I don't mean to brag, but it turns out that running a museum is actually pretty easy. From the moment I sat down to play Two Point Museum at Gamescom last month, I was making a modest monthly profit, teaching the masses about a fifth of a dinosaur skeleton, and, most importantly, not causing a single employee death.
That's a very real risk in Two Point Studios' latest management sim, which not only shifts the setting from a hospital or university campus to a natural history museum, but also forces you to send out reconnaissance teams in search of new exhibits. Dig them up, bring them home, completely ignore any possibility of international disputes over ownership, and they're yours: the centerpieces around which to build your hallowed hall of learning.
This is important because, unlike the Two Point Campus, money flows in fairly easily—but it’s not as tightly tied to progress. With just a stone footprint and a few trilobites in my otherwise cavernous museum, I could generate enough money from ticket sales and donations to hire a functional staff of historians, cleaners, and receptionists, while also funding some modest decorations that would really wow the crowd. You know what people like to see? A rock. You know what people like to see Love See? A rock surrounded by two plastic palm trees.
You can't buy new attractions, though, and without them your museum will never amount to more than a sparse hall and an overly hopeful gift shop. That's where expeditions come in: one or two of your staff's history experts are sent to a distant land with orders not to return without at least a moderately interesting pile of bones. You'll gradually unlock different areas to dig around the world map, but while the loot ranges from small fossils to neatly dead dino parts, higher-level expeditions also pose more dangers for your remote team, with tar pits and animal attacks that can injure personnel or, tragically, lead to their, well, “disappearance.”
I don’t yet know how widespread these permanent losses will be, but dealing with survivors of a mission south has proven to be one of Two Point Museum’s biggest recurring challenges. One of my prehistorians returned from an expedition having fallen into a tar pit, which meant he was in a foul mood and, worse, left inky black footprints all over my beautiful floor. My cleaning crew had to tend to primitive mud stains, while a trash pile formed in the employee break room, and the culprit was so angry that he neglected his duty to maintain his prehistoric exhibits. This led to a room full of dusty fossils, unimpressed visitors, and dwindling donations, leaving me no choice but to initiate employment litigation, which I repeatedly took and left as punishment. This is just some liquefied asphalt, Phil. I need you to be a team player here.
Despite the possibility of death and displeasure (and the fact that you don’t actually see them happen—yours is too much of a desk job), these explorations also stand as Two Point Museum’s brightest moments. From outfitting the crew to the fun loot-box moment of unpacking your next exhibit, there’s an air of anticipation and excitement around them that I’ve never felt with any other specific construction or staffing assignment. They’re a reward, a milestone, and a challenge all rolled into one, and I especially love how successfully guiding the museum’s destiny simultaneously opens up more of the world map to explore—it’s as if you’re expanding beyond a single building.
Of course, it’s not all about sending staff to tar pits and murder forests. In your country, you’re tasked not only with filling the museum’s coffers, but also with generating Buzz: essentially a score for how informative and entertaining each exhibit is. A well-maintained ancient wonder, surrounded by explanatory panels and ornamentation, will keep the Buzz flowing and bring in more donations, while unfinished or unattractive sections will simply drain the money and confuse viewers.
A close relative is the Two Point Campus star system, then, although perhaps not as easy as making cheese. While piling up a ridiculous number of arcade machines in dorms is more effective at farming happiness than an elaborately furnished game room, here, lining up rows of fossils without context won’t generate the excitement needed to fund new discoveries. You really have to be thoughtful about the space, balancing displays with information boards, decorations, and tactically positioned donation boxes.
This isn’t Frostpunk 2, though. The Two Point Museum is an expectedly cheerful affair, and the finer points (like Buzz’s development) are introduced gently enough that even the most inexperienced curators can pick up on them. Naturally, there’s almost constant banter. The museum’s public address operator continues the tradition of the Two Point announcers, delivering his unconventional announcements with a very British sense of exasperation, and even small details like the staff member’s title (“Smelling face”) can raise a smile. And so can some of the rewards for discovery: one of my firsts was a fossilized floppy disk.
A more snarky perspective would focus on how these trips out of office are the only real deviations from an established routine. If you had been told two months ago to close your eyes and imagine a Two Point play about a museum, you would have come up with something that was at least 85% the same as Two Point Museum. That’s fine, I suppose; this latest take on the comedy-book balance is still making its fair share of improvements, and the expeditions are no small shake-up. It’s out March 4, 2025.