Big new additions are coming to Planet Zoo 2 in the form of aviaries and aquariums, and fans will also be delighted to know that it's coming later this year.

Dropping on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X, Planet Zoo 2 now has a release date of October 13, 2026.

Revealed in a stunning announcement trailer that gives fantastic sneak peeks at the two new habitat types, Planet Zoo 2 will let players create immersive aquariums in their zoos and let new feathered residents take flight in custom-built aviaries.

Aquariums will allow players to add critters such as black-tipped reef sharks (though I doubt they'd like to be called "critters") and hawksbill turtles to their zoos. These new habitats are, as you'd hope from a Planet Zoo game, completely customizable. Staff will need to keep things clean by hopping through airlocks and donning scuba gear, too.

As for aviaries, you'll unlock friends like toco toucans and secretary birds, all housed beneath sprawling canopies that can be custom-placed for maximum creativity. I love the fact that guests will be able to walk through these spaces, too, so they can get up close and personal with our new residents.

Narratively, Planet Zoo 2 also really dials in on its conservation focus, with players able to take on conservation projects across the globe, working towards revitalizing expansive wildlife reserves that you can actually release animals into.

Of course, there are graphical and quality upgrades too, from improvements to fur, feather, and scale tech, to more authentic behavior from your animals and how they interact with their environment.

Pre-orders start now ahead of launch on October 13. Expect more news during the Summer Game Fest schedule, specifically at Wholesome Games on June 6 and PC Gamer's very own PC Gaming Show on June 7.

It's not just Planet Zoo 2, there are oodles of other new games in 2026 and beyond to look forward to.

The first two achievements I unlock in god game Masters of Albion are very telling. The first is awarded for throwing a worker over 25 meters with my deity's disembodied hand. An accident, I promise – even godhood comes with growing pains. The second achievement is for ordering my village's factory to stuff its pies with rats. What can I say? Buy cheap, get cheap.

Over the years, the god game genre has ceded territory to a flourishing sim scene. But there's significant overlap. In Masters of Albion your initial goal is to raise a small village from neglect, restoring its economy and expanding across Albion by day, safeguarding its borders from supernatural threats by night. Think Manor Lords, except you enjoy a physical presence as a floating hand that can scoop up denizens, launch fireballs, raise buildings, and roll comically large boulders through hordes of zombies.

I've been lording over Masters of Albion's early access launch in my spare time, and although it's currently struggling with performance issues, the game's freedom-driven systems already show significant promise.

The old gods and the new

Even with godly powers, Masters of Albion leaves plenty of work cut out for you. The run-down village of Oakridge is a small patch of green in the mist-shrouded lands, and you can't directly interact with anything where the fog has settled.

Oakridge itself is in pieces: its smattering of buildings are dismantled, Lego-style, and sit in useless chunks until you bric-a-brac them back together. Worldly creation in Masters of Albion is less Garden of Eden, more yanking the pull cord of a stubborn lawnmower until it sputters to life. Every cog has its place: farms supply mills, which in turn keep flour flowing to factories, which can be put to work fulfilling orders for food, weapons, and more.

A factory's output must be tailored for each order. You may be given a vague hint as to what sort of pie the client would like, for example, but it's up to you to select its ingredients and consider how much you're willing to spend on them. Prices are constantly in flux, which means yesterday's moldy bread can be today's premium moldy bread. I'm guilty of bending my factory's standards to save a buck: if a nearby lord orders a batch of sandwiches I'll make sure to use fresh bread and decent fillings, but for a bulk order of 75 pies to feed the poor? It's rat chunks in rat stock, but at least the pastry seems fluffy.

The industry must flow: besides making a profit, completing orders grants resources that can be spent in branching unlock trees – though unlocking new god powers requires harvesting dark energy from dead baddies.

As your domain expands, so too do your responsibilities. Keeping Oakridge stocked with weapons and armor means reclaiming the nearby mining village of Wyrmscar, which in turn requires hiring a hero to do your dirty work beyond the fog, as they can take on quests and reclaim swathes of Albion by standing on magical pedestals.

Heroes are powerful fighters and can also be possessed, allowing you to take control of a character in third-person. It's gimmicky – combat is barebones, and getting involved in the flesh feels like busywork when I should have my eye on the bigger picture. Still, I like that you can. Much of Masters of Albion (and Molyneux's past work) is about making fantasy tangible, minimizing the barriers between imagination and play, and while my fantasy revolves around raising a society, others may be drawn to the more hands-on facets of godhood.

A bolt from above

Likewise, there are numerous options for defending your land at night. Each day only ends when you're ready, so there's no time pressure, but sundown is still deceptively hard to survive – if your crypt-home takes too much damage, it's game over.

You can see where each night's attacks will come from, but later in the game there are enough threats to spread your attention thin. Turrets and wall fortifications are helpful for controlling the flow of baddies, but you can only build during the day, and on several occasions I've taken to picking up my ragdoll-hero by the arm and flinging him into a branched wall to plug the gap (with the latest weapon I've cheaped out on at the factory).

Still, this is very much an early access game. The current build struggles with the odd bug, but worse are its performance issues. I consistently run below 30fps on a 5070 GPU, yet it runs smoothly on a 2080. Developer 22cans also left early access game Godus unfinished, which leaves me cautious to recommend anything I can't prod with my fat god finger.

What I can say is that Masters of Albion's ambition is clear, it has an easy charm, and I've seen enough proof in the rat-pudding to feel good about what it already offers. Is that enough for you? I suppose it's a matter of faith.

The best city builders feel a lot like Masters of Albion... but with a little bit less divine cruelty

Magic Inn managed to put me under its spell within three short hours. As a young wizard sent to work at a ramshackle tavern in the town of Crop Meadow, it's my job to give this once-glorious public house some TLC. On top of that, I have spells to master, drinks to mix, and a salad-chopping minigame to perfect.

Scratch a little further beneath the management sim surface, though, and Magic Inn proves a much broader experience. From interior decorating to building relationships with the townsfolk, solving the mystery of a magical enclave known as Embers, and figuring out what my smarmy boss is up to, there's a surprising amount of depth to Magic Inn as it enters Early Access – which means I'm already wondering what could possibly come next.

Toil and trouble

After playing around with the character creator – I choose to keep the default name, Summer, for my little witch – I finally get a closer look at Hope's Inn. My manager, Samuel, seems nice enough, granting me free rein of the place as I tick off objectives on the way to leveling the premises up.

Magic Inn is a simple enough management sim at surface level: you seat customers, take their orders, bring them their meals, and get paid for it. It's the kind of satisfying, engaging set of mechanics I recall loving about one of the best GBA games in my book: the one and only Cake Mania. Again, though, Magic Inn has a little more to it.

For starters, I'm a witch. That means I have access to a range of helpful spells to help keep things running smoothly. Rain clouds wash dirty tables in a jiffy, the Flying Plate charm sends meals soaring over to diners to save me the legwork, and Fire Bolt burns away any pesky cobwebs that might spring up around the inn.

I'll admit that Magic Inn's controls did give me a bit of trouble at first. The spellcasting crosshair is fixed rather than point-and-click, meaning I have to march around and angle the camera just so in order to lock onto a target. The item wheel is also a little confusing – entering build mode is as easy as tapping B on my keyboard, but the item wheel itself doesn't seem to be working when I try selecting the hammer tool that way instead. It's also not yet Steam Deck verified and the controller functionality is limited at the moment, which is something to bear in mind for fellow keyboard-mouse strugglers.

These are just a few minor snags in an otherwise beautifully iterated experience, and as an Early Access title, I am more than forgiving of them.

The gift of the gab

With my plate, pint, and spell-slinging skills out of the way, I'm permitted to leave Hope's Inn and make for the marketplace. Here, I'm introduced to three other key gameplay elements: shopping, crafting, and deck-building.

Everything in Magic Inn has to be either purchased, crafted, or "requested" from an NPC in town. The market has a revolving slate of pop-up shops and vendors, so checking back every morning and evening to see who's about is crucial to success. I can purchase ingredients, furniture, recipes, and other items from stalls if I wish, though the price markups can be dire. I can also try to haggle for prices, or flirt my way to a higher relationship with various NPCs by way of Conversation.

These interactions see me using a deck of 12 cards, earned by leveling up and tailored from the inventory screen, to try and gain relationship hearts from my opponent. It's a simple enough game of matching emotions with my "rival" – who in this case is anyone I'm trying to charm – while blocking energy-sapping Counters using shield cards.

