Two Point Studios has built a long and storied reputation out of producing slapstick business management games, and the studio has looked more than ready to continue that legacy with Two Point Museum. This game puts players in charge of turning boring, empty museums into bustling and active attractions. It also features a cool variety of themes, enjoyable campaign progression, and unique mechanics to play around in each of them, as well as Two Point’s trademark humor, making it another wonderful entry in the Two Point Studios occupational resumé.
Dusty relics to line your walls
In Two Point Museum’s campaign, you take over empty and/or uncared for museums that have fallen into obscurity in their counties. The first museum gives you a fossil/prehistoric/frozen age aesthetic to work with and guides you through what you need to get foot traffic going again. That said, it also acts as the suitable first steps that will lead to you being able to manage even further rundown museums in other aesthetics and the mechanics that go with them. There are a bunch of great ones, and once you have a handle on them, you can play them outright in the Sandbox Mode if you don’t want to work your way up to them in the campaign.
Of all the tutorials I’ve dealt with in Two Point games, Museum’s is the best. The prehistory museum gives a great foundation to learn about staffing, exhibit positioning and decoration, ticket and merch sales, and general museum display and business improvement. It wasn’t long before I felt fit to take on more museums and the challenges they had for me, but just because you get access to another museum doesn’t mean you’re done with a previous one. The goal is to get them all up to five-star experiences one star at a time, and each star takes ever more complicated conditions to achieve, like displaying a certain number of a certain exhibit type, making a minimum amount of positive cash flow in a month, and much more. You can also veer off the tutorial and objectives to achieve your own goals if you want.
Exhibits and the expeditions to get them are at the heart of what makes Two Point Museum uniquely fun and engaging. Every museum has its own expedition map full of places with discoveries to find. As you progress through the game and accomplish goals, you unlock new areas of the map that have unique exhibits. Some finds are even progressive multi-step events, such as when you find the head of a dinosaur skeleton and must go on further expeditions to the same area to find the rest of the skeleton. They also give awesome Buzz bonuses for your museum when completed. That said, Two Point Museum also has tons of exhibit types depending on which museum you’re working from and where they search and some of them will even require you to build rooms with special features.
I think my favorite was the Supernatural museum, Wailon Lodge. At a certain point you collect ghosts and have to build “Poltergeist Rooms” for them. They act as attractions, but you have to build the room to suit each ghost’s tastes. Some hate fire, some love beds, some do or don’t want musical decor, others do or don’t want to be around other ghosts. And if you don’t appease them, they’ll freak out and go on a rampage through your museum that will take an active staff of janitors and experts to fix. Also, you can sell any exhibit for quick cash (like when you discover repeats) and that includes ghosts. Not sure about the moral implications of such a transaction, but I had a business to run. Two Point Museum has loads of unique mechanics like this and they’re fun to organize around as you arrange your perfect collection of oddities.
If I had to take away one thing here from Two Point Museum, it would be that when everything is up and running, it’s the expeditions that hold up the game. When you unlock a new area, you don’t necessarily know what kind of exhibits you’ll get, so it’s hard to know how you want to build until you see what you’ve got. That means waiting on the expeditions to go out and come back at a lot of the museums until you figure what you’re going to display, and that stalls progress more than anything. Generally, the game gives you plenty of other things to look after, but I still found myself regularly waiting for the next exhibit to arrive so I knew how I’d proceed. It’s not too much of a pain, but it’s definitely noticeable later in the game when you have fewer things to do.
A guide will be with you shortly
Building design has always been a huge part of Two Point games, and it continues to be in Two Point Museum, perhaps more so than ever. Museums aren’t like hospitals or universities. They demand fun decoration, cohesive flow, and a wide variety of things for visitors to enjoy in a constant walk rather than a compartmented room. Two Point Museum has an absolutely huge amount of tools to make yours into a star attraction, but sometimes those tools have to be coerced to play nicely.
One of the key mechanics of Two Point games is making assigned rooms like staff break rooms and restrooms that provide basic amenities. However, you’ll often lay exhibits outside of assigned rooms in your general floor space (unless it’s something like fish that require an aquarium room or ghosts that require a poltergeist room). You also have the freedom to build walls, rope partitions, general doors, staff doors, and more to create a flow through your museum for visitors to follow. It allows for a ton of creativity, but also a bit of jank that can make things frustrating at times.
Free-build walls in Two Point Museum have a lot of collision and angle rules that can be hard to navigate. They must be straight and have rigid angles they must follow. There were numerous times where I felt I wrestled with trying to make non-rectangular rooms for fun ideas only to have a wall partition be too long, or too short, or not the right angle to fit things in. I built an assigned room next to a free-build wall full of exhibits and the game decided the free-build wall ended up with a collision issue with the assigned room and needed to be removed, so I had to reorganize the rooms around that.
While objects have a lot of freedom, too, allowing you to rotate and place them to your heart’s content, you have to be mindful of their interactive areas or the game will call out similar collision issues and force you to either move or remove them. Also, if ever there was a Two Point game where I wanted to have curved walls, this is it, but alas, I had to work in the confines of mostly grid rigidity and be careful when making anything not squared and adhered to the grid.
For all the little annoyances, I will say I’m happy to have such customizable options. You can change the flooring and wallpapers per room, set ground or hanging lighting, put in or take out windows easily, and do all sorts of fun tweaks to get the most out of your museum. I might want more out of the customization options, but I feel like this would definitely be a lesser game if we had to stick strictly to assigned rooms with assigned decoration like in past games. The customization in general space is definitely a highlight here.
I also need to give props to Two Point Radio and the overhead announcer because I think it’s the best it’s been in these games. As you manage things, relaxing music accompanies your play, often interspersed with radio programs. They generally talk about the goings-on in your museum or other parts of the Two Point County world. They’re always jokey, often fun, and even evolve as you continue to play and grow your attractions. The overhead voice is similar, but it has the added bonus of letting you know if there are any pressing issues in your museum. You’ll often have exhibits to deal with, organization and building to consider, and staff to manage, so having that extra vocal reminder in the background is a good way to keep up on the most pressing matters. If nothing is pressing, you’ll just get periodic jokes, which are also fun.
Donations are not mandatory, but are encouraged… please
Two Point Museum is, for me, the best amalgam of Two Point Studios' business management and mechanics yet. The road to five-star museums is paved with fun challenges and customization that will likely have empty spaces looking like your personal dream attraction hours in. Even when I reached one-star at Wailon Lodge, I was so proud of the haunted house maze of supernatural fascinations that I couldn’t help but stare at my work for a while before moving to the next thing. This game may have a few frustrations in waiting and free design, but it’s also full of warm moments to be proud of what you put together as the visitors enjoy your assembly, and that’s exactly what I want out of a Two Point game.
This review is based on a digital PC copy provided by the publisher. Two Point Museum comes out on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on March 4, 2025.
Two Point Museum
- Museum theming brings all sorts of unique mechanics
- Creating the flow of a museum is really fun & creative
- Two Point Radio is the best it's been
- There are tons of good customization options
- The tutorial being integrated into the first museum feels great
- Free-building has a lot of collision issues
- Waiting on expeditions slows progress down noticeably
- No building curved walls
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replyTJ Denzer posted a new article, Two Point Museum review: The silly side of archaeological administration
