It’s always fun to brainstorm what the next game in the Two Point Series might be. Movie Studio? City Zoo? Port Authority Terminal? Yeah, it’s none of those. Following on from the success of Hospital and Campus, Sega and Two Point Studios have unveiled Two Point Museum, which will enable players to curate and showcase historical exhibits to the delight of semi-feral school kids.
The first step in running a successful museum is coming up with things to put on display, and to make that happen you’ll dispatch teams of experts to find rare artifacts and bring ’em back. As your intrepid adventurers continue to explore, they’ll unlock new locations containing ever-rarer finds from throughout history, all of which can be organized and displayed to keep your visitors happy—and, more importantly, keep them coming back. Because in the end, it’s all about keeping the money flowing: Guided tours, highlight exhibits, a well-stocked gift shop, and “ample toilets” are all vital to ensuring success.
Beyond the basics of museum administration, you’ll also have to deal with unexpected Two Point-style problems, ranging from busloads of rowdy children to vandals, thieves, and “keeping frozen cavemen on ice.” Apparently that’s not just a visual gag for the trailer.
The previous Two Point games are very good: Hospital and Campus are engaging management sims with a healthy dose of unpredictable silliness, and Two Point Museum will clearly take a similar approach. But it also promises “deeper customization options” than its predecessors, and expanded gameplay via those artifact expeditions: Design director Ben Huskins told Eurogamer that expeditions will add a layer of storytelling and strategy because players will have to manage who to send off on the hunt, who to keep back to run the museum, and how to deal with the not-always-ideal stuff they bring back.
Some aspects of Two Point Museum are “grounded in reality,” Huskins told the site, but whether that reality will include any acknowledgement of (or clever swipes at) the problematic aspects of real-world museums—the British Museum, for instance, is facing growing pressure to return artifacts taken from other countries during the British colonial era—remains to be seen. As a comedic sim, Two Point Museum obviously isn’t going to be in a position to tackle the issue head-on, but it could for instance offer options for giving items back to their original owners, with penalties of some sort—lower star ratings, maybe—for those who refuse. Maybe it’s all a bit too thorny for a game of this type—perhaps just having the occasional masked idiot show up to throw some Chef Boyardee on Old Master will be sufficient in that regard.
Two Point Museum doesn’t have a release date yet, but more information on that front is expected soon. For now, it’s available for wishlisting on Steam.