If I run out of energy points, I'm locked out of Conversations until I build some points back up again. But if I win, I've earned hearts to trade for free items. These items vary from person to person; a farmer might give you free milk, while a high-level trader might give you three rare diamonds worth over 600 coins apiece.

An NPC's profession is very important to bear in mind when it comes to building up my list of Hope's Inn regulars, since regulars bring free resources each time they visit. After meeting and inviting an NPC to the tavern once I talk to them at the market, they get added to the next day's guest list. Now I need only provide perfect, full-star service, and spend five energy points on asking them to be a regular.

Regulars can be swapped out to ensure I get a steady stream of a particular item. Flowers are a safe money-making bet in the early hours of Magic Inn, as they sell for a 10% markup at market. Meanwhile, staples like sugar, lettuce, wheat, and driftwood are important commodities to have daily deliveries of, especially once I level Hope's Inn up enough that my guests expect higher quality food and drink.

Order's up

A typical day as innkeeper is a frantic thing. If I'm unlucky enough not to have a bartender hired, I'll be pouring pints and mixing cocktails as well as chopping salad, preparing fried rice, and managing to juggle the many pizzas being churned out by our resident baker.

The first additional hire I make is for a housekeeper, freeing me from the drudgery of wiping down counters and tabletops, but I also need to bear in mind my staff's own happiness. Throwing the odd vacation day their way helps keep things moving, but whatever you do, don't follow my lead and send the chef on holiday the day before the newspaper visits to critique the food and decide whether to give us a coveted North Star in its restaurant reviews section.

Magic Inn had me hooked within three hours, yes, but I've actually played about 10 so far because it's just that layered. It reminds me more of Two Point than Cake Mania in that regard, offering a host of detailed mechanics that have me actively involved in every level of operations. Managing guests, staff, interiors, ratings, and my own boss's expectations is a lot for one little witch or wizard, but there are some intriguing side-narratives at play, too.

What's with all the detectives around town, or the gossipy vendor at the marketplace who deals solely in secrets? Will I get in trouble with the Empire's guards for using forbidden magic, and will my new magical friend Maja help me get out of this sticky situation without lumping me in with the renegade wizards she runs with called the Embers?

This is one stunning new indie I can't wait to discover more of, and thanks to the transformative powers of Early Access, it's a magical process I'll get to witness first-hand.

Check out the host of upcoming indie games we're keeping an eye on here at GamesRadar+, from cozy games to roguelites and beyond

I'm trying to complete a mission in Minami Lane with the single most important objective: attract more cats. How do I do that? By increasing the beauty rating of my little street diorama that's mine to build up and manage. From renovating existing houses to make them more aesthetically pleasing, to adding a picturesque onsen where my residents can relax, I set down some kombini stores to rake in more cash so I can afford more beautifying upgrades. Some other objectives bring in an added layer of challenge, though, such as one that stipulates I can only have a set amount of buildings to draw in at least four cats every day.

But even with some strategy involved, it's an incredibly laidback management experience overall, and the optional side objective to pet a certain amount of cats is of course one I'm all too happy to fulfill. When my street starts to really come together with feline friends aplenty, I sit back to watch the satisfaction meter of my residents understandably skyrocket. I mean, who wouldn't be happy to walk down a lane and see so many kitties?

I've been meaning to play Minami Lane ever since I saw it take off on Steam last year, and with its recent console release on PS5 and Xbox Series X (it's also available on Xbox Game Pass), I had to finally give it a go. Everything on paper about the indie management game called my name, from its adorable aesthetics to its low-pressure vibes, and my instincts about it were absolutely right, because I've been loving my time with it. I can easily say that after playing it for a little under four hours, I totally get the high praise.

Street life

In Minami Lane, there are five main missions to complete that give you various challenges to meet as you build and manage your own cozy Japanese-inspired streets. The first mission asks you to have a certain number of villagers and build a boba shop, which helps me learn the ropes of its very chill management features.

Each building you can set down, for example, has parameters to fulfill in order to add it to your street, such as a certain satisfaction rating for your residents (which you can increase by adding more attractions and making your street more appealing), or having a particular number of villagers in residence by adding more houses for them to live in.

Both apply when it comes to being able to add the boba cafe, which requires a 60% rating and 10 people to build. Of course, since everything you add also costs money, I have to lean on my ramen shops to rake in some cash. Every shop can be managed to change what it's selling (in this case, ramen noodles) and how much you want to charge to give yourself more profit.

Part of the management comes into play here, because you can also click on residents who visit your shops to see how you can cater to them and get them to keep coming back for more – such as adding more of a particular ingredient to your ramen bowl, or lowering the cost.

At the start of each in-game day during a mission, you can make changes to your shops and add new buildings. Then, you can simply sit back and watch your street come to life over the course of the day, with the option to clean away any trash they drop, and look for a Tanuki who hides in an object on the street to earn yourself some additional money. As the missions go on, there will also be other ways you can interact with your street as you unlock more features, such as petting cats or clicking on passing cyclists to say hello.

I personally love to click on all the passing residents as they go about their business to see what they're thinking. Not only does this allow me to get some feedback on my shops and the street overall, but it also generally lets me get the tea on their daily lives — with some sharing their anxious feelings, while others clearly feel very good about their own fashion sense.

Each mission introduces something different to contend with, with new attractions to build including book stores, karaoke bars, and a service center that allows you to remove existing shops, or hire a shop investigator to help you gather customer feedback.

From trying to cater to both elders and youths with your ramen menu and karaoke selection, to attracting a certain demographic through your streets set-up, you can comfortably complete all the missions in an afternoon, and by the end of my last objective, I only wished there were more to take on.

Happily, outside of the missions, you can also play in two different sandbox modes. The planner mode provides a more strategic experience, since you have limited starting money and it includes building requirements to add to your street. The creative mode, on the other hand, has no restrictions and lots of starting money, so you're completely free to make the street of your dreams without worrying about objectives or money.

Minami Lane is such a laidback management experience that it's the perfect kind of game to unwind in while you're listening to an audiobook or podcast. I can already see myself dipping into the sandbox modes to do exactly that in the future. If you've been holding out on this one like me, or you're looking for a chill, charming indie delight, this is your sign to give it go.

Minami Lane is out now on PC, Xbox Series X, PS5, and Switch. For more recommendations, head on over to our Indie Spotlight series.

The developer of adorable management game Minami Lane recently released an equally adorable bug collect-a-thon that's gathered flawless reviews, literally.

You might already recognize the name Minami Lane - it was a pretty big hit last year on account of its warm art style, condensed management, and cozy vibes set on a single, miniature street. Co-developers 'Doot' and 'Zakku' on Steam put out their follow-up project, Kabuto Park, last month and the response has been just as strong.

"This is completely insane," Doot tweeted last week alongside a screenshot of the game's 590 reviews, 100% of which were positive. "I didn't even think that was possible? OVERWHELMINGLY POSITIVE with 100% POSITIVE REVIEWS?!"

I've personally never seen a game with 100% positive reviews on the platform because, well, you know, it's hard to please every single person. Taste is subjective. Heck, at the time of writing, those perfect reviews fell ever so slightly: Kabuto Park now has well over 1,000 reviews and 99% of them give it the thumbs up. The game being able to gather 100% Overwhelmingly Positive is sort of an unbelievable feat in the first place.

"With Kabuto Park, I wanted to do something quite personal," Doot continued. "Every game you make is like putting a part of yourself out there, it's terrifying but so rewarding when people react as you do. I cried several time since release and feel like I'm about to do it again rn."

"Catch the cutest bugs, train them and win the Summer Beetle Battles Championship in this tiny bug collection game," the Steam blurb explains. "Upgrade your equipment to find rarer, stronger and shinier little friends." It's essentially Pokemon as a cute side-scroller, but this time you're making bugs fight, which I won't question the ethics of here.

For now, check out some other upcoming indie games of 2025 and beyond.

How much do you know about Lithuanian history circa-1866? If you're like me before I played Book Smugglers at Digital Dragons last week, your answer is probably "zilch" – but Fluxo Games is here to educate and entertain you in equal measure.

Off the back of 2021's Plasticalypse, a deep sea cleanup action-adventure currently out in Early Access, the Lithuanian developer's upcoming resource management game is still rooted in real world contexts. Transporting us back in time to Fluxo's homeland in the late 19th century, Book Smugglers explores the impact of banned literature across the region and the experiences of those who set out to combat it.

Delivering illegal texts was a perilsome, very real endeavor in 1866, and this point-and-click boardgame-style management adventure is more about wits and strategy than anything else. My experience with the demo was longer than my other indie sessions that day – 45 minutes, to be precise – but the truth is that I barely felt the minutes tick by.

