I genuinely hope there’s no direct correlation between the golden age of simulation games from the 90s and 00s and the current amount of people who try to milk every business venture for every dollar they possibly can. Because before you know it, you’ll have people building ultra-flammable houses and removing the doors, or building swimming pools and deleting the ladders, or even worse, roller coasters that launch all of the patrons into neighbouring theme parks.
Thankfully, the wackiness is still purely contained to the simulation games, and it seems Two Point Studios have found the winning formula when it comes to business simulation games. Opening with Two Point Hospital in 2018 which was followed up by Two Point Campus in 2022, we now get the latest instalment with Two Point Museum. Stepping into the shoes of a museum manager, you take over a blank canvas museum after the former curator, who ditched it under suspicious circumstances, ready to restore greatness to Memento Mile as you generate excitement and profit through new and interesting exhibits.
Two Point Museum takes a tried-and-true formula that has been tinkered with over the previous two instalments to allow you near-full creative control of how you want your museum to run. Control the flow of traffic with one-way entry points, create themed sections with a wide variety of partitions, and decorate each exhibition to add ‘Buzz’ with themed accessories. Your goal as the museum manager isn’t just to display pieces, you’re there to drum up sales through any means necessary and to allow your exhibitions to grow in size and stature while allowing the public to get educated and have fun doing it.
While the task ahead may seem overwhelming, you settle into a pretty good flow as you move forward, working out the best placement for information boards, or donation stands, to make sure that the patrons get exactly what they want out of each museum visit, raising your star rating and allowing you to grow and expand even further.
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First things first, you’ll need staff to work in your museum. A good combination of experts, janitors, security guards and assistants will not only improve the quality of your museum and the many roles that entail, but also allow you to upskill these staff for expeditions in order to retrieve new and exciting exhibits along the way.
Being the great business manager you are, you’ll also have to balance their pay demands and job satisfaction by making sure they aren’t overworked and have adequate break and toilet spaces. Of course once you’ve added these areas, your museum will already start feeling quite compact, and this is the biggest challenge you will face throughout the entire game – how to keep everything moving forward without dipping in quality. Once you have enough staff to ensure everything is covered, you can start sending them on expeditions, for new exhibit retrieval.
Not only do expeditions allow you to keep your museum interesting and exciting, they also bear challenges to the crew who will take part in it. Some crew have particular perks that will help navigate an event – for instance, avoiding a climbing accident or finding the perfect camping spot. These expeditions will cost you money, but see it as an investment. The more that you explore and bring back to your museum, the more patrons you can bring in, potentially raising the ticket price and receiving more donations. Just make sure that you give your staff adequate breaks upon their return, otherwise their job satisfaction will begin plummeting and you’ll have to either throw money at them to stay, or hire new staff.
With assistants to man the cash registers and ticket booths, janitors to clean and work on new exhibits, experts to continue maintenance of existing exhibits and run guided tours, and security guards to clear out the donation bins and prevent any sneaky sticky hands from pinching your hard earned exhibits, there won’t be a shortage of things to do, just make sure you keep everyone paid and happy.
Pretty quickly it becomes evident that money isn’t an endless resource, and while it may be fun to build a museum with all kinds of strange and wacky layouts, you will need to make sure there’s some form of income. Wages don’t pay themselves! Installing things like gift shops, vending machines and coffee stands, and donation bins all around the museum will increase patron spending – and the more Buzz you add to exhibits as well as info signs will make people donate even more.
In the beginning, I casually put the ticket price up a little just to get a bit more cash through the door, but people were dissatisfied with this, and so once I had more exhibits to show off, I was able to lower the price and boost my ratings even more. As your ratings rise, you unlock additional items each with different cosmetic themes; not only can you change the flooring and the wall colours, but also add different styled seating or Buzz items to really make your exhibits pop!
Progression doesn’t just mean expanding the one museum, either. You have the opportunity to open up new museums with different themes across the map as well. Museums can be built by the seaside for aquatic relics, or you can revamp a haunted house. The best part about opening up additional museums is you aren’t forced to focus on all of them at once, the game allows you to progress and take your time, ensuring you get each one right. Quirks like having tropical fish requiring a warm tank, while other fish require cold tanks make you reconsider your layouts and how you want these creatures displayed. Once you strike the right balance, you can start guided tours through each museum, increasing patronage and donations that you’ll receive, and expanding your museum even further.
It is games like Two Point Museum that allow you to think, but to do so at your own pace. There’s no mad rush to get things done unless you’ve left everything by the wayside. The game’s blend of realism and quirky humour lend itself to the golden age of sim games, from the humourous announcements and character names which gave me pleasant flashbacks to games like SimCity and Theme Hospital, the latter of which led to the creation of Two Point Hospital through the same creators.
Like its predecessors, it is clear to see that a decent level of care has gone into this game in an effort to recapture exactly what made those classic simulation games so great all the while bringing it into the modern age with punchier graphics and more processing power.
