Two Point Museum: Fantasy Finds DLC review — Fantastical museum adventures

If you read our last review, you know that we gave glowing praise to Two Point Museum, the management sim of your dreams - and if not, go read it because this is DLC! It felt like the Two Point games were only getting better and better, with the perfect balance of difficulty, creativity, and management wrapped up in a quirky and often hilarious package. However, after spending about 70 hours running my wacky museums and decorating every spot I could find, I admittingly got a bit burnt out and decided to give curating a rest. Spending that many hours on a campaign I haven’t even finished yet just proves the value of the base game, and I knew from the start that future DLC would only further extend my to do list. Jump from March to July, and we have Fantasy Finds, a fantastical DLC that has the player running a D&D inspired campaign, pillaging artefacts and mystical gear along their way to create a truly magical museum. 

Fantasy Finds offers players a new map called the Scorched Earth, where you’ll find your typical POIs that experts can embark to so they can encounter dilemmas and locate rare goods. Of note straight after installing the pack is that you don’t get a new museum location to put all your artefacts in. Instead, you can begin the campaign on any of the existing locations, you only have to go into the Scorched Earth map on the exhibition menu screen and you’ll receive your usual quests to follow. This is the first time players have had an in-map campaign so, naturally, players were initially confused. This was admittedly a bit of a let-down as I felt like I needed to squeeze my fantasy museum alongside my already flourishing base-game ones. It's recommended that you do the campaign in Memento Mile, but you’ll have to have completed the initial star of your first museum in order to unlock it. Raven decided to take this advice and play in the first museum because that is ‘my best museum at the moment, but if you wanted to start a mega museum, I would choose Pebberly Heights.’ Keeping to a large museum map is definitely the right way to go, but it seems like myself and a lot of other players took the opportunity to test out the recent 4.00 update that gave us the finale museum, Pointy Mountains. However, in hindsight, this was probably the wrong choice.

As update 4.00 came out literally alongside Fantasy Finds, it made sense for players to give the new DLC a whirl in a new location - I have an OCD thing where I want my museums to be on themeand I didn't want to mix and match just yet. However, Pointy Mountains is an extremely grindy museum, subsequently making progress slow and at times boring. The campaign is standard, with the museum focused on Frozen Finds as its theme and asking you to accommodate for the Yetis and the new guest type, Hikers. Most notable is the added challenge of beginning your campaign with no money. You need to begin by taking out a loan and quickly factoring in how much you need to pay off whilst also making a profit. This was a nice challenge and had me locked into managing my museum straight off the bat, but past this, Pointy Museums becomes a bore when you have to edge towards larger goals. This includes earning an average monthly profit of 8,000 over three months and having 150 guests in your museum. I felt like this would have been better if I had paced myself, but instead, I wanted to take in everything Fantasy Finds had to offer. So, I ended up spending 15 in-game years to get to star 2, halting my progress in Fantasy Finds as you can’t unlock the new Goblin and Dwarf guest type until then. If you’re just in this for the DLC, I’d highly recommend plonking your fantasy base on a pre-existing map to save a lot of time.

The fantasy exhibits are gorgeous. They’re among our favorites in the game and have quickly absorbed all of our attention with how unique and fun they are to mix and match together to make an immersive museum. They’re separated into categories, from Mystical Gear, that actually gives your experts buffs in skills when worn (more on this later), and Dwarven geodes and devices. I honestly think the Fantasy exhibits have been the most fun I've had in constructing a museum. I’ll leave some pictures below, but once I had collected the majority of them, I made my museum into a D&D campaign for guests to walk through. They begin in the hall of gear so they can prepare themselves and pick up their sword on the way out. They then enter a forest full of beasts like the goblins and cat cavalry before descending into the ruins of a lost civilization, pillaging gold and golden goblin statues. I had an absolute blast with this as you can tell. 

Creating a museum is made even better by the new array of decorations on offer. You get your normal cosmetics to decorate your museum, which includes barrels, banners, food crates and the like but disappointingly, you don’t start off with much compared to past museums. You unlock more through completing POIs but most of them come from progressing through the Enlightenment tab. Even then, once you hit a certain point you’ll only be getting wallpapers. I found mixing fantasy decoration with the day one DLC bulked up the look of my museum, but alas, I always crave more. The best part of the new decorations is that we have been given themed museum items, from ticket booths to donation stands. Immediately, I ungratefully wished that every other theme had been given this treatment, because using the same ones over and over again gets boring. Fantasy Finds including these themed items was definitely a game-changer. 

Raven’s favourite aspect was the new decorations for the cafeteria, including tavern floors - yippee! - so you can transform it into your own proper little tavern.

As with every other museum theme, you need to employ experts to go on expeditions and the way they work is by far Two Point Museum’s most innovative design. Normally, you employ an expert and they’re versatile in what POIs they can embark on. Their only obstacle is usually being a certain level or having a certain skill. However, Fantasy experts take this a step further in utilising stats in POIs. You are given 4 types of Fantasy expert: Rogue, Barbarian, Wizard and Bard, and they all have an affinity for one skill:  dexterity, strength, intelligence, and luck respectively. The challenges you face in each POI can be negated by having a certain number of stat points in a skill. For example, to ward off money-grabbing goblins, you need 15 strength, or to avoid a curse, you need 20 intelligence. This was so refreshing and breathed a lot of new life into embarking on expeditions. To calibrate an expert’s skill, you can engage with three different methods. The most natural is simply levelling up. Every time you level up, you are given a skill point that you can put into any one of the skills. This feature was never explained in any tutorial, so it took me a while to find this. The next way is to drink stat potions that can be made by an expert with the potion crafting skill. You unlock them by doing certain challenges, but they’ll act as an item you can equip to your team so they can push past bigger challenges. Finally - and undoubtedly the coolest way - is you can use exhibits to boost your stats. As previously mentioned, you can find exhibits called Mystical Gear and each have a skill boost, the wizard hat will grant you intelligence, the winged boots, dexterity and so forth. The only downside is that once these are equipped, the exhibit is classed as empty so you don’t get the maximum potential from the exhibit. Raven utilized this weakness by having two of each item, one as an exhibit, and the other as backroom gear.

Finally, we have the main campaign of Fantasy Finds. Straight away, I was interested in the new twist the team put on this quest. Instead of picking whatever POI you wanted and moving on to the next, there’s a story here. You are a team on a quest to defeat the red dragon, a beast that’s terrorizing the surrounding villages. You’ll need to unlock certain POIs and get certain exhibits so you can unlock unique dragon potions, which will then help you in the three boss fights against the dragon. This felt like I was actually building my workers towards something, as these boss fights are often major challenges that require high skill levels to beat, each dilemma resulting in a potential MIA. I remember losing one of my experts in the first fight, but roleplayed into him becoming a museum hero. You get a plaque for remembrance, so I created a room where I placed my dragon trophy and plaque for them to be remembered by. Speaking of trophies, once a boss fight is complete, you’ll get special exhibits that are pieces of the dragon that have been cut off. Ouch. The first instance also has you making a decision that admittingly isn't all too consequential, but helped in creating more immersion. 

On the other hand, we found the map to be a touch obnoxious as there are a bit too many obstructions for our taste. As previously mentioned, you have to make sure to increase the stats of your workers; otherwise, you might have a rough time here, especially when it comes to combat. Some of the POIs require you to branch out the theming of your museum, dabbling in the supernatural and aquatics. These were quite hard to unlock earlier on, as the requirements were a tad steep. For the fish POI, your Marine expert needed to have level 3 fish whispering. This meant you’d have to do a lot of grinding in the fish aspect of your museum in order to unlock this on the fantasy map.