Dicey histories

Book Smugglers takes the shape of a 3D board game, with large gold coins sitting at crossroads across the map. These are flipped at the start of each turn, with the symbols representing a series of randomized encounters my Smuggler must contend with.

As I click on one such crossroad coin, I'm given a choice: give an old man five gold out of the goodness of my heart, or ignore him. I click the more benevolent option and feel awash with pride, basking in my own charitable glow in having surrendered a handful of rubles to a good cause.

That pride soon sours and turns to indignation when, almost immediately, on-screen text describes how the man has also pilfered one of my precious books in the process. Ordinarily, I'd shrug it off. But money, food, weapons, and literature – especially literature – are important commodities in Book Smugglers, and that one act of kindness has just cost me double.

The compulsive blend of choice-led narrative, randomly generated board game "moves", encounters, inventory juggling, and strategizing makes Book Smugglers an immediately gripping experience. I know nothing of my character's background at first, save that I'm part of a secret unit of Lithuanian book smugglers desperate to keep the local language alive amid the Russian Empire's occupation.

I'm briefly introduced to the first of my vital resources: rubles, useful for purchasing items from patrons and vendors alike while visiting taverns along my journey. I have 100 rubles to start with, as well as 15 books, a full health bar, and a single food item. I'm prompted to eat as soon as possible once my health drops too low following one too many failed encounters with everything from brambles to hostile NPCs, meaning food hoarding will almost certainly be key if you want to conserve more valuable resources.

Once I have my bearings, it's time to move to a new encounter. I trade a book for some bread, much to the chagrin of the wandering traveler who's clearly aware of the illegality of my proposition, before making a bit of a boo-boo and clicking on a coin that either had an exclamation mark on it or a skull and cross bones. Either way, it wasn't a smart move – I'm set upon by a police patrol, and with no weapon to use in my defence or bootleg booze to bribe them with, I'm forced to make a break for it.

Tall tales

A chase ensues, underscored by dramatic music. Following a short freeze-frame cutscene, one I'm told is being padded out into full animation (though the hand-painted stills are beautifully fitting for a game about books, in my opinion), I somehow manage to escape the police unscathed.

Mercifully, run into a kindly priest named Father Valenčius, with whom I share my dangerous mission. Much like in Pentiment, or any of the best visual novels you might have played yourself, dialogue-heavy encounters with NPCs are presented via on-screen text with a portrait of the character placed nearby. To my surprise, the Father is actually delighted to hear of my quest, as a firm supporter of preserving local culture. He's also keen to know more about my character's backstory – which is when Book Smugglers starts to dip into RPG territory.

When asked about my profession before joining the smuggling syndicate, I'm given three choices: a bard, a bureaucrat's assistant, or a farmer. Each background comes with respective stat buffs or other perks.

Bards have 10% increased luck and earn one ruble per book delivered, assistants can sell items at full price as well as peek at one random encounter at the start of each turn, and farmers 20 get more HP and an extra inventory space. Sadly, being a jack-of-all-trades is not an option, so I go for the assistant background. Prescience is kind of a big deal in a game like this, I figure.

From here on out, I treat Book Smugglers more like a strategy game. Rationing my money, books, and food wisely is paramount, but I try not to scrimp too much when the chance to load up on items presents itself.

Talking various NPCs in a tavern soon after leaving the Father, I discover each of them is selling something of use. From a huntsman slinging weapons to a kindly farmer selling food and manual tools, elements of build-crafting start to emerge. Do I blow 60 of my 100 rubles on a shotgun, just in case I run into another police patrol, or do I opt for camouflage and survival gear instead?

A mix of a bit of everything is probably most useful, but the potential for tactical planning and experimentation in Book Smugglers is plain from this short demo alone. If you're a fan of point-and-click stories with a strong helping of "choose your own adventure" sensibilities – and if you love to learn as well as have fun playing games – you'll want to keep an eye on Book Smugglers' Steam page. And your myriad resources in case an old man tries to nab them, apparently.

Love a good yard? Check out the best video game stories the medium has ever seen

I only played a couple of city-builders in Steam Next Fest, but I'm glad one of them was Overthrown - not necessarily for its settlement systems, which are hard to get a true sense of in a demo, but for what's easily best-in-genre movement tech.

I'd had my eye on Overthrown for a while, largely thanks to its developers' fondness for showing off how it laughs at most genre conventions. The 'thrown' in that game name is pretty literal, it turns out, thanks to your characters' ability to pick up basically any item in the world and chuck it somewhere new. Within minutes of starting the demo, I was pitching entire tree trunks around the map to speed up the progress of my sawmill and expand my city, and that cartoonish logic can also be applied to entire buildings. Don't like where you've placed your town hall? Throw it somewhere else.

But what if you should throw a villager's house too far away by accident and then need to collect and replace it? In another game, you might be in for an uncomfortably long saunter across your city. But not in Overthrown, a game where the Sprint button momentarily locks you into a power stance before catapulting you away across the map. Your character is astonishingly fast, capable of zipping across your entire settlement in moments, and Overthrown's third-person camera means that you're firmly in the driver's seat.

The last city-builder I played that gives you that kind of perspective was Manor Lords, where you can abandon the traditional top-down perspective and go for a gentle saunter around your settlement. Overthrown's protagonist would leave that lord in the dust even at their normal movespeed, but once they're moving at full speed, it's easy to forget that you're supposed to have been managing a city this whole time.

That's because Overthrown's movement is so fun that I was sometimes hesitant to construct any buildings - I didn't want them to get in my way. Instead, I was much more interested in charging across the plains, drifting through the forests, and parkouring up the cliffs that made up the world around my kingdom. Overthrown really plays up its speed with some classic camera and sound design trickery, but it also lets you really feel how fast you're going. Turns aren't jerky, jumpy changes of direction, but wide arcs, your hero leaning into them like a pro motorcyclist. A collision doesn't let you just bounce off an obstacle or come to an abrupt stop - it knocks you on your ass with a thump. Jumps are a question of timing - at this kind of speed, you've got to nail your takeoff if you want any chance of landing in the right place.

I probably shouldn't be surprised - Overthrown's devs have already made their thoughts on things like fall damage pretty clear, removing it from the game entirely simply "because it's annoying" (and to spite their mums). There's a desire to get you moving and keep you moving, a real 'rule of cool' moment that stands out here because it feels so at odds with much of the genre. If this were a traditional open-world action game, I'd enjoy the movement and get on with some hacking and slashing. But here, where I'm supposed to be doing the serious work of building and running a city, it feels like a powerful breath of fresh air, best-in-class movement.

You could read our list of the best city building games, but just be warned that none of them have you sprinting like this. 

Stardew Valley 1.6 will hit consoles and mobile on November 4, developer Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone has confirmed.

In a tweet on Sunday, Barone said, simply "release date for Stardew Valley console & mobile 1.6 update: November 4." While that might read as a little bit of a mouthful, it doesn't leave much to the imagination, and confirms that those tending their farms away from PC will have to wait roughly another six weeks for the update to drop.

Given, however, that they've already had to wait around six months, perhaps that won't be too bad. Stardew Valley 1.6 dropped in March, offering PC players more than 500 changes. Those included pets, new neighbors, dialogue, and crops, as well as plenty of bug fixes, quality-of-life changes, and an easter egg that dedicated fans wasted no time in uncovering.

It's been a long wait for Stardew Valley 1.6 on consoles and mobile, but that's not because Barone has been slacking off. On the contrary - he said in July that the update was "on my mind every minute", and confessed that "I have not touched" new game Haunted Chocolatier "in a long time" because of his focus on bringing the update to all platforms.

Presumably, now that Stardew Valley 1.6 is in sight for all players, work will resume on that new game. We've still only seen the tiniest snippets of Haunted Chocolatier - the last of those was a scrap of info that appeared in March and before that we had a bunch of screenshots that released last fall. There's no sign of Stardew Valley 1.7 - at least for now - but for those craving something truly new, perhaps that's a good thing.

Here are 10 games like Stardew Valley that should keep you busy until update 1.6 arrives.

Bethesda officially launched The Elder Scrolls: Castles, its new Fallout Shelter-like mobile game, today, September 10. After a soft-launch earlier this year, and an even softer launch nearly a full year ago, the game is now available globally on iOS and Android.

Castles has had a confusing rollout with surprisingly little fanfare. We've had writers playing it before Bethesda ever acknowledged it existed, a region-limited launch at the beginning of the year, and now a full release with barely a peep. Outside of a handful of social posts from Bethesda accounts, the game hasn't had much in the way of marketing. Even its predecessor, The Elder Scrolls: Blades, had a comparatively sizable reveal at Bethesda's 2018 E3 showcase. It seems Bethesda is mirroring Fallout Shelter's shadow drop. 

