, you’ll be able to enjoy a (possibly) endless quantity of community-made mods from day one.

The launch experience should also bring a host of bug fixes, and I’m confident that Two Point Studios will deliver a mostly pain-free experience. At one point I encountered an issue that would crash my game as soon as I attempted to launch into one of the campaign museums. A quick email and a couple of hours later, a fix was deployed. It turns out that a plant was the root of the issue (I subjected PR to that one, so now you also have to deal with my dad humor). There are a couple of minor annoyances, though, such as wallpapering being a bit clunky and occasionally overstepping an adjoining wall, but overall the experience has been almost flawless.

Two Point Museum continues to iterate on the series’ tried and tested formula while providing more than enough new systems to keep even the most seasoned fan entertained for hours on end. Two Point Studios knows its strengths and continues to play to them; something the Yakuza series – also published by SEGA – has thrived on for the past 20 years. Whereas Campus failed to captivate me as Hospital had originally done, Museum has hooked me back in, and all it took were a few fossils and a spectral spinster. Imaginative, witty, and chuffing good fun, Two Point Museum embodies the spirit of discovery, packaged within a management game full of charm.