While the embargo for this preview lifted today, I was provided access toTwo Point Museumon my birthday. It’s really nice of Sega and Two Point Studios to have remembered, especially since it’s one of my most anticipated games. As, truly, any game in theTwo Pointseries probably would be.
It’s not that I particularly love museums, either, though I do enjoy them, as should anyone who enjoys massaging their brain matter. I just really love theTwo Pointgames.Two Point Hospitalwas a terrific modernization of/apology for 1997’sTheme Hospital.Two Point Campuswas a deft continuation on a new subject matter. As far as management games go, Two Point Studios’ feel ripped from the golden age, which makes sense, since many of the developers there worked on some of the best ‘90s and ‘00s genre staples.
And having put nearly eight hours intoTwo Point Museum, I can readily say that it continues the level of quality that the studio is known for.
If you haven’t heard of the series, they’re management games set in a fictional county full of hapless people. Capitalism is ruinous to the poor sods, but as long as they get their fill of nutrient-deficient snack food and are able to watch the most mass-marketed movie filth, they don’t seem to mind. Not even when it results in their demise.
This entry continues the theme of institutions that money should have no factor in with museums. You’re the latest fool to be brought in to run the county’s museums. This not only means curating exhibits, but sending out even hapless-ier fools into the world to plunder treasures for you. You also need to balance the books by encouraging donations, hire staff, run a gift shop, and (much later on) prevent thieves from making off with your rightfully plundered assets.
There’s a lot of the DNA fromHospitalandCampushere, but it also feels like it leans a lot further in a Tycoon-style direction. The gameplay loop is more about acquiring better and better attractions to bring in the crowds, whereas the previous games had a focus on efficiency. You send out your expedition crews, then place whatever they bring back around your museum, ensuring that they’re appropriately decorated and amid other related exhibits. For extra profit, you’re able to also set up guided tours, which is surprisingly intuitive and easy to do.
The main complaint that I always had with the previous games is that their missions are very isolated. You’d build a hospital, complete the objectives, then move on to the next to start all over with different parameters.Campuswas very similar in this regard. It made it so that there was no need to continue after you’d gotten three stars. There was no advantage to playing on and just building the best institution possible. You’d just moved on. It could get a bit repetitive.
Two Point Museumhas a similar level structure, and certain elements are still isolated. you may’t, for example, collect artifacts in one museum and plant them in another. However, any place you unlock on the expedition map will be available elsewhere. Also, there are different types of exhibits, and you may need to have first played in another museum to be able to recruit experts for new ones. There is a lot more meta-progression overall.
More importantly, you can only progress so far in one museum until the game asks you to improve your reputation before it gives you any more tasks at that location. You can only get a single star on the first museum, and if you want to progress beyond that, you’ll need to go work on another museum for a while and complete objectives there. I’m not sure this leveling system was fully implemented in the build I played since the criteria to advance wasn’t quite clear.
However, I did get a taste for it. The preview gave me three museums to progress through, each with a different primary theme. Two of them only allowed progression to the first star, but the first museum allowed me to obtain two stars.
Even within the first museum, I got a lot of room to play. It introduced botany as a secondary exhibit type, showed off how you set up tours, and gave me the rundown on how to prevent theft. There’s a surprising amount of depth as you work to maximize the impressiveness of your collection. Celebrities will visit, school trips will invade, and people will be turned into clowns.
I found myself constantly reconfiguring my exhibits when new ones would come in or if I collected enough of a theme to create a guided tour of them. The build system is more freeform than it was in previous games. There’s still the block-based room tool for things like bathrooms and staff lounges, but you’re able to also just set up walls in the negative space between them to create an aesthetic separation between groups of exhibits. It’s not even all aesthetic, either, since placing decorations increases the buzz of the exhibits in the area, so there’s plenty of reason to not just leave everything bare walls.
It’s simple. Even if you don’t really care about aesthetic or have an eye for it, getting the buzz on your exhibits to perfect is cake. There’s usually one particular decoration that gives an exhibit extra buzz, and it’s easily viewable in the information pane. Guests don’t seem to mind cramped spaces, so you’re able to just load up.
There’s one place I’m iffy about, and that’s when it comes to studying artifacts. You eventually get the ability to research for a better understanding of the various exhibit types. You do this by just dragging a spare (preferably duplicate) exhibit into a big machine and having one of your experts work on it for a while. This destroys the exhibit but gives you experience in that field. But the reward for researching is new decorations.
New decorations are cool and everything, but each time you pass a milestone, you get one new thing. And you’re lucky if you get one milestone out of a research project. It can sometimes cost quite a bit of money to send out an expedition, but more importantly, it takes a chunk of time. So, you start off with an adequate but limited set of decorative objects, and then you need to work to get anything really cool. It’s just a little trickle of new stuff.
It’s not a bad use for your doubles whenever an expedition comes back with an artifact you already have. But selling extra displays is the best way to make up for any budgetary shortfalls. You can’t do that when you destroy them for research. The best solution is to grind out shorter, cheaper expeditions to feed the machine, and that kind of sucks. It’s mostly optional, but it’s still a nuisancesome distraction for not a lot of reward.
I’m happy to say that the DJs are back. Also, the Tannoy Voice, but I’m more interested in the DJs and ads. After all the straight hours I put in the demo, the segments have all kind of blurred together for me, but the original trio of Harrison Wolff, Sir Nigel Bickleworth, and Ricky Hawthorn all return (all voiced by Marc Silk). The student radio hosts didn’t show up in the rotation, which makes sense with the change of settings. However, a new archeologically aligned host has been added.
All the humor of the previous games is intact. Children (the first time they’ve been represented in the Two Point Universe) are represented as creatures of chaos that you need to keep distracted. The botany exhibits seem to be especially hazardous to your patrons, as many are carnivorous. The first that I received would turn people into clowns, revealing the source ofTwo Point Hospital’sJest Infection illness. Speaking of which, there are plenty of callbacks to previous games.
Another of my favorite facets that are returning is the pleading blurbs you receive when you attempt to fire employees. They’ll tell you how their life is dramatically falling apart and how this is an awful continuation of the pattern or, inversely, agree with your decision because they sucked anyway. When I spoke to the team the last time I previewedTwo Point Museum, I asked if they were afraid that this would hit differently in a climate where we’re all out of work or scared of losing our jobs. The reply was essentially that they try to be ridiculous enough that these statements would never be taken seriously, which I’m personally grateful for since the core of the humor here is that these people are dumb and must suffer.
I don’t have any major concerns aboutTwo Point Museum. At the same time, it hasn’t exceeded my expectations. It is exactly the kind of game I expected from the series. That’s not a bad thing; that’s how it should be. I mean, it would be great if it wasalsosome sort of revolutionary experience, but also somewhat unrealistic when regarding a game about running a museum.Two Point Museumis areally goodgame about running a museum, and that’s pretty rad.
At the same time, I can see the loose threads that need to be tightened before release. The preview wasn’t an uncomfortable experience, but it does need some gentle balancing. Considering we’re still a few months from release, I have no doubt that Two Point Studios is more than capable. Unfortunately, that also means I have a few months left to wait. Ugh.
Two Point Museum isplanned for releaseon July 18, 2025, for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