Despite all of that, The Elder Scrolls: Castles is out now, for real this time, and you can download it to see for yourself. It's got all of the management sim gameplay from Fallout Shelter, but ditches the underground vault aesthetic for a colorful and whimsical fantasy castle. 

Each day in real life equates to an entire year in-game, so everything moves at a pretty brisk pace. Choose how you want to rule your kingdom and assign your subjects, whether that's with an iron fist or a loving heart. I'm not here to tell you what to do, I have my own castle to run. 

Bethesda has a couple of other projects in the works that we're still waiting to hear more about. Between the upcoming Starfield Shattered Space expansion, the far-off Fallout 5, and The Elder Scrolls 6, there's plenty of time for another Skyrim port (PS5 Pro, dare we dream?) and probably another mobile game or two. It's somehow been roughly six years since the announcement of The Elder Scrolls 6, and while Castles may not be the franchise update that some were looking for, it's certainly something, and it seemed pretty fun even in its earliest stages.  

The Elder Scrolls: Castles may be enough to hold you over for now, but if you're looking for more, check out everything we know so far about The Elder Scrolls 6. 

Obbe Vermeij lent his expertise to a suite of Grand Theft Auto games across a Rockstar career that spanned more than 17 years, but now he's making a game that could barely be more different.

Vermeij, who has spent the last year or so outlining development secrets from Grand Theft Auto 3, GTA: Vice City, and San Andreas, recently unveiled his new game, Plentiful. A tranquil god game about collecting rainwater by moving rocks around a map in order to grow plant life and feed your tribe, Vermeij describes Plentiful as "a relaxing game about creating conditions for nature to thrive."

It's a pleasingly simple premise, with an understated art style and an even more understated Steam page. In other words, it could barely be further from the Grand Theft Auto games that Vermeij cut his development teeth on, which are set in sprawling, complex worlds and marketed in such a way that Rockstar and Take-Two can extract every last penny from them.

Vermeij doesn't appear to be in any particular hurry to release Plentiful, which he says will be out "when it's done." Regardless of that long potential wait, I'm actually very into the premise - there's something about the idea of manipulating streams and lakes that harks back to childhood.

I'll be interested to see what Vermeij cooks up, but I'm also pretty interested in what he has to say. The developer has dropped a string of tasty morsels about his time at Rockstar over the last several months, culminating in his recent expectations for GTA 6, which he thinks won't be "wildly different" from GTA 5.

Vermeij left Rockstar after GTA 4 because he thought the series was getting "too dark, too depressing almost."

An adventurer wanders into my tavern just as I’m serving up a pint of something almost certainly inedible. Clicking on his valiant armour-plated character model opens up a story book, and with it, one of many unique moments of randomized storytelling in Tavern Keeper.

Greenheart Games’ fantasy management sim neatly pairs tabletop RPG-style storytelling – courtesy of its fully-voiced narrator – with fastidiously detailed design and business systems. From purchasing casks of ale to placing furniture items, decorating tables, and preventing an all-out fist fight from breaking out in my nice respectable establishment, my brief half hour with Tavern Keeper surprised me with just how exciting life as an old-timey barkeep can be.

Roll for initiative 

The tutorial segment of the game is a short one, but charms me almost instantly. Panning around a cheery ready-built tavern reveals a host of rosy-cheeked revellers, swigging tankards of ale and wandering about to interact with the many decorative or leisure features on offer. There's darts, for example, with a description suggesting patrons use the visage of their enemies to inspire a true shot at its bullseye. Elsewhere, an elven visitor looks to be picking her nose in an empty corner. The whole pub feels teeming with life already, and all I've had to do is sit back and enjoy it (and learn about nested tooltips). 

There's something so effortlessly enchanting about Tavern Keeper's medieval fantasy framework. By the time the aforementioned adventurer swaggers in, triggering a storybook moment with branching dialogue choices, I've already decided that this might be my favorite game of Gamescom 2024. Everything about it speaks to my niche interests, from the Sims 4-like grid building and nonsense-chattering NPCs to the backdrop of myths, legends, and heroes of yore. Pair it with the fact that taverns are infamously lively centrepieces of any good D&D session, and the result is a fairytale world of discovery that hinges on three things: storytelling, creativity, and formulaic (yet intuitive) management systems.

After opening a pub of my own in a dank swamp, furnished with naught but wooden crates repurposed as tables, barstools, and countertops, one of the first things I have to do is hire a worker. I select a tall, spindly-looking elf, underskilled and undertrained for the job at hand. However, her worker bio mentions that "thinking of ogres makes her laugh," and that, in turn, makes me laugh. Even the wholesale deliveryman, a beady-eyed cyclops who pulls into the swampy waters behind the tavern to peddle his wares, adds a unique vibrance to the proceedings. It's these little moments of humour and silliness that infuse Tavern Keeper with a sense of whimsy – it's clear Tavern Keeper's 10-year development journey has been paved with nothing but love for the fantasy world and management sim genre. 

My demo session ends all too abruptly: when the timer runs out, I accidentally-on-purpose blow the whole thing up when prompted by the game to do so. It's a fittingly daft way to wrap things up, and I feel a strange sense of pride in watching my barren little tavern of wooden crates and cheap ale erupt in comical bursts of fire. No fantasy creatures were harmed in the making of this preview, and I'm already excited to try out the full version when it launches to PC platforms on November 5, 2024 

GamesRadar+ is in Cologne playing the most anticipated new games of 2024, and speaking to the developers bringing them to life. For more of our hands-on previews and exclusive interviews, visit the Gamescom 2024 coverage hub. 

Dwarf Fortress' publisher reckons the smash hit management game will never reignite the 120,000-concurrent-player success from its Steam launch again, but that's not even remotely a problem for them or the developers. 

Kitfox Games, which publishes everything from Caves of Qud and Boyfriend Dungeons to Six Ages, recently put out a blog post delving into the advantages and potential pitfalls of early access development because "the human element has been largely missing from the conversation," as well as the different types of early access that studios might pursue. 

Kitfox Games co-founder Tanya X. Short and community manager Alexandra Orlando explain that one possible avenue for early access developers is to simply "Skip It" or, in other words, do it like Dwarf Fortress. "A cheeky answer for many reasons, chief among which is that it was never actually in the official Steam Early Access program at all," the blog explains. "Partly because Early Access didn't exist back in 2006 (let's be honest, Steam itself barely did), but partly because the creators wanted to keep expectations low, by giving it away for free/donations."

Dwarf Fortress' two-person development duo were apparently "extremely aware" of the added pressure that would come from Steam's higher player base, which eventually found the building sim with 120,000 people playing the game simultaneously when it came to the platform in 2022. "A year and a half later the Adventure Mode beta snuck players back up above 20,000. Will Dwarf Fortress ever have 120,000 concurrent players again? Maybe, but probably not? Does that bother anyone? Not that I’m aware of."

"It's fine if we've 'peaked'. We're not here to make as much money as possible," the blog post continues, since the developers "don't really care" about "capitalizing" on their success - "they just want to live a comfortable life working on their game." As we've seen from Hooded Horse's strategy hits, 1.0 launches often lead to record player counts and give years-old games a nice second wind, but that's just not what the Dwarf Fortress team were interested in. 

So Dwarf Fortress skipped an official early access tag because it had already been in the works for years before its Steam release, and in a sense, it's a game that can never really be complete. The developers are planning to continually update it for years to come, so who's to say when the game is 'done' or ready for a 1.0 label? Side-stepping early access means the developers don't need to work on complicated roadmaps and semi-frequent updates fuelled by angry online forums, though it's not a full-proof way to "escape the gamer-demand treadmill either" since "the marathon doesn't end with 1.0."

Early access pipelines were the subject of much debate earlier this month when Manor Lords’ publisher argued against the idea that games need to force their developers to pump out updates as quickly as possible. 

The developer of adorable Stardew Valley-style farming sim says that they're "just coming to terms" with their smash success.

Last month, Jordan Morris released Rusty's Retirement, an idle farming game. Sitting at the bottom (or side) of your screen, the game largely plays itself, but in your role as farm supervisor, you can instruct Rusty to plant crops or build new structures. Five days after release, Morris announced that the game had surpassed 100,000 sales - seemingly spawning a new idle genre in the process.

Earlier this week, Morris offered a sales update, announcing that the game has doubled that total, with 200,000 copies sold in less than three weeks. But the period after launch has been so busy for the game's solo developer that he's only just starting to realize the impact it's likely to have.

