Two Point Museum review
Supernatural history
Two Point Museum is a game about how the crushing practicalities of life eventually force you to spend less and less time on the things you truly care about.
More specifically, it's a game where I started every stage as an enthusiastic interior design sicko and gradually devolved into the sort of dispassionate bean counter who'd happily shove a snack machine next to a priceless prehistoric armadillo skeleton if it meant raking in a two percent bump to customer satisfaction. Feast on snacks, you swine. Feast so I may harvest your fulfilment to unlock a wall hanging that looks like melted cheese.
Like the studio's previous management games, it's about running a successful business by keeping customers and staff happy. Visitors want an educational, entertaining, clean and attractive museum with an adequate snack-to-piss pipeline. Staff want training, nice sofas, and good pay. It's the biggest and most interesting Two Point game but also the most exhausting, and all for the same reason: it feels like two or three sequels in one.
It is stuffed to bursting. There is melted cheese coming out of its nose and it barely notices because it rarely breathes. A good writing trick Alice Bell (RPS in peace) taught me was to go back after you'd finished and cut 10% off your word count. I think Museum could have shaved off a similarly sized tuft of new ideas and ended up a bit more aerodynamic and honestly more fun. Still, it practically buzzes with the creativity of a team let loose to be weird, ambitious, and a little reckless. Like its Tommy Gun drum of dad jokes, it's all very endearing despite eliciting some massive groans.
They're the sort of groans you do after smashing overrich fondue. I'm forced to take occasional lie-downs but I keep getting back up because there's always more to discover. Most exhibits are single-use plonkables you dig up by sending your staff on expeditions. If they get stolen or you deconstruct them, which you need to do for research, you have to dig up more. This changes something you'd previously barely think about into a finite resource you have to plan for, like toilet paper when you first move out of your parent's house. A thief nabs my fossil and the interior design sicko in me channels Ed Norton in Fight Club mourning the loss of a sofa he figured he'd never have to buy again.
Sometimes the sofas are plants that look like deck chairs, and sometimes you have to pop them in a fancy science blender so the rest of your botany bits get a bump to 'knowledge'. That's a secondary resource that joins the tertiary 'buzz' (how excited your guests are about your exhibits) in determining how successful your Museum actually is. More so than money, which buys you neither love nor deck chair plants.
For that, I need to stuff my staff in a helicopter and send them to the jungle, preferably equipped with medical supplies or ghillie suits or the right training perks so they don't get Audrey II'd or come back traipsing tar all over my immaculately screen-surface-reflecting marble floors. I spent minutes picking the right tiles for those floors! Minutes! Sometimes staff get into choose-your-own scrapes and sometimes they get possessed by ghosts which tends to make your visitors run off screaming. I love the space for emergent yarns here but the expeditions smear on the jammy micromanagement thick. I want toast but it's telling me I can't have the butter until I finish eating the plastic tub.
So: I'm back at my first museum trying to get a third star. The campaign is much more freeform this go around, giving you overarching objectives to increase your 'curator class' which you can - and sometimes must - do across multiple museum locations. But I've got a thing in these games about getting three stars because it's those objectives that really stress test the systems, offering you the more interesting and complex challenges. Maxing out one location tends to teach you the nuances.
To get that star, I need to first unlock 14 expedition spots on the bone belt map. Two are behind blockers, which means I need to make two drills in my workshop, which means sending janitors on an exhibition to source the metal I need to build the drills, then sending an expert to make them in the workshop. Even once I've got the drills, I need to train up more staff so they've got the traits to counter the events on the blocker expedition so they don't go MIA and…at this exact moment I really just want to be putting up wallpaper.
Which I can obviously do by just exiting the level and opening sandbox mode. Except sandbox mode doesn't let me use all the lovely themed bins and melted cheese decorations I've unlocked in campaign by (and here's a word I've been trying to avoid but it was going to come up eventually) grinding out knowledge points by deconstructing exhibits. Moments like this don't feel you're like curating a lovely museum as much as they feel like a tug of war between two angry Excel spreadsheets. You're the rope.
Obviously spreadsheets are part of the fun to an extent, but not when I've got a stack of appetising sofa menus I'd really like to get back to. I push through the unlocks because I'm ultimately enjoying myself with how much novel detail is here and, crucially, how Museum merges tools for creativity and efficiency so well. It's those partition walls again. They bear the load of my heavy heart and I love them dearly for how transformative they are. They're joined by partition ropes, one-way gates and staff-only doors. Now, you can funnel guests and architect beautifully complex buildings at the same time. You can make damn well sure they exit through the gift shop.
Those gift shops are just one added layer of thoughtful simulation. Build one selling sea-themed plushies filled with speakers blasting aquatic ambience (not that one, unfortunately) next to an actual aquarium, and visitors suddenly very into fish throw money at you. There are dozens of little details like this. I notice goths turning up in the museum. They're too stoic to care about entertainment or other such frippery, but they're very into knowledge. Visitors have personal ambitions for their dream day out and the goths frequently want to get turned into vampires. I have no idea what this means until I excavate blood-sucking bat plants that do just that. There are even several genres of criminal. One of them is the 'Boggymen' who sneak in through toilet bowls, which means you have to set up security cameras outside the bathroom like you're suspicious the natural history professors are honking blow in the cubicles (make your own education funding gag).
I moaned in my preview that I'd have liked to see some of the private healthcare satire in Hospital brought in here to at least lightly rib the British Museum's historical passion for nicking everyone's shit. No such luck. Campus actually had a deft ludic pivot away from the amusingly sinister theme by making the quality of the education you were selling a factor in your success. Museum basically swerves it through sheer absurdity, although there is perhaps something to unpack in the way the Cheesemoonger aliens visit you from space to see their own culture's artefacts which you nicked from space. I don't think it's necessarily Two Point's responsibility, but it does seem like a missed opportunity to have some fun at the expense of an allegedly very dodgy institution.
I'm left impressed by Two Point Museum more than I actually enjoyed playing it. It's as thematically endearing as ever (sans the above), crammed with detail, and the new design customisation features are brilliant. But I also think it should have slammed the breaks on shoving in so many new, granular systems. It doesn't take long before you're pulled in too many directions and distracted from the stuff that's actually enjoyable. It makes the game feel sludgier and more calculated and tiresome than its novel and bright coating deserves.
"Nice bit of cheese" you think, your environmental satisfaction rising as you pass. I smile, but do not fool yourself. The spirited joy of the interior design sicko I once was has long since been smothered by a morass of spreadsheets, my spark extinguished like a roman candle dropped in a swamp, eaten and digested and ejected by a crocodile, then recycled to make a clipboard. I am not smiling because you're happy. I am smiling because the numbers went up.