Latest news with #TwoPointStudios
Forbes
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
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. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder 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.
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Two Point Museum review – keep a cultural institution afloat with the joy of curation
All was quiet at the County Archives Museum, until a woman erupted from one of the toilets. Clad in full scuba gear, she would have gone unnoticed as she weaved among the usual visitors – a bored gaggle of schoolchildren, tourists, and a yeti – were it not for a beady eyed security guard. The woman, it turns out, was a member of an infamous crime syndicate, renowned for breaking into museums, stealing priceless exhibits and slipping back into the sewers like a well-renumerated goldfish. As my security guard tackled the thief, the museum's prehistory expert neatly sidestepped the fray and departed for a far-flung corner of the Earth, soon to return with a prized relic of the ancient world. Burglars get caught; museums just hire better qualified thieves and send them on expeditions. This is the kind of whimsical satire that Two Point Studios trades on, making delightful and irreverent management games that poke fun at very serious establishments: hospitals, universities, and now museums. Here, as the curator of the county's timeworn institutions, you must protect profit first and history second. Easier said than done when there's so much to manage: you must hire experts to source and maintain exhibits, assistants to run front-of-house, janitors to scrape stubborn substances from floors, and security guards to handle donations and play whack-a-mole with criminals. Tour routes must be carefully plotted and decorated to impress, thus generating 'buzz' and convincing visitors to make a donation. Different visitor types like different things: sage professors crave knowledge from well-placed information stands, while hyperactive children just want something that goes beep. To please pint-sized punters, you need to research and build kid-friendly interactive displays in the workshop, paying for the materials through any fundraising means necessary, whether that be loans, gift-shop sales, or advertising deals with local businesses. It's a beautifully detailed operation that suggests the developers have paid close attention to human nature, and how to mirror it in an intriguing game-loop. You can imagine that the curators atthe British Museum scratch their heads over the same challenges (save the scuba thieves). Some visitors barrel straight through, pausing just long enough to take a selfie with the most popular exhibit, while others will spend hours in the gift shop. Two Point does a spectacular job of simulating the challenge of satisfying diverse crowds … despite the fact that here, your audience includes literal clowns. Museum themes range from the expected – prehistoric, aquatic, botanical – to the outlandish – haunted, extraterrestrial, apocalyptic. Previous instalments in the Two Point series forced your institutions to stay siloed (it would have been odd, after all, for a sports university to install a wizarding magic department). But the very nature of museums requires a joyful mishmash of curiosities, allowing you to build wildly varied exhibits across unique locations. The aquarium, for instance, offers expeditions that yield the prehistoric bones of sea creatures, or cursed booty from creepy sunken pirate ships. This means your collection stays useful, rather than languishing in a forgotten inventory menu, and progression feels consistently rewarding. This is easily the best-looking Two Point game yet, even the simple act of placing objects has been improved, with priceless artefacts wobbling precariously as you move them. Floors gleam with the reflections of those walking across them, shadows slant dramatically through windows, and vending machines cast an almost heavenly glow. This new lighting enhances Two Point's signature cartoonish style, preserving its charm while elevating the spectacle. A hallmark of any great management game is empowering the player to create something that boasts form and function. 'Prehistoric items have been here for thousands of years,' announces the museum's public address system. 'Same,' you may think, as you adjust the colours of your gift shop counter to match your new tiles. Yet, as you step back to admire the result, not a second feels wasted. Two Point Museum takes all the lessons from the previous games and builds on them to make a thoughtful and hugely entertaining contribution to the management sim genre. Two Point Museum is out now; £24.99
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Two Point Museum Devs On Balancing All The Absurdity And Struggling To Spell Museum Correctly
Two Point Museum—available now on PC and consoles—is the third game in the Two Point franchise. The wacky sim series started off with Two Point Hospital in 2018 and then leaped to colleges and universities in 2022's Two Point Campus. Now, players are able to build their own wild and weird museums in Two Point Museum. And after spending over 40 hours with the game, I talked to Ben Huskins, design director at Two Point Studios, about this latest entry. We discussed why the team went with museums, how they researched the topic, the new features they are excited about and also, if they too struggle with spelling 'museum' accurately. According to Huskins, spelling museum wrong became a 'running joke' in the studio during development. 'Lead Designer Luke is a big fan of 'musuem' – we think he's trying to push for the word to be officially updated in the dictionary,' said Huskins. 'Throughout development, we've been discovering a wonderful smorgasbord of museum typos in every nook and cranny of the game. It's particularly amusing as our trailer ends up with the line 'You can't spell museum without u and me... um...' Turns out we can't spell museum full stop.' While the devs might have struggled with spelling museum right, they nailed making a great game about these places dedicated to history and knowledge. But I was curious as to why the team decided to go with museums for the third entry in the first place. While it defiantly worked out, a museum sim wouldn't have been my first choice after Campus and Hospital. According to Huskins, the team wanted to make a game about creation, exploration, and discovery, and once they started talking about museums they were 'inspired by the possibilities.' 'Something that's great about museums is they all have completely unique collections of exhibits,' said Huskins. 'We thought it would be great to allow players to build up their own unique collections, with every player finding different things. The expedition system felt like it would give us this wonderful sense of adventure, allowing you to choose where you want to explore, and then adding that sense of excitement and anticipation about what you might discover. Then, as your collection grows, we wanted you to have complete creative freedom to decide how to lay out your museum, and to craft an awe-inspiring and educational experience for visitors.' And while the museums you build in Two Point are filled with strange and cartoonish exhibits, like giant man-eating plants and ghosts, the team still did a lot of research to figure out how real museums work. 'We spoke to several people who work in museums. We even got a few behind-the-scenes tours, which were amazing,' explained Huskins. 'There are so many different roles involved in running a museum, everything from the people designing the exhibition spaces to the technicians looking after the exhibits. There was no way we could represent them all in the game, but there are so many little features we added based on these conversations.' For example, the director told me that staff-only doors were one such feature they added based on museum research. They also discovered that many museums in the real world categorize visitors in to 'various personas' such as thrill-seekers and explorer. This helped guide how the game handles digital guests and their preferences. And some of these guests are vampires and aliens. Yet, like the other Two Point games, Museum perfectly balances real-world details, like having to manage your staff's pay and build restrooms for guests, alongside these outlandish aspects that are only possible in a video game. According to Huskins this is a key pillar of the Two Point formula. 'Having that juxtaposition is important for us – if everything is absurd, then nothing feels absurd, so we like to have that contrast,' said Huskins. 'Of course, we're also trying to design a game with a lot of depth to the simulation. We're not specifically trying to model reality, far from it, but we take some inspiration from real world organizations, then distill it down into something easier to understand. Ultimately, our priority is fun, so we'll pick and choose the elements that give us the depth and the variety we want, whilst keeping the game approachable and lighthearted.' Two Point Museum is out now digitally on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC. . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
