Two Point Museum hands-on preview — financial-fleecing fossil fun

I love the brand of silliness that the Two Point Studios team brings to a game. Two Point Hospital resurrected the genre with the ability to run a silly hospital full of even sillier patients. Two Point Campus took that same loopy gameplay and brought it to college. Recently the team let us go hands-on with their newest game, Two Point Museum. Could the team do enough to differentiate this title from their other two, and what new tricks did they have up their sleeves? Time to dig up some ancient artifacts and find out!

Two Point Museum starts very similarly to their previous two titles, giving you a fairly blank slate and asking you to build out a simple museum to learn the basics. The controls are mostly the same, albeit with some further refinements to make building, cloning, and relocating rooms even easier than before. With basics like bathrooms, break rooms for your staff, a ticket booth and an assistant to man it, and perhaps a few vending machines, you’re ready to get rolling.

Your team has uncovered a large star-shaped fossil, and your job is to display it. Simple. Unlike a hospital that has patients to charge, or a campus which receives tuition for their studios, your museum operates on the largess of its patrons. Other than the tickets to get in the door, your only money comes courtesy of the carefully-placed donation bins around your displays. They won’t want to donate unless they’re learning something about your ancient rock, so that means kitting out your space.

Your fossil is the star of the show (Ha! See? Because it’s literally a star…) but you’ll need to impart some knowledge about it to entice patrons to donate. Small standees, large free-standing flags, wall plaques, and more can be placed nearby to get your adult patrons interested. Adding things like theme-specific foliage will help with the overall ambiance of the space, again enticing your patrons to want to stick around to see what else you might have on offer. Benches for them to sit on, the already-mentioned snack machines, little plants and blow-up dino heads to stick on the wall round things out. So far not all that different than sticking posters on the wall of your hospital, right? Well, not so fast.

In Two Point Museum, your job is three fold – collect money to keep things running, fund new research, and educate your patrons. Your team can’t lean on a single star fossil to run a museum, so that means heading out to unearth (literally) new ones. Sending your team to the helicopter, you’re presented with a mission setup screen. Using their talents, your team will head out to find new things to showcase, and their expertise will determine how successful they will be in avoiding bad outcomes. Sometimes they’re simple things, like getting their feet stuck in tar. They’ll show back up and leave little tar footprints behind all over your museum – your janitors won’t appreciate this. A trip to the staff breakroom and some time in a machine that scrubs them clean, will fix this and ready them for duty once again. They can then either be sent out once again, or patrol the display area to help patrons learn more about your discoveries. More severe issues like snake bites, helicopter mechanical problems, snow storms, swamps, and more can slow you down, and you can even find a few things that give your team a better outcome, increased experience, or increased rarity of the outcomes. Things like first aid kits and Expedition Journals can counteract negative elements, but at additional financial cost or extended time, as can more trained staff. Once they do show back up, you’ll get a fun little sequence where you get to open the crate and see what’s inside. Let’s talk about what’s in the box.

Inside each box you’ll uncover something to display, or at least part of one. If you’ve uncovered a triceratops, for example, you might pick up the spine on your first trip. You could wait till you uncover all the pieces, but never let pieces go to waste. You can put these incomplete goodies on display, allowing you to at least collect some money while you work on the rest. Each piece is graded based on their rarity, estimated value, theming, and more. Subsequent visits to the same location could eventually uncover the rest of the pieces, completing the show piece. Additionally, through these discoveries and a few other prerequisites, you’ll eventually unlock other regions to visit for more dangerous expeditions but with greater rewards.

Oh wait! Somebody needs to run this mess, don’t they? Hiring and retaining good staff makes a world of difference in keeping your museum evolving and earning donations. You’ll need security guards to make sure items you have found stay put, you’ll need janitors to clean the place but also to keep up with maintaining the various theming elements. Assistants can sell tickets, man your gift shops, or help keep kids entertained with the interactive exhibits. You’ll also need Prehistory experts to go on those expeditions and educate the public when they wander around. Like the other Two Point games, however, it’s those secondary skills that you’ll need to grow. A training room gets your staff ready for learning new skills, and it’s not just directly related to their job. Similarly, your Janitors can be trained to restore your fossils to improve their showcase quality, or maybe just move their feet a little faster. An assistant who previously manned the coffee stand can be trained to be a research assistant, or even a field assistant to help mitigate those dangerous conditions, or up the quality of recovered goods. As a research assistant, they can help create new additions to your exhibits. As an example, kids aren’t interested in the boring junk adults are, but if you build them an interactive dinosaur play area, they’ll be happy to keep mom and dad in the display area, donating their hard earned cash.

With your staff trained, and your museum churning along, you’ll eventually unlock opportunities to visit other museums. That’s where things got really interesting for me.

The next scenario I got to play involved building an aquarium. Sending my team out to recover various types of fish, I brought them back to my simple Atlantis-themed museum. I had a few recovered underwater artifacts to display, but my fish would be what brings these folks back again and again. Setting up a tank, I had to account for visibility, how many fish would be in there, what sort of food they eat (and not putting fish together that eat each other), how much filtration they require, and more. Just like my fossil museum, my aquarium sold tickets to get in the door, but donations would keep it open. And just like that museum, that means keeping a crew of prehistory experts and support staff to educate the public and keeping the place running. My researchers this time around created a “tune-a-fish” for the kids – a big fish that wiggles as the kids play the ribs like a marimba.

I didn’t have to head over to the aquarium scenario – I could have also selected a museum haunted by ghosts. I didn’t have much time with this area, but as you can see below, it has its own set of unique challenges. Supernatural animatronics, haunted toilets with the toilet paper facing the wrong way (savages!), TVs with creepy connotations, furniture that won’t quite stay where you put it, playful poltergeists, and carnivorous plants that may or may not have come out of a little shop of horror are just some of the fun you’ll face while trying to shake the coins from the pockets of your visitors.

One of the things I really appreciated was an emphasis on not only theming, but also how you can use your museum layout to control the movement of the public. Creating staff-only areas, or building chokepoints and funnels to push folks through exhibits and directly into gift shops can also generate much-needed revenue for your museum. My team continued to go on more dangerous expeditions for more exotic fish to display. Watching my team head inside their tank to feed the fish and service the filtration system is goofy in a way the Two Point team has mastered.

As my museum grew, I slowly unlocked progressively more remote than the last. Each with it a new set of requirements, challenges, and dangers. I knew I’d have to research and build fresh ways to tackle those challenges, but my time with the game had some to an end. I blinked and several hours evaporated into thin air. I couldn’t wait to play more, and that’s the mark of a great game. The Two Point team may have infused Two Point Museum with all of the fun humor and fun of their previous games, but they’d also given us a lot of new ways to play. These three scenarios were all very different, and each had fresh challenges that made them all feel unique. I didn’t feel like I was having to reinvent the same wheel over and over as I progressed, merely visiting other museums to help them solve their problems. It’s rare when a sequel can manage to outdo the ones that came before it, but that seems like precisely what the team has done. The great news is that we won’t have to wait long to run our own museum of financial-fleecing fossil fun – Two Point Museum ships on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S on March 4, 2025.

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