All was quiet at the County Archives Museum, until a woman erupted from one of the toilets. Clad in full scuba gear, she would have gone unnoticed as she weaved among the usual visitors – a bored gaggle of schoolchildren, tourists, and a yeti – were it not for a beady eyed security guard. The woman, it turns out, was a member of an infamous crime syndicate, renowned for breaking into museums, stealing priceless exhibits and slipping back into the sewers like a well-remunerated goldfish. As my security guard tackled the thief, the museum’s prehistory expert neatly sidestepped the fray and departed for a far-flung corner of the Earth, soon to return with a prized relic of the ancient world. Burglars get caught; museums just hire better qualified thieves and send them on expeditions.
This is the kind of whimsical satire that Two Point Studios trades on, making delightful and irreverent management games that poke fun at very serious establishments: hospitals, universities, and now museums. Here, as the curator of the county’s timeworn institutions, you must protect profit first and history second. Easier said than done when there’s so much to manage: you must hire experts to source and maintain exhibits, assistants to run front-of-house, janitors to scrape stubborn substances from floors, and security guards to handle donations and play whack-a-mole with criminals.
Tour routes must be carefully plotted and decorated to impress, thus generating “buzz” and convincing visitors to make a donation. Different visitor types like different things: sage professors crave knowledge from well-placed information stands, while hyperactive children just want something that goes beep. To please pint-sized punters, you need to research and build kid-friendly interactive displays in the workshop, paying for the materials through any fundraising means necessary, whether that be loans, gift-shop sales, or advertising deals with local businesses. It’s a beautifully detailed operation that suggests the developers have paid close attention to human nature, and how to mirror it in an intriguing game-loop.
You can imagine that the curators at the British Museum scratch their heads over the same challenges (save the scuba thieves). Some visitors barrel straight through, pausing just long enough to take a selfie with the most popular exhibit, while others will spend hours in the gift shop. Two Point does a spectacular job of simulating the challenge of satisfying diverse crowds … despite the fact that here, your audience includes literal clowns.
Museum themes range from the expected – prehistoric, aquatic, botanical – to the outlandish – haunted, extraterrestrial, apocalyptic. Previous instalments in the Two Point series forced your institutions to stay siloed (it would have been odd, after all, for a sports university to install a wizarding magic department). But the very nature of museums requires a joyful mishmash of curiosities, allowing you to build wildly varied exhibits across unique locations. The aquarium, for instance, offers expeditions that yield the prehistoric bones of sea creatures, or cursed booty from creepy sunken pirate ships. This means your collection stays useful, rather than languishing in a forgotten inventory menu, and progression feels consistently rewarding.
This is easily the best-looking Two Point game yet, even the simple act of placing objects has been improved, with priceless artefacts wobbling precariously as you move them. Floors gleam with the reflections of those walking across them, shadows slant dramatically through windows, and vending machines cast an almost heavenly glow. This new lighting enhances Two Point’s signature cartoonish style, preserving its charm while elevating the spectacle. A hallmark of any great management game is empowering the player to create something that boasts form and function.
“Prehistoric items have been here for thousands of years,” announces the museum’s public address system. “Same,” you may think, as you adjust the colours of your gift shop counter to match your new tiles. Yet, as you step back to admire the result, not a second feels wasted. Two Point Museum takes all the lessons from the previous games and builds on them to make a thoughtful and hugely entertaining contribution to the management sim genre.
