The Bullfroggy-related universe of Two Point County continues to expand with the announcement of Two Point Museum, another irreverent management sim from developer Two Point Studios. Believe it or not, it's about museums, and the exhibits' themes include the prehistoric world. Find a trailer propped up like a freshly brushed Tugowaurus skeleton at the bottom of this paragraph.
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The basics are the same as in the previous two games: you build an attractive, maze-like space to earn cash, meeting the needs and demands of passersby. The theme is played for laughs, but underneath there's a machine ticking away, constantly ticking away metrics. Individual relics you can display include dinosaurs that need to be pieced together fossil by fossil, primitive stone computers, and giant ice cubes containing not-quite-dead cavemen. Each exhibit generates Buzz based on how well you arrange the pieces, which means more donations from visitors who range from confused schoolchildren to secretive artefact thieves.
As for how it differs from previous Two Point management sims, here are a few of the valuable nuggets of amber gleaned from Eurogamer's preview: Firstly, building is no longer confined to rooms: instead, you'll use partition walls, arches, floor materials, lighting types and decorations to structure and define each section of your museum. Hmm, I wonder if I could build another Toilet Maze? That was my best achievement in the previous Two Point Campus, which Ed enjoyed. It's a shame Two Point's in-game humour doesn't extend to exploding NPC bladders.
You'll obtain new museum artifacts by sending fossil hunters and tomb raiders to explore a gradually revealed world map. You'll also need these experts to keep the exhibits well-maintained and in good condition once they're installed. Exhibits can also be “leveled up” through research to increase their earning potential.
At the risk of sounding like a bit of a spoilsport again: it’s a slightly edgy time to be debunking a museum sim, at least in the UK. There’s a muddy reckoning going on in our cultural sector over the fact that many valuable UK museum exhibits are looted goods that should perhaps be returned to the descendants of the people we stole them from. Two Point Museum (which you can find on Steam), with its comedic ice-cream Bigfoots and literal lava lamps, isn’t really trying to, or equipped to, join that conversation. I’m not sure how the developers manage to pull it off – the difficulty lies with the concept of museums and archives in general. If you’re looking to delve into this sort of thing, I recommend Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s recent polemical book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism .