“If, two months ago, you’d been told to close your eyes and imagine a Two Point game about a museum, you’d come up with something at least 85% identical to Two Point Museum,” wrote James, previewingishly. After spending a few hours with a beefier build, I’m inclined to agree. But, much like Campus (which gave you real incentive to actually run a smooth operation that genuinely benefited the lazy ratbags stinking up your dorm halls) it’s that extra 15% that really makes all the difference.
James already covered the new exhibits system, and how acquiring and displaying them changes the way you run things, but such globetrotting adventures do little to rattle the pulse of a world-weary mapmuncher like me. No, what I’m actually most excited for when Two Point Museum releases next February is possibly the most ostensibly uninteresting feature added to any videogame ever – partition walls.
Broadly, these partition walls – alongside partition ropes, one-way entrances and staff-only doors – allow you to customise your interiors and direct foot traffic through your museum in a far more personalised and granular way than before. If you’re anything like me, I’m sure you’re already imagining just how crunchy and elaborate the possibilities these additions open up are. For lead designer Luke Finlay-Maxwell, putting more emphasis on how you Museum lets you tailor your guest experience was indeed a priority. He said “guest experience”, anyway. I prefer to think of it as a nefarious act of profit-driven puppeteering.
“You can use these partition walls to sort of create bottlenecks for thieves, or you can create back rooms for staff,” Finlay-Maxwell says. “One of the big things we’ve found is you can guide your guests through this one-way route, but you can make sure that your staff are always just a door away from where they need to be. And the balance there is allowing the guests to have a full, solid view of the museum, but making sure that your staff can get to everywhere as quickly as possible if they need to – to restore exhibits, catch thieves, or man a ticket desk.”
“It’s a lot less room-based compared to Hospital and Campus,” says design director Ben Huskins. “It’s much more about that corridor space and being able to put down partition walls at all sorts of different angles, and decide exactly how you want to section up the space, and how you want to channel guests through and shape their journey.”
There are other advantages to having this sort of control over foot traffic, too, Finlay-Maxwell says. “We’ve tried to build a lot of the systems so that they can work emergently with each other”. He uses the example of the customisable gift shop items you’ll be able to match to whatever theme your museum is – aquatic onesies or dinosaur plushies. “So for example, in the gift shop, guests will buy the themes of items if they’ve seen them. The more they’ve seen of a theme, the more of those types of items they will buy.”
“We have some players who really focus on the management aspect, and some that really focus on the decoration aspect,” he continues. “With Museum, it’s making sure that both those players have so much to do in the game”. One of those decoration features it took me a while to notice, but made me very happy when I spotted it, was the ability to customise the colour of various items. Like several of Museum’s new features, the inspiration here came from the series’ modding community.
“We read everything,” says executive producer Jo Koehler. “All the reviews, the forum posts, and we always want to make sure that we’re catering to what our players want. The colour picker, for example. No one specifically asked for that, but we saw in our Campus modding, a lot of the mods were colour variants of the items we have. And we thought ‘ah, we can allow that’. Actually, that’s been one of my favorite new features in Museum. We’re always listening to our players and making sure that we’re kind of evolving.”
“If you’re in charge of a museum, you’re thinking about: how do I make this exhibition space look amazing?” Huskins says. “Ultimately, I’m trying to impress the guests coming through. So [Museum] felt like a great opportunity for us to really push those tools and allow people to do things that they weren’t able to do before – like making [building] much more freeform.”
One of Musuem’s more sizable new features is those exhibitions. You can’t just buy new dinosaur fossils and rare fish – you’ll have to send teams of experts off to the far-flung corners of the globe to scoop them up. It’s slightly disappointing, then, that Two Point seem to have opted to largely gloss over the stolen elephant statue in the room.
“Ultimately, you know, it’s a light-hearted management sim game,” says Huskins, when I ask if the Bullfrog tradition of sardonic commentary we saw in Hospital would make its way the new setting – one that features a very British museum nabbing treasures from across the globe. It’s too early to say whether the full game will acknowledge this, of course, but it does seem like a worthy target for the series’ self-depreciating humour at least. Fingers cross Two Point haven’t misplaced their teeth amongst all those ancient bones.
What’s definitely here, anyway, is Two Point’s sense of whimsy. The third demo stage I played involved catching ghosts and housing them in tanks, alongside era-appropriate knicknacks to stop them getting too aggravated and busting out. That whimsy extends to a new focus on the smaller stories and dilemmas you’ll face whilst hunting down those exhibitions, too.
“Because you revisit your museums, you spend a lot more time with your staff,” says Finlay-Maxwell. “Because of that, we kind of want to look at the trait system and how staff are in the long run, because you’re going to become more attached to them, and we have a bigger potential for more stories”. He gives the example of the traits that staff you send on exhibitions can pick up, and how they can end up spinning personalised, emergent tales for your workers. “Oh yeah, that’s Jerry, and he’s a toilet terror, but you know, he risked his life at this volcano. I’m proud of him because he got me that cool fossil.”
You know what, Jerry? I’m proud of you too. Two Point Museum releases on the 4th of March, 2025.