I’m not really the kind of person to go visit a museum when on a rare holiday. Blame the proliferation of information and imagery across the internet, but the slow, meandering nature of many museums doesn’t really do it for me. That said, museums are still a hugely important part of modern society, collecting, preserving and seeking to educate visitors in everything from dinosaurs to modern science, from steam trains to model trains, and from chocolates to sex toys and medieval torture devices (possibly at the same museum). There’s a museum for pretty much everything.
Two Point Museum somehow manages to come up with some new things that you definitely won’t see in a museum outside of Two Point County.
Sure, Two Point Museum still dabbles in the familiar realms of ancient history or aquatic life, but there’s more than a few funny twists on these themes with the exhibits you’ll get to display, and that’s before you head to a spooky mansion and host spectral beings and haunted dolls as attractions.
We got to go hands on with the opening few hours of the game and the first handful of museums and themes. Starting off with Prehistory, we were plonking funky looking dinosaur skeletons and fossils right next to gigantic footprints, stone-carved floppy disks and ancient beehives and fridge freezers still encased in the ice block they were found in.
Then it was off to the coast and the Marine Life museum, setting up water tanks for the very literally named sea life that we could dredge up from the ocean where Wetlantis used to exist. Think Catfish, Clownfish, Tigerfish, and you’ll know exactly the baseline punning that Two Point Studio has got up to here. Taking a leaf out of Planet Zoo’s book, marine life needs their water tanks to match their specific requirement, such as having certain temperature ranges, amount of foliage, and more to get them into their happiness sweet spot and increase the Buzz level.
But then there’s the spookily haunted mansion of Wailon Lodge. There’s a menagerie of haunted horrors here that will bring punters through looking for a frighteningly informative time, showing them spooky mannequins and dolls, letting them peep through one-way mirrors at Industrial Age Spirits, who you’ve set up in poltergeist-friendly Polterguest Rooms to (un)live out their days with period appropriate furniture and entertainment.
Get things wrong with an exhibit, and fail to have enough of the right type of experts around to maintain them, and things can get out of hand. Frozen exhibits can melt, releasing a swarm of prehistoric bees and fridge contents out into your museum, or spirits can become restless, their Peace level lowering to zero until they break out of their room and terrorise your visitors. In practice, it doesn’t take too much to keep things in check to start off.
You’re free to build out your museum pretty much however you like, but there’s a few key things to consider when placing your exhibits. You want to get the theme right, decorate those prehistoric footprints with faux tusks poking out of the floor, jungle-like walls and shrubs to really get across the right vibe. Every item will also need to be in rough proximity to an info board of some kind, and the environment and amount of information combined will help to raise the Buzz level of an exhibit, increasing the likelihood that a visitor will chuck a few extra coins into one of the many, many donation bins that you scatter around the building.
But where do you get those exhibits? Filling out your museums requires you to hire experts and send them out into the field, visiting dig sites, hopping on boats, and even stepping foot into the Netherworldto find and bring back exhibits. An expedition needs you to send out an expert, perhaps accompanied by other staff members, and with a chance that various event types and conditions will occur – potentially seeing them bring back an ailment like sticky feet. Higher levelled staff will have a better time of it, they could be trained in survival skills to help in more exotic locales, and you can send them packing with items to help cancel out the risk of coming back poorly, or boost their XP.
It’s a neat meta game that you will funnel so much of your museum’s cash into, gradually unlocking sites across a broader map of the world, each with different potential finds. There’s certain narrative blockers to overcome, and the potential that you’ll have to make a decision at a key juncture as well. And it all builds up to the loot box pastiche of an exhibit reveal, the wooden crate bouncing around on screen before bursting open in a glorious light show to reveal what’s inside.
But your experts can’t just go gallivanting around the world on adventures – who do they think they are, Indiana Jones or something? – they have to ensure that the things that belong in the museum stay in good condition, and also do their best to teach the eager museum-goers about the exhibits. Guided tours are where they go face to face with the uninformed masses, and you have to curate a little tour with stops at a bunch of your exhibits, checking them off as though you were creating a bus route in a city builder. You’ve got to balance the length of the tour with the most exciting exhibits and cohesive theme, with the goal at the end to, once again, encourage more donations.
Oh, and don’t forget to put in a gift shop!
It doesn’t take too long before you start to appreciate the layers of management sim that will feature in Two Point Museum. The game eases you in with the more thematic ideas, but then you start to see the familiar elements of staff training rooms, where you can boost their specialisation or traits for expeditions, research rooms that will break down finds to help increase your understanding of a particular theme, but then there’s new twists like a workshop to let a trained janitor put together an interactive display that’s engineered to keep the bogey-producing rapscallions that are the youth of the day entertained and distract them from clambering over the actual exhibits!
Once you’ve unlocked a new museum, hired the right experts and opened up new discovery sites, you’ll be able to revisit previous levels and bring all of those unlocks with you. Of course you can open up a new wing with a completely different theme, but there’s also some finds that will blend between them, such as the Swim Reaper mixing both Marine and Supernatural, of the Exterrogator an oversized aquatic skeleton to mix Prehistory and Marine.
This is shaping up to be the most customisable Two Point game yet from a visual and layout perspective, with things like diagonal walls and floor tile quarters letting you create the kind of flowing floorplans that IKEA would be proud of. It can be a little bit fussy, though, as this is bolted into the game alongside the regular style of room – for staff rooms, gift shops, lavatories and the like – and those are still stuck to the square grid, which didn’t always want to mesh together with the new walls and entrances quite right. Hopefully Two Point Studios can round off some rougher edges here before launch next March.
But on the whole, I had a lovely time visiting the museums of Two Point County. There’s the cheeky, pun-laden, irreverent Two Point humour throughout, and this is a great twist on the studio’s brand of management sim that offers something really quite different to both the rest of the genre and their first two games.
