When Two Point Studios launched their first game -- Two Point Hospital -- back in 2018, it successfully brought the fun tone of classic management sims like Theme Hospital to the modern age. The studio then went on to release Two Point Campus, a huge step forward that proved the team behind these games knew how to make great, original management games that didn't just play on nostalgia.
The studio's latest game, Two Point Museum, is yet another fantastic step forward as this series continues to grow in all the right areas. There aren't any major examples of museum management games, so the team had a lot of room to come up with cool original ideas, which is TPM's strongest aspect.
Unlike hospitals and schools -- where the patients and students come to you -- in a museum, you need to send your team of expert explorers out into the world to retrieve the exhibits that will draw in paying customers. It makes for a wonderful sense of discovery as you slowly uncover the game's various maps and build up your collection of exhibits, placing them around your museum in as appealing a fashion as possible to draw in guests.
The two sides play into each other as well. To unlock new locations on your exploration maps, you will need to hit certain milestones in your museum, both in terms of the number of visitors and the quality of their experience.
More than ever before, your customers feel like living people for whom you need to carefully curate an experience. Having your exhibits well-decorated increases their buzz and draws more people in, but once they're there, you must continue giving them reasons to stay. On a surface level, this means tending to their basic bodily needs, but you also need to keep them entertained and informed.
Every exhibit needs information signs nearby, as guests will stay for longer if they can gain knowledge as they go -- plus, you can spend duplicate exhibits on research which increases how much knowledge that exhibit provides and unlocks new decorations. If that wasn't enough, different kinds of guests have different needs. Kids don't want to stand around reading big paragraphs of information, so instead you need to develop interactive exhibits to keep them entertained.
These mechanics don't just aid the gameplay progression though, as they encourage creativity when designing your museum. You have all the tools you could want to customize things, and the many decorative items can be applied in just about any way you want. While you're an all-powerful being on high who looks down upon the entire building, you can create that magical experience of turning a corner and seeing a massive dinosaur skeleton looming over you as everything else in the room makes it feel like you're deep in an ancient jungle.
Combine that with tools like one-way entrances and you can create the perfect visitor experience, shepherding them through your exhibits in a specific order to maximize their knowledge and entertainment.
The exhibits themselves are bursting with creativity too. The game has six themes: Prehistoric, Botany, Marine Life, Spectral, Science and Space, and they all have unique quirks that make them fun to play around with.
Prehistoric is the most basic, but even that has some great joke exhibits, like caveman versions of modern technology that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of The Flintstones. Botany gives you a whole host of dangerous plants, several of which transform your guests into unique visitor types like vampires and clowns.
Marine Life gives you a unique challenge, as you have to house your fish in aquariums, make sure the water conditions are right for each type of fish and avoid mixing fish that will try and eat each other. Similarly, the Spectral theme sees you pull famous ghosts out of the underworld and house them in special chambers where you need to keep them entertained or risk them wreaking havoc on your visitors.
The Science theme makes you build your own contraptions that have special effects on the guests, making them great exhibits to mix in with the other themes as it can energize them or tempt them into buying things from your gift shop. Finally, the Space theme is a whole puzzle game in and of itself, as all of the exhibits require specific power modules that are created by other exhibits, so you need to carefully place them all in the right order to ensure they're all powering each other correctly.
You have to think about each scenario in a unique way. You can't settle into doing the same thing over and over to succeed, as each theme has its own foibles that you need to manage on top of the basics like keeping thieves at bay, and of course, making as much money as possible from the gift shop.
This is also the best a Two Point game has ever been paced. Rather than the star rankings being fully unlocked from the start, you'll only be able to reach a one-star museum at first before you're forced to jump to other locations and slowly expand your knowledge, unlocking new themes to play with. As you rank up, you can go back to your older museums and add to their star ratings.
You've always got objectives to work for, whether they're the main ones to rank up your museums or the smaller ones to unlock new locations to explore, and that keeps you playing for a lot longer than other management games. On top of that, because the expansion of the museum is in your hands with the exploration system, you're never just sitting around waiting for all of the numbers to tick up to fulfill your objectives, which was a problem in previous games in the series.
Two Point Museum is far and away the best game in the series and easily one of the best management games of all time. Curating a successful museum requires taking care of a web of mechanics that are all simple in isolation but affect each other in ways that force you to think about every little detail, while still giving you plenty of freedom to let your creativity shine. The exploration side of the game has you constantly excited to see what fun exhibits you'll unearth next and its ability to capture the wonder behind museums is an absolute triumph.