"It's been a little over two weeks since the release of Rusty's Retirement," Morris said in a tweet. "Since release, I've had my fixing hat on, and I'm only now realizing how life-changing this is." It's hard to get a real sense of how much Morris has made through Rusty's Retirement, but as a solo, self-published developer, there are fewer costs involved than most studios would have to contend with.

Financial success, of course, is far from the be-all-and-end-all of game development, and Morris also says that he feels "incredibly proud to have made something that genuinely brings people joy."

Fancy a return to the simple life? Check out our list of games like Stardew Valley to keep you farming for hours.

Kaizen Game Works, the studio behind the bangin' 2020 detective game Paradise Killer, has revealed its next game, and it sounds absolutely wild in a way that seems meticulously catered to my precise tastes.

I think the best way to not only sum up what Promise Mascot Agency is about and also convey just how weird it is, I'll just share what Kaizen itself says about its second project. Fair warning, it's a doozy, so strap in. Promise Mascot Agency is "the world's first (and best) open world mascot management crime drama."

Open world. Mascot management (!), Crime drama. You're an exiled yakuza lieutenant banished to a cursed Japanese town and tasked with restoring an old rundown mascot agency - that is, an agency catered to Japanese mascots down on their luck. For the uninitiated, Mascots are adorable little characters usually designed to promote something like a region of Japan, an event, or a business. For example, Domo-kun is the brown, fuzzy, rectangular representative for the Japanese public broadcasting company NHK, while Pikachu is the mascot for Pokemon. However, not all mascots are created equal.

As the sole operator of Promise Mascot Agency, along with your rotund mascot sidekick Pinky, you mostly deal with "misfit mascots," like a big old cube of tofu literally named To-Fu whose greatest adversary is "Normal Sized Door". Recruit To-Fu and they'll do various jobs for you to increase the profitability and efficiency of the agency, but be prepared to train, manage their stress levels, and help them overcome challenges, like fitting through doors, using Hero Cards with various stat-boosting effects.

"Mascots have their own hopes, dreams and desires and you’ll need to negotiate to recruit them," Kaizen says. "Some mascots want money, some want fame, some want a rice ball from the local convenience store and some want to see the entire world burn to ashes in glorious hellfire."

You still with me? When you aren't recruiting and managing new mascots, you can explore the town of Kaso-Machi by bombing along in a beatdown, but upgradeable flying truck with Pinky holding on for dear life in the bed. Along the way you'll meet all sorts of whacky characters to earn new Hero Cards, but don't forget to take a plunge in the local onsen when things get a little too weird - as if they haven't already, months before the game releases.

Kaizen is working with Ikumi Nakamura, a developer best known for her work on Okami, Bayonetta, Evil Within, and Ghostwire: Tokyo, to bring this Japanese fever dream to life, which is yet another reason it is so firm on my radar you couldn't pry it off with an industrial wrench. Promise Mascot Agency launches on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC in 2025.

Who knows, maybe it'll weird its way into our list of the best open world games.

I’m peeking through the hatch in the door trying to figure out if the alien in front of me is hiding an eye. Cyclops Anger Management is an exclusive support group that couldn’t possibly accept the multi-eye chancers that have been turning up this evening looking for a free bite to eat. But this cyclops is a truthful one, and a hidden eye isn’t the kind of subterfuge that you should expect in Mars After Midnight. This is a much goofy, more overtly lighthearted take on Papers, Please. The apprentice-level Return of the Obra Dinn. It's a Lucas Pope game that he made for his children, and they claim to "love it" – probably almost as much as I do.

This Playdate exclusive sees you play as an alien working on Mars running various community support groups that all happen, you guessed it, after midnight. Between the hours of 1am-5am you're going to be working with your little robot therapist pal to help the citizens of this Martian Colony sort out their various problems. 

Fartin' in Martian

Sometimes it might not be entirely clear why such problems need a support group, but hey who am I to judge why people want to connect. From those gifted with ESP or startlingly loud flatulence, to shy smilers and math geniuses, there's a little group for all Martians eventually, you've just got to put the right flyers out. 

Your job starts with picking which support group you'll run the next day, and then making sure the flyers you put out are going to the correct areas to appeal to all six Martians identified as beneficiaries - I told you these groups were exclusive. You then need to pick a refreshment that appeals to those people, whether they're into space-age donuts or something more disgusting-sounding like Dune Bug Pie. Then, you sleep in preparation to play doorman for the group. 

This is where the Playdate exclusivity works wonderfully, as you open the hatch in the door using the crank, winding it one way to take a good look at the alien through the giant peephole and then the other to slam it closed on the chancers. Some entry requirements will be based on sight or sound alone, like listening for the audible trumpers or one-eyed wonders, while others will require accessories of sorts that bring even more hilarity to proceedings. One group based on finding likeminded flinchers meant blasting a small horn in their face, while another required using a calculator to conjure up potentially complex math equations that successful candidates will instantly know the answer to. (Me on the other hand, not so much.)

Crumbs!

The problem is your job doesn't stop when you let someone else through that door. Once inside they'll help themselves to the snack you've prepared for them and often maniacally just rearrange everything on the table, stacking plates on pies and serving spoons on tiny notice boards in wanton disarray. It's then on you to quickly put them back into presentable order while the next potential supporter bangs intensely on the door. It's not always that easy as you'll first have to stack everything with your gangly tentacles so that you can use the crank to send out a sweeper bot to do away with any crumbs, and then 

The gameplay loops like this throughout, with support group themes becoming increasingly varied as you buy new support group cartridges and recipes from a travelling salesman who occasionally pops up on the other side of the hatch. You can really only do one group once, which keeps things feeling fresh throughout the surprisingly lengthy runtime for Mars After Midnight. 

It's also a visual delight too, with creative alien designs and inventive silliness throughout, combined with a chip tune soundtrack that's going to earworm itself into your consciousness. 

Mars After Midnight is out now exclusively on Playdate.

This upcoming shopkeeping simulator takes the fantasy setting of Baldur's Gate 3 and combines it with the relaxing life sim elements of Stardew Valley.

Merchants of Rosewall is an upcoming story-driven cozy management sim that sees players take on the role of a shopkeeper in the fantasy land of Rosewall. The game's main aim is to purchase resources, craft items, monitor stock levels, and get to know the customers who regularly drop by. This is the debut game from developer Big Blue Sky Games and is set to release later this year for PC. 

Set in a world at peace, Merchants of Rosewall doesn't feature any violence or combat, like other games set in fantasy settings, and instead focuses on the peaceful day-to-day lives of the residents of Rosewall. As revealed during a preview event for the upcoming game, the Big Blue Sky Games' title features a fresh spin on the characters we all know and love - including Giants, Orcs, Elves, and more - which all have unique backgrounds, personalities, and ambitions.  

You can watch the reveal trailer for Merchants of Rosewall below. 

The upcoming management sim retains what we love about games like Baldur's Gate 3, Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, etc., and offers exciting new features. For example, Merchants of Rosewall will feature a climate engine that calculates the price of items in your store depending on supply and demand as well as how difficult it is to obtain the materials due to outside factors such as the weather and shipping conditions. 

Elements like this will allow players who are really into the management side of things to get stuck in but won't punish those who want a more casual experience. Its developer also says that Merchants of Rosewall is not a farming sim and focuses more on crafting while also telling a story that touches upon real-world subjects such as capitalism and climate change. It'll also have a mix of 3D and 2D visuals with a mix of hand-painted textured and visual novel-style assets.

Similar to Baldur's Gate 3, there are a bunch of companions for players to get to know in the upcoming game. You can befriend these characters and even hire them to work alongside you in the store, as each one has a profession and very own workstation. Merchants of Rosewall even takes one of the best elements of Animal Crossing and allows players to visit each others' stores to buy and sell - even if you're not online at the same time. 

Find out what else we've got to look forward to this year with our new games 2024 list.

If there's one thing the city builder and management sim genre is missing, it's a cozy game full of cats and tanukis.

Enter Minami Lane, put together by the adorably named co-developers Doot and Blibloop and available now on Steam. As you may have guessed, Minami Lane is a tiny, cozy, casual management sim that tasks players with designing their own Japanese-inspired town. 

The very wholesome aim of this game is to maximize the happiness of the villagers that live in your town and to complete quests to fill the street with love - it doesn't get much cuter than that. Except it does! Alongside all the human inhabitants, Minami Lane players will also encounter several adorable tanukis and cats - and yes, you will be rewarded for petting the cats in this game. 

