Hands-on Preview: Two Point Museum

I couldn’t help but notice that it’s been a year since the last DLC for Two Point Campus. I figured that Two Point Studios had gone to work on the next entry in the Extended Two Point County Universe. Here it is! It’s Two Point Museum.

The Two Point games are big events for me, so I was extremely excited to get my hands on the newest locale in the county. Even if it was only briefly. I also got to talk to Executive Producer Jo Koehler and Design Director Ben Huskins to get further details on the latest management game.

Backing up, the Two Point games began with Two Point Hospital in 2018. The most basic way to describe Two Point Hospital would be to say it’s a spiritual successor to 1997’s Theme Hospital by many of its creators. It’s a bizarre parody of a privatized, for-profit health care. Two Point Campus followed it up by transplanting the premise to education. They are deep but intuitive and easy-to-learn management games.

More importantly – to me, anyway – is that the Two Point games all exist in a singular county full of hapless, impulsive puppet people.

Two Point Museum continues this approach to the management genre with another game about deterring people from learning things, but this time in a museum. You also get to plunder artifacts from out in the world, and while I hope there will be jabs at particular institutes that rob countries of important historical objects, the demo only had exhibits from the pre-history category. These are things like fossils and bones. You know, things that dinosaurs aren’t using anymore and won’t miss.

It’s a mix of familiar and new. Museums are a different kind of business, making Two Point Museum something closer to something like Roller Coaster Tycoon. You need to draw in the crowds with some popular sights before you can squeeze them for their cash. In this case it is, of course, exhibits of different types.

You gain exhibits through expeditions that you perform by sending your experts out into the world. It’s not terribly far from something like Jurassic World Evolution, but the twist here is that there’s a risk and reward to it. When you select a location to plumb for educational loot, you’re presented with a list of events that could happen, both good and bad. You can affect the likelihood of bad stuff happening but seemingly not eliminate them entirely. These can result in your experts returning injured. At least, that’s what could be seen in the demo, as experts would return with tar-covered boots that they track through the museum.

The harm of Tarry Feet can be mitigated by hiring a janitor to clean up after them and sending them to the Omni-cure in the staff lounge. Nothing too impressive, but I asked about how far this would go as the difficulty ramped up.

“We wanted expeditions to be meaningful,” Koehler told me. “It is possible for your experts to go missing… permanently.”

“We have a few different types of ailments and injuries and even getting into things like curses and things like that that you have to resolve in different ways,” Huskins added. “Not everything can be cured in that cure machine, there are some that require a bit more thought and a bit more effort and have a bigger impact on your museum when those teams come back.”

Once you have the artifacts in your building, you then have to place them accordingly. Not only does their adjacency to similar exhibits affect their popularity, but there’s a lot of decorative items that will make them more attractive. You then have to place donation boxes and information boards in their vicinity to get people to empty their pockets.

You also need to hire staff, make sure the important facilities are on site, and keep things running smoothly. Some of the artifacts you bring back are encased in ice, such as a caveman. As shown in the trailer, if you don’t maintain your exhibits, they can break down. In the caveman’s case, he can break free and escape the museum.

I asked if, once the caveman escapes, you could just put him back. I mean, it might be cruel to just re-freeze a protohuman, but one of the themes of the Two Point games is a somewhat dark lack of value for human life, especially in the face of potential profits.

“Once they’re out, they cause a little bit of chaos around the museum,” Huskins told me. “But then they want to go out and live the life they didn’t manage to live many tens of thousands of years ago.”

He says it’s a “fail state” for the exhibit, meaning you can’t get it back, which ensures you value your most important artifacts. After hearing that, I’m now wondering if the caveman will return to your museum as a guest.

Museums are a new setting for the Two Point games, but Two Point Museum still takes place in the same county. There are a lot of familiar elements to it besides the hapless, avarice-ridden citizens. The radio DJs (and “tannoy” voice) are back, which I’m happy to see. In the brief demo, I had Ricky Hawthorn as my host, as he oversaw a telethon to raise funds for Two Point Radio. I’m told that “the favorites” from previous games make their return, so if Harrison Wolff isn’t on the air, I’ll pout.

The expeditions reveal a world map around Two Point County. Previously, I thought that the county was simply in a fictional area of Britain, but the existence of a wider world implies that the whole planet might be similarly abstract. So, I asked if we’d learn where, exactly, Two Point County actually is.

“Not specifically, but we are excited to be exploring further,” Koehler said.

Huskins explained further, “We like that idea of kind of teasing the wider world and giving you little pockets of it. We didn’t want to completely define the whole world because we kind of want to leave a bit of mystery around the edges.”

On that topic, I pushed to find out if there was more lore around the Two Point games beyond just what’s explored in the games. Huskins told me, “I’m not going to claim that we’ve got Elden Ring levels of lore to Two Point County, but we do keep track of things that have come up before.”

As I mentioned, the demo for Two Point Museum was distressingly brief. It introduced many of the game’s concepts, including item placement, expeditions, staffing, and merchandising, but ended before I really got to flex my creative muscle. Or maybe I’m just complaining because I’ve been eagerly awaiting anything new from the series.

One thing that was mentioned to me that I didn’t really get to see was the new progression system. Previous Two Point games would have you build your Hospital or Campus, complete goals to reach a three-star rating, and then move on to the next level without really providing any reason to look back to your previous efforts. It’s the sticking point for a lot of people, as you need to repeat a lot of your efforts each time a new level starts, and there’s little feeling of progression or persistence.

Progression seems to primarily revolve around exhibits. Artifacts that you discover on your expeditions are added to a pool that is available in each location.

“You can mix and match what you want to have in different museums. There’s a kind of natural fit for some of them, but it’s very much up to you what you put in each of your museums,” Huskins told me.

Exploration of the world is also persistent, so you can continue discovering locations when you switch to a different location.

Huskins explained, “The way that you unlock locations is to complete objectives, and some of those objectives you can complete in the museum you’re already in, but some of those objectives really will require you to take advantage of the fact that you have built up multiple museums.”

Unfortunately, the demo didn’t give much indication of how close to completion Two Point Museum is, nor has a release window been stated. I asked – I had to – but there’s nothing to announce right now.

I may not have seen much in the demo, but I have seen the Two Point charm applied to a new setting, which is enough for me to get excited. As an established fan of the Two Point games, I’m easy to please. Mostly.

For anyone who tried Two Point Campus or Two Point Hospital and didn’t quite jive with them, there are enough improvements to Two Point Museum to take a second look. It feels closer to a tycoon game where the goal is to obtain better and better attractions and place them in an optimal way to convince people to part with their wallets. Previously, the Two Point games were more of creating a flow between rooms to get the Two Point citizens through a progressive system to either be cured or educated. 

Two Point Museum has the potential to be more engrossing for people who are looking for a more traditional managerial experience while not alienating fans of the previous two games. Personally, I can’t wait to experience more, and I hope it will wind up being worth the ticket price.