27-03-2025
Two Point Museum Offers A Satisfying Balance Of Relaxation And Control
Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy, Muséum national d'histoire naturelle
Two Point Studios is back with another fun management sim—this time, you get to build and maintain a series of museums filled with dinosaurs, ghosts, and alien artifacts. The game strikes a satisfying balance between relaxation and micro-management.
Two Point Studios is known for their humorous and fun management games in which players can build and run institutions like hospitals and college campuses. In their latest installment, players get to build, design, and manage a series of museums. You have to keep employees, reviewers, and guests happy while balancing your budget.
The game is filled with Two Point's signature goofy humor: the cheeky voice on the PA system frequently takes jabs at museum guests ('Bored guests are reminded that not everything has to be a party, okay?"). Your exhibits (whether ghosts or carnivorous plants) will occasionally threaten your guests. But the game's real achievement is that it provides players with a high level of complexity and control without becoming overwhelming or stressful. Not many management sims are able to walk this fine line so well.
I was surprised by how long the game stayed enjoyable and fresh: because the game keeps unlocking new locations and museum themes, it's easy to put in dozens of hours without feeling bored or maxing out.
In many management sims, I tend to gravitate toward the first few hours of play, leading me to restart my farm, theme park, or medieval village over and over again. But, in Two Point Museum, I actually enjoyed the game the longer it went on.
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While some elements of gameplay run the risk of becoming overwhelming--e.g., you need to increase your security setup to keep pace with the thieves that are constantly trying to steal exhibits--the game is exceptionally well-balanced. I never felt like I couldn't keep up with the increasing difficulty, and the ability to pause and slow down gameplay gave me the chance to make fixes and tweaks within my museum before disaster could strike.
I was impressed by Two Point's ability to provide me with a lot of details to manage (e.g., museum design, staff salaries, tour routes, exhibit upgrades) while also keeping gameplay calm. A lot of this boils down to the fact that the choices and decisions you make have fair and predictable outcomes—I never felt burned by random bad luck or bad RNG.
People play video games for a lot of different reasons; video games provide a creative outlet, a chance to connect with others, and moving stories that resonate with our personal experiences.
Management sims, like Planet Coaster, RimWorld, and Two Point Museum, offer players a sense of control—the freedom to make decisions that have reliable outcomes. If you take care of your employees, they won't quit. If you provide your guests with bathrooms, they won't pee on the floor. If only real life was so simple.
Two Point Museum, perhaps more so than the studio's previous titles, excels at creating choices that feel both meaningful and fair. In game design, meaningful choices are choices that feels weighty. Sometimes this means pulling on the player's heart strings, but not always. Spending skill points in a difficult game can feel meaningful, because these hard-earned points will greatly impact your experience. Fair choices are choices that logically connect with what happens next. In Two Point, if you hire experts, your exhibits will be better maintained. If you don't water your plants, they will die.
Research on childhood wellbeing has shown that the sense of agency and control that video games provide can be good for mental health. For kids, as well as for adults, it's important to have a safe environment to experiment with making decisions. Especially given that many of us lack, or feel that we lack, control in the real world. While video game decisions can lead to predictable outcomes, real-world choices and outcomes aren't always fair.
It can feel good when the choices we make have logical outcomes. For many reviewers and players (myself included), this sense of agency and control make Two Point Museum an entertaining, relaxing, and much needed, escape.