With a playtime of around 2-4 hours, Minami is a bite-sized city builder with management sim elements. You'll spend a good chunk of your time designing and personalizing the street, adding a variety of shops and attractions like ramen shops, Boba cafes, bookstores, and villager's homes - all of which have unique inventories and require different types of management.

You'll also need to work hard to keep the residents happy as they'll have their preferences and offer feedback each day on how the street is shaping up. Add things like floral bouquets and karaoke, and pick up trash, to attract more customers to your stores and make the residents of Minami Lane just a little bit happier. 

If you're more of a fan of designing a street than managing it, Minami Lane also has a sandbox mode that allows players to focus on creativity and relaxation without the stress of objectives, which makes this already chilled sim even more laid back. 

Minami Lane is available now for PC via Steam and only costs $4.99. Due to its recent launch, there's also a 20% discount available for a limited time.

Find out what other hidden gems are on the way with our upcoming indie games list. 

Two Point Campus' winter update is here - and it's free.

Along with the gentle sprinkle of snow you'll see peppering the place, the free Winter update is "decking the halls and gifting new in-game items, costumes, and much more" to players over the holidays.

"Players can now decorate their campuses with a whole host of yuletide treats, like Christmas trees, stockings, fairy lights, and even Santa’s sleigh – complete with reindeer team," the studio teases. "If that wasn’t enough, players can dress up their faculty and friends in Santa suits, elf outfits, giant snowman heads, or Krampus’…um…let’s call it fur."

That's right: Krampus is here to "wreak havoc on your holidays" with the new Challenge Mode "Two Point Krampus" in which you'll have to defend your students from "this festive spirit zapping menace".

There's more good tidings to be had, too. If the game's community can collectively raise $1 billion in-game dollars in the new level, everyone will get a "secret holly jolly item". You can keep track of the community's progress on the game's main menu.

Not going to get onto the game over the holidays? That's okay if you have the Space Academy DLC. 

"All items, costumes, and the challenge mode level will remain after the event period," the team explains. "All your festive items even work in Two Point Campus’ Space Academy DLC, which is out now on all platforms."

GamesRadar+ gave Two Point Campus four out of five stars when it released earlier this year, saying: "Being a dean isn't always rewarding, but Two Point Campus is a much more involved and rewarding sim than Hospital before it. The balancing act never stops, and it's a wilder ride than ever".

"However, Two Point Campus is not without its frustrations, particularly when it comes to the more fussy human-level interactions", our EIC, Sam, said in her summary. "Two Point Campus is a much more involved sim than Two Point Hospital, and sometimes misses a little of the early stage hand-holding to back that up. 

"But once you get a handle on the unique rhythms of this university simulator, Two Point Campus can be incredibly rewarding, particularly when it gives you the space to appreciate just how fine-tuned the needs of each of your campuses really can be." 

Here are the upcoming games of 2023 we really just can't wait for.

As is customary around this time of year, Two Point Campus has a spooky new update for you to try.

Available now until November 1 across all formats - PC, consoles (including Xbox/PC Game Pass), and Nintendo Switch, although the latter will get the update a little later than the others - the update includes "lots of new content that will be kept permanently after the Halloween hijinks are over", including "items, swappable costumes, and new challenges to complete while you're dodging the undead and your homework".

"Add a little pumpkin spice to your campus with a set of all-new eerie items to decorate in ghoulish fashion," the team explains. "Two Point Campus’ local radio station has also been taken over with some spooktacular new tunes. Looking to celebrate with style? Don one of the new outfits available to students and staff. Admit it, seeing a werewolf, mummy, or zombie walking to class wouldn’t be the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen in Two Point County. "

We also get a new Challenge Mode where "you can revisit some of your favourite Campus levels and experience brand new trials and tribulations" and you can team up with Lord Blaggard to protect your campus from zombies with the Siege at Noblestead.

GamesRadar+ gave Two Point Campus four out of five stars when it released earlier this year, saying: "Being a dean isn't always rewarding, but Two Point Campus is a much more involved and rewarding sim than Hospital before it. The balancing act never stops, and it's a wilder ride than ever".

"However, Two Point Campus is not without its frustrations, particularly when it comes to the more fussy human-level interactions", our EIC, Sam, said in her summary. "Two Point Campus is a much more involved sim than Two Point Hospital, and sometimes misses a little of the early stage hand-holding to back that up. But once you get a handle on the unique rhythms of this university simulator, Two Point Campus can be incredibly rewarding, particularly when it gives you the space to appreciate just how fine-tuned the needs of each of your campuses really can be." 

Horror isn't just for Halloween, you know - here are our tips for the very best horror games you can enjoy all year round.

Two Point Campus cheats might sound like an exciting way to mess around with the game without restrictions, but unfortunately there aren't any cheats in Two Point Campus, despite the tendency of sim games like this to include them. However, that doesn't mean there are no options for those who want an easier or more customizable experience. If you're after that, seek out the Two Point Campus sandbox mode, which we'll cover in more detail below, as well as some third party mods for those who want to tinker with their college rules in a little more depth. We've got Two Point Campus cheats - or lack thereof - covered in our guide below.

Two Point Campus cheats

As we’ve mentioned, Two Point Campus does not have any proper in-game cheats or cheat codes. However, Two Point Campus does have third-party cheats through WeMod. This includes the ability to get unlimited money, increase the learning rate of students, and maximum Happiness. Although these tools will only work with the PC version of the game on Steam and the Xbox launcher.

Two Point Campus Sandbox Mode

If you’re trying to avoid third-party solutions, Two Point Campus does have a customizable sandbox mode outside of the main game that (kind of) lets you cheat by adding custom settings. To access this, start off on the main menu and then choose the ‘Sandbox’ option from the list. From there, you’ll need to choose a new Sandbox slot, then choose any of the 12 campuses, and lastly choose your mode. Your options are Standard, Creative, Challenge, and Custom.

Creative is the most cheat-like mode off the bat. You start with a lot of Two Point Campus money and Course Points, you can make money significantly easier, and everything is unlocked. This is for those who just want to make a delightful campus free from financial woes and is the closest in-game answer to an unlimited money cheat. 

For more direct control over your Two Point Campus experience, you’ll want to pick the Custom mode. This allows you to change a few extra settings to make things even easier. You can increase your starting money up to $2,000,000 and starting Kudosh in Two Point Campus up to 15,000. There’s also an adjustable income multiplier and you can change the campus’ temperature, your starting Two Point Campus course points, and whether or not you face inconveniences, such as Disasters and Invaders. Certain mechanics and challenges do go out the window of course - there's no need to look for Two Point Campus bookworms if you never need the rewards they offer - but the obvious appeal here is a consequence-free college-creation engine to play with. Of course, you could even tighten all these constraints and make Two Point Campus much tougher.

The Custom options for Sandbox mode do feel like they’re missing a few things though. Things like happiness, hunger, and energy can’t be influenced so third-party cheats and trainers might be your only option if you really want to mess around with those mechanics.

To run a profitable college in the main game, you’ve got to do it properly, building your campus up with new students and buildings in each academic year. We have plenty of Two Point Campus tips that you can read through to help you get started with managing your universities and profiting off those undergraduates. 

Keep Two Point Campus Student Happiness high and you'll have cheery students that love uni life, are keen to learn, and keep paying those all-important tuition fees. Of course, improving happiness doesn't come cheap, but the alternative is having unhappy students that refuse to pay their fees and could drop out if you don't spend on the necessary cheer-boosting changes! It's therefore in your best interests to keep your Two Point Campus students cheered up by providing a clean campus with lots of entertainment opportunities. Below, we've laid out everything you need to know about Student Happiness in Two Point Campus, including how to increase it.

Two Point Campus Student Happiness explained

Student Happiness is a really important stat in Two Point Campus, and maintaining a decent level of it should be one of your main priorities. In the bottom-right corner of your screen, you’ll find the average Student Happiness of all your students. We reckon that keeping this above 60% – but ideally 70% or higher – should be adequate for running your campus. You can check on how individual students are feeling by clicking on them or by looking at the full list under Personnel Management.

The key thing to note is that happy students learn faster and get better Two Point Campus student grades. Better grades will mean very few or no failing students that might drop out and stop paying fees and you might get some award at the end of each year. Students that are feeling happy will also move a bit faster.

Conversely, grumpy students will refuse to pay their tuition fees and may even drop out. There’s no way to get students back once they’ve left or been removed, so if you have an exodus of unhappy undergraduates, it could be the end of your campus as you lose funding from tuition fees. Bear in mind that staff members also have happiness stats, and there’s more below on how to help them too.

