Two Point Museum Preview – Dust off your leather elbow patches

Two Point Studios must have a thing for leather elbow patches. A stereotypical part of college and university professor dress for Two Point Campus, they’re also pretty prevalent in museum curators, I’m sure. Hence, Two Point Museum – the latest management sim that will have you reviving an ailing industry across Two Point County.

While the elbow patches remain the same, and the general gist of a management sim will be familiar, the actual workings of a museum are rather different to a hospital or university. Instead of managing a flow from diagnosis through to treatment, or trying to teach and train students to get a passing grade from one semester to another, a museum has much more in common with a theme park. You want a museum to entertain as much as it should enlighten, and there needs to be a flow through the building, taking people from exhibit to exhibit, before dumping them into a gift shop to buy all the kinds of tat that will actually pay the bills.

The thing you really need to be thinking about when designing a layout and an exhibit is the “buzz” that it provides, the excitement and interest that it instills in your guests. As wondrous as a giant prehistoric footprint might be, it means very little without a bit of info alongside, so you’ll naturally want to put up a few info stands to provide that. And since it’s a prehistoric artefact, why not dress up the environment a little to theme it around this? You will want an expert on hand to make sure that a stand is well preserved and maintained, but between the buzz it generates, the knowledge that is imparted and the general decoration that you put down, you’ll build up the environment score of an exhibit.

Oh, and don’t forget to place some donation bins for people to chuck coins into as a reward for your hard work. That’s before they get to the gift shops that you can fill with themed items to match your museum and exhibits.

The building tools are really nice and straightforward, bringing the ease of creation from the previous games, dropping items down with a handy snap to grid to keep things in order, creating blueprints for rooms, and more. There’s some really extensive colour options to let you get exactly the look that you want, and there’s greater ease for putting things on an angle with diagonal internal walls, halved floor tiles, and more.

Of course, just because they’re paying your bills doesn’t mean you can really trust visitors. Whether it’s vandals, thieves or invariably bored children getting up to no good, you’ll need to have security cameras and guards meandering around to try and make sure your exhibits are kept in good order. You can help to keep them on the rails, as it were, with tour guides that take groups through the museum in a more orderly fashion, as well.

As you would expect, there’s a great humorous twist to all of the exhibits that you can display through your museums, with Two Point Studios well known for their pun-filled games. I particularly enjoy the stone-carved computers, goofy looking dioramas, frozen prehistoric men still in their ice blocks, and even when it’s a fairly sensible looking dino skeleton, it’s got a great cartoony style. The marine life museum goes all in on oversized tentacle monsters and strange-looking fish, while the freshly announced ghost museum has you featuring spectres in Polterguest Rooms, floating furniture, haunted TVs and puppets, and more.

But where do these exhibits come from? You can’t just pop to the history shop to buy a Sharpontops skeleton, after all. This is where your hired experts come in handy, as you send them out on expeditions to dig sites and other locations to try and find those precious artefacts and bring them back. You can choose how much time and leeway they should have on these missions, whether speedy, safe or detailed in their search, and that will impact how likely they are to be successful in bringing things back. Skeletons will take multiple expeditions to find all of the parts, and each expedition location on the map will have a number of discoverable items to search for.

Should they find something, they’ll come back with a big ol’ crate for you to open up – replete with a glorious loot crate animation – and then decide where you want it to go.

That’s not the only thing that they can bring back with them, as a risk of every expedition is that experts come back with some kind of physical ailment. They could end up with sticky feet that make them tardy, they could be snake bitten, and plenty more besides. Thankfully it’s not too difficult to sort them out with recovery pods that you can place in the staff room for them to heal up in – I’d love to see some kind of tie in back to Two Point Hospital. but this might be wishful thinking.

After Hospital and Campus, Two Point Museum brings another fresh setting for the team’s fun-filled take on management games. I’ve really enjoyed the themes revealed so far, and can’t wait to see what the wider game has in store when it comes out in March.

Tags: Two Point Campus, Two Point Hospital, Two Point Mudeum