Having bounced off the last two games in what's now a fairly long-running series--Two Point Hospital (2018) and Two Point Campus (2022)--I wasn't super pumped to be sitting down with Two Point Museum. A week later I can see that my indifference was wildly misplaced; it's one of the best, if not the best management games I have ever played.
My main problem with the first two games in the series wasn't necessarily with them as games, per se, but more their setting. I found them weirdly stressful: As the custodian of a hospital and then a school, there was a duty of care, a constant pressure to get people in, make them better (or smarter) then get them out. Fail and I could get people hurt, or even killed, a level of responsibility I absolutely do not want in a relaxing "click and watch some little guys move around" video game.
Not here. Two Point Museum just wants you to give a never-ending stream of guests and customers a good time. The general public are rarely in danger, are surprisingly patient as you repair stuff around them and are basically in your museum for the same reason you are: they want to have a coffee, learn some stuff and see some cool shit. This shift in focus changes the experience entirely; it's no longer a game about care, it's a game about being a fun guy.
And that's fun! Thanks to the vibe switch, Two Point Museum feels almost Sims-like at times, because there's less emphasis on the pinpoint optimisation of your museum (though you can do that if you like) and more of a focus on creative sandboxing, designing cool exhibits, then agonising over how you're going to decorate them.
This construction side of the game is so important here because your museum runs on "buzz". You generate buzz via the quality of your exhibits, which is partly down to stuff like their rarity, but mostly down to how you style them by adding stuff like plants, information displays, lighting and speakers. There aren't hard rules you need to stick to in order to upgrade your exhibits; the game assesses you more on the quantity of stuff you add, not the quality of its placement. You can spend hours dressing up your dinosaur bones exactly how you like, and if that's how you like it, the game will reward you for it.
Beyond the positive vibes and very enjoyable sandbox/construction tools, this is also a very good management game. Its interface, combining on-screen alerts (like icons appearing over the heads of guests and staff) with a speedy set of menus, is almost frictionless; you're always alerted to the exact location and cause of a problem (or even a shortcoming) almost instantly, and solving those issues usually only takes a click or two. Not once during my entire week with this game did I ever feel lost, or wondered exactly what was causing an issue, or how I was supposed to make something better. While I know that sounds like the absolute basics of this genre, you'd be surprised--Planet Coaster 2, I'm looking at you--how many rivals can't get it right.
Well, no, I did get lost once, and that was when crimes were being committed. Two Point Museum is full of crime. It has a whole system attached to detecting and defeating it that would be more at home in a game about art heists or jewellery stores. Criminals are forever trying to break in and steal your stuff, and you have various ways of trying to stop them, from putting security guards near exhibits to building a network of cameras around the museum. But the act itself is strangely punitive; you sometimes get almost no time to react before you can lose a whole exhibit when a single thief drags an entire Stegosaurus skeleton down a toilet (don't ask) and escapes. Those things can take ages to build, so to lose them in an instant is weirdly at odds with the rest of the game's casual, fun-loving, build-whatever nature.
A game about running a modern museum and managing a diverse staff of skilled workers could also have been areas Two Point Museum tripped up, but I was pleasantly surprised by its handling of both. First, how they managed to make a whole game about museums work without once having to whistle awkwardly as we collected antiques or raided tombs is a miracle--you instead build collections based on dinosaur bones, fossils, fish, ghosts and space--which sounds weird, but once you start playing the game it really does make sense within Two Point's cartoonish universe.
And second, there aren't many games where the phrase "pay your workers" is more important. Everyone you hire can eventually be trained to be elite; as they learn more and get better at their jobs, they ask to get paid more, and you have to pay them a lot more. Unlike loads of other management games, you can't skimp here; if you don't pay them they get angry and walk, and losing your best workers can cripple your entire operation. So look after your people! Good lesson!
Two Point Museum is out now on PC, Mac, Xbox and PlayStation.