Good Two Point Campus grades for your students are crucial to your universities' success at the end of each academic year, and are raised by numerous factors such as happiness, resources and staff. In many ways, the student grades that your campuses produce are the most effective and important measure of your performance in Two Point Campus as they can even get you some extra rewards. Good grades should be reflected in the end-of-year awards and students that avoid failing the year will continue to study and pay their fees, so it's worth understanding how grades work. Below we'll cover how to improve your students' grades in Two Point Campus, and how the different mechanics come together in this regard.

Improving and raising grades for your students in Two Point Campus

Student Grades in Two Point Campus are affected by numerous factors, all of which contribute to the final grades they get. While you can check the grades of individual students, you can see the average grade of all your students in the bottom-right corner of the screen, so you can quickly refer to this to see how grades are changing over time. Here are all the main elements that impact your student's grades:

• Happiness: Two Point Campus happiness is affected by dozens of factors and ultimately about meeting their needs. The happier they are, the harder they work, and the higher their grades get. If your students are unhappy, they'll fail classes and might drop out altogether.
• Teacher skills and training: Obviously teachers have to have at least one level of training in the subject they're teaching, but those colleges with a training room can improve their knowledge of that subject even further. Then when they teach pupils, it results in a greater knowledge of the subject. If you don't have a training room, check to see what teachers are looking for work in the "Hire" menu - there might be a genius on offer.
• Private Tuition: Speaking of which, building Private Tuition rooms and staffing them with additional teachers allows you to improve grades further outside of the classroom. Again, training plays a big part in this, but you can also manually select individual students, check their grades, and press the icon of the chalkboard at the bottom to force them to go to Tuition when it's next available - some lazy students need a push, after all.  
• Libraries: Students regularly go to the campus libraries between sessions. Make sure the libraries are stocked with good furniture and bookcases to match the subjects being taught, and that an assistant with a good Library Management skill is constantly available.
• Classroom and Lecture Hall resources and upgrades: The actual rooms in which subjects are taught - Lecture Halls, specialized Classrooms, and yes, the Libraries and Tuition rooms, all impact grades. Make sure they're stocked with any items and furniture that can aid learning - like the Giant Library Reception - and use Two Point Campus best upgrades and research projects to enhance existing props, such as the lectern in the Lecture Room. These are expensive, but considering it's a permanent upgrade to the room, it can definitely be worth it.

Beyond all that, a major element in this is making sure that there's enough to go around of everything - enough happiness-boosting elements, enough rooms, enough teachers, all of it. The more students you have, the more they'll need, so make sure that you can always supply them. That even goes for less-than-obvious qualities like  Two Point Campus attractiveness - there's not enough space for everyone to look at the same flower.

Grades themselves impact the money you earn, and the overall success of your campus. Students who earn higher grades and learn more add to the "XP bonus income" you make monthly, so smart students are also profitable students - er, not to be too callous about the education of young minds. There are also many contextual objectives based around your average grades campus-wide, so it's not enough to have a few excellent eggheads - you want to raise the overall quality of learning as a whole. You also don't want to spend too many Two Point Campus course points if you think you can avoid it - setting up bigger objectives without the infrastructure and support systems ready to go is a path to academic doom, as one teacher can't support hundreds of students.

Two Point Campus money is essential to keeping your campuses running, your staff paid, and your financial problems to a minimum. Turning a profit is the only way you're going to keep your colleges afloat, and failing to do so will only lead to more problems - a sudden loss of cash can mean failing grades, staff quitting, and all your hard earned work going down the drain, especially when money becomes a lot more scarce around the Spiffinmoore wizarding campus.

Fortunately, we'll explain how to make money fast in Two Point Campus below, including to how to take out loans and repay them easily enough. If you want to know how to avoid going into debt and make money fast for your university, we've got some pointers for the basics of Two Point Campus money-making here.

How to make money in Two Point Campus quickly

To make money in Two Point Campus is fairly easy, even a passive experience, as most money is earned automatically via the rent and tuition fees paid monthly by your students, as well as any minor income made from certain decorations like vending machines. It's important to remember that money is different to the Two Point Campus kudosh currency, which we explain in more detail at the linked guide.

The key to making money is more about minimising your losses comparatively, as well as looking at your monthly expenditure/income and seeing how it works. We'll explain that below to begin with, though if you want to skip past the process altogether, you could always find out about cheats for Two Point Campus and what third party help is out there.

Monthly profit/loss table and XP bonus explained

There are six elements to take note of in your Monthly Profit/Loss table, which can be viewed by hovering the cursor over the money number in the bottom right corner. This displays your most recent monthly financial statement, not your current financial situation (so if you hired a bunch of teachers since your last turn-of-the-month bills and payments, that won't come up in staff wages yet).

Below we've laid out the full details of these statements, what each element means and how they impact your income.

• MONTHLY PROFIT/LOSS: The sum total of your income, or loss. Calculated by adding up all the other numbers.
• Tuition Fees (profit): The money earned and paid by your pupils. Determined by the value of the course, the number of students, and the fees you set at the beginning of the year. Students who are unhappy may refuse to pay fees.
• Rent (profit): Money paid by your students to you for their dormitories. Universal across all students, and paid until they leave university - one way or another.
• XP Bonus (profit): A general bonus that grows according to numerous factors - including student grades improving, teachers learning skills, challenges completed and general "good play", where everything you have on the campus all improves in meaningful ways.
• Staff Wages (loss): The total money paid to all your staff at the end of the month. Salaries can be altered in the staff menu, but lowering them negatively impacts your staff's happiness. 
• Loan Repayments (loss): The standard repayment of any loans you've taken out.
• Loan Interest (loss): The added interest on top of the loan that you also pay out.

Though it'll vary from player to player, the big factors you'll need to pay attention to month-to-month are the XP bonus and Staff Wages, which are by far the most variable. The XP bonus in particular can vary from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands, depending on your performance in the game, and can ensure you stay profitable even in otherwise unprofitable times. In fact, it's a perfectly valid strategy to strain so hard for good performances that the XP bonus cancels out all the other expenditure along the way.

Two Point Campus loans, repayments and more

Players can take out loans in Two Point Campus by clicking the little icon of a building at the bottom of the screen next to the staff/characters icon, then clicking on the money bag icon that appears.

This then gives you three options for lenders - Two Point Bank, Swindles and Smell My Cash. Each one offers differing amounts of money at a different rate, but you can control exactly how much you borrow with the sliding scales attached. The bigger the percentage, the more money you'll have to pay back. The less time you have to repay it, the bigger amount you have to give per month. 

Once you have taken out a loan, you get the money instantly, but are locked in to repaying it monthly. The formula for repayment is, from what we can work out:

• (Total loan amount x stated interest percentage) / loan duration

That's not a big deal though, as the little box explaining how much you pay monthly makes it pretty clear what your target goal is. As a rule, there's nothing bad about taking out a loan - it's a good way to invest in business decisions that'll pay off later and a great method when it comes to How to increase Campus Level in Two Point Campus - but you shouldn't borrow more than you need, to minimise your debt. We also really don't recommend taking out more than one loan at a time if you can avoid it, though sometimes circumstances can force your hand.

If you have enough, you can always head back into this menu at any point to repay your entire debt. You should definitely do this if it's a safe option - it brings your monthly income back to normal and brings your finances a little more under control.

How to stop yourself from losing money and going into debt in Two Point Campus

If you find yourself sliding headlong into debt and "the Red" in Two Point Campus, you're in trouble. Players can't buy anything while in negative numbers, meaning they can't do a lot to help reverse their loss once they are in debt. However, here's some helpful advice to help keep your campus financially stable. Of course, if you're looking for more general advice, our Two Point Campus tips will do a lot to keep you surviving the worst events a university manager can go through.

• If you're losing money, take action. It's not enough to wait until you're in the negative - if you go for several months while making a loss every time, start making changes to prevent calamity. The less money you have in the bank, the harder it is to course-correct. 
• Sell what you don't need. Extra rooms, items and decorations can all be sold. It might negatively affect stats, but sometimes hard choices have to be made. Focus on inessentials and vanity items first. Research and Training rooms, as useful as they are, can be burnt up in a pinch, as can outside decorations. Alternatively, some of the best Two Point Campus research projects and upgrades can actually net you a big chunk of money - though you'll need to have a teacher at work in the lab. 
• Invest in what you have. Make sure your money is spent as effectively as possible. Rather than hire an expensive new employee, try training the ones you have. If you have extra rooms, sell or repurpose them. Pause the game, look at your situation, and work out how what little money you have left can be used most effectively. 
• Take out a loan. It's risky, but maybe the best idea is to invest in some new classrooms or facilities to improve your course - resulting in happier students and more XP Bonuses. If you can start making profit again, that's what's most important.
• Change salaries and tuition fees. Tuition fees can be changed at the start of the new year, while staff salaries can be altered in the management tabs. Paying your staff less or demanding more money from students won't make them happy, but it can help in the short term.
• Complete challenges. The little challenges, evaluations, inspections and more can drop tens of thousands of dollars into your pocket - a useful perk in a pinch. 
• Don't expand unnecessarily. If loans aren't an option, don't make the mistake of trying to go bigger. Developing new courses and expanding your student base always means you have to pay more to keep them happy, as the resources you already have won't be enough to support the new influx. Sure, the initial payout might be more, but if you can't support them all, they'll eventually go berserk and leave you. 

Two Point Campus Kudosh is a valuable resource that can be spent on permanently unlocking new furniture and decorations for your campuses. Although, earning it can be a bit tricky as you need to complete specific quests and objectives to get any. This means that earning Kudosh can seem like a drip-feed process at times, with the game demanding you spend it far faster than you seem to be earning it. However, there are ways to earn Kudosh faster in Two Point Campus, and we'll lay out the fastest methods for earning Kudosh below, as well as some advice about how you should be spending and managing your Kudosh funds.

How to get Kudosh in Two Point Campus fast

Kudosh in Two Point Campus can be obtained in multiple ways throughout the game, usually in small quantities. Here's every way you can earn it:

• Career Goals: These are the biggest, best ways to earn Kudosh. The Career Hub in the top-right corner lists all the long-term objectives across the game, based around completing simple tasks in great numbers, and Kudosh is awarded at every milestone. The minimum is 50 Kudosh, and it increases as you hit larger milestones, so if you ever need a large chunk of the stuff, look up the Career Hub and see which you're closest to. You can also pin these objectives so that you never lose track of them.
  
• Random objectives: Every now and then the game will offer small random objectives, such as the Suggestion Boxes, Inspections or rebuffing intruders. Complete these for small quantities of Kudosh - usually 5-10 each.
  
• Bookworms: It's a small thing, but the Two Point Campus bookworms that appear randomly in certain campuses have a small chance to drop Kudosh when prodded. It's not a lot, usually 5, but it's worth keeping an eye out for the chance. Collecting worms where the opportunity arises can ultimately add up to hefty rewards.
  
• End of Year Awards: It's a little hard to predict, but the end of year rewards grant Kudosh for mastering certain elements, like Teacher of the Year and hosting the most clubs - with 10 Kudosh for every award you win. This means that if you're playing well, the End of Year awards can be a goldmine of Kudosh income.
  
• Earning stars and star rating: Earning a star for your Campus will earn you a huge amount of Kudosh - anywhere from 100 to 250+, depending on the campus. Admittedly you're earning Kudosh in part to get stars, but it helps to know you'll be paid back somewhat once you get there.
  
• Research projects: If you have a research room set up, meeting the right conditions will allow you to start research projects that earn you Kudosh - usually about 25, depending on the exact project. This is a guaranteed method, yes, but it's slow and requires a teacher constantly at work. Might be better to put them towards one of the  Two Point Campus best upgrades and research projects instead.

Of course, if you want a more general approach to the game, we've got Two Point Campus tips laid out here for you to check out!

How to spend Kudosh

Kudosh can be spent in the item menu on any item with the Kudosh symbol on it. Keep in mind that spending Kudosh on an item doesn't get you the item, and instead permanently unlocks the item for the rest of the game, making it available for purchase with money in Two Point Campus on all campuses, not just the one you're in at that moment.

We highly recommend prioritising Kudosh spending on items with function, not just those that look good, as spending cleverly is a great method on how to increase Campus Level in Two Point Campus. Things you'll use often, that serve a unique purpose, or boost multiple stats are all priority purchases. We also recommend keeping at least 30 Kudosh in the bank at any one time, so that if the game suddenly demands a specific item from you for the sake of building the Two Point Campus happiness stat, you either have the funds to get it, or are at least part of the way there. Some demanded items can cost hundreds of Kudosh, so you'll need to start using the techniques listed above to their utmost.

Use these Two Point Campus tips to help you build and manage great universities that remain full of cheerful and hardworking students, well-trained staff, and all the necessary facilities. Keeping those things in order is a lot easier said than done, however, with so many things to consider to keep everyone happy and healthy, but also avoid going under in Two Point Campus. Master your managing skills, keep your students content, and get those tuition fees rolling in and you’ll dominate the educational institutions of Two Point County. Don't be fooled by the silly appearance of this game as it’s packed with complex systems that you need to understand to run the best possible campuses. So here are 10 tips to help you get started with Two Point Campus.

Hover over Two Point Campus objectives and items to see tooltips

When starting out with Two Point Campus, you’ll have a lot of uni terminology thrown your way. Most features are available to you right away but that also means some aren’t explained to you until you reach other campuses much later in the game. To help you out, make sure you hover over any objectives to get a more thorough explanation of what to do, particularly if you’ve forgotten what a particular term means or which menu to go to check a statistic.

This also goes for any furniture and items you can place in a room as you can see any special bonuses, costs, and conditions that an item has. Not all items have these in-game effects and can instead act purely as decoration for an aesthetically pleasing campus, so you should avoid these items to save money. For example, the regular Library Reception has no effects, while the Giant Library Reception increases Learning Power and Attractiveness but is much more expensive.

Use the pause feature to get organized

The Two Point Campus pause feature is essential to successful university management. The game condenses entire academic years into minutes, so you’ll quickly realize that running a college and meeting the needs of all its students and employees is impossible without conveniently stopping time whenever you need to. Use this feature to complete multiple construction projects at once in the blink of an eye, easily move staff around to work on urgent jobs, and buy yourself time to avoid missing multiple challenge deadlines and student requests. 

Start your Two Point Campus off with the essentials

When you get introduced to a new campus, you’ll want to make sure you hit pause and build up your campus with just the essentials. Make sure you check off the required buildings to get things ready for students, then build a few extra essential buildings, assuming you’ve got money to spare – we recommend a Library, a Dormitory with several beds, and a Bathroom with at least a couple of toilets. This strikes a balance between ensuring a reasonable level of Two Point Campus happiness for your students and staff, and avoiding debt by splashing all the tuition fees on fancy Lecture Theatres. In general, start small and build or expand rooms to meet needs, and don’t spend loads on new plots. You also don't want to go overboard in spending Two Point Campus course points if you don't think you have the resources to back up your promises - spreading yourself thin never goes well.

Place a plant, posters, and a bin in every Two Point Campus room

There are a few cheap things you can buy in Two Point Campus that will provide nice bonuses to all your rooms. Posters are cheap to unlock with Two Point Campus Kudosh and buy with money, require no maintenance, and boost a room’s Attractiveness. Plants are similarly cheap and boost Attractiveness but require a bit of maintenance. Bins are small, making them easy to fit in rooms to boost Hygiene and reduce litter. Finally, you might also want to consider hand sanitiser and rugs to boost Hygiene and Attractiveness respectively. This will all contribute to a room’s Room Prestige – higher prestige means students and staff will be happier and healthier. 

Save money in Two Point Campus or take out loans

Having some cash to spend in Two Point Campus is crucial for developing your college further or getting yourself out of a sticky financial situation. As a rule, we recommend having at least $30,000 saved, which should be enough for most items and room types.

However, when this just isn’t possible, loans will let you risk a short-term cash injection in exchange for a long-term repayment. There are three loan types offering different loan sizes and repayment rates, so picking the right one for your situation is important. Don’t just opt for the smallest loan and then get stuck again, prompting you to take out another loan. This’ll cause you to spiral into debt, which is obviously pretty bad. Invest your loan carefully to increase your profits and save yourself from a dire financial situation, but these should be seen as a last resort!

Student Happiness and Grades are key in Two Point Campus

Having money to spend on your Two Point Campus is important, but you won’t get any money if you have unhappy, failing students. Their hefty tuition fees are largely what keeps your campuses afloat, so keep them cheered up with Student Lounges and parties, and ensure they pass each year and pay those fees. Make sure you regularly check on all Two Point Campus student grades under Personnel Management to see who needs help. Any student with a grade lower than C definitely needs to go to Private Tuition, or use the tips at the link provided. 

Two Point Campus Clubs buff your students

Students can sign up to clubs to receive numerous benefits that will improve their time at your university. For example, the Power-Nap Club allows members to regain Energy anywhere, while Book Club members learn faster. Students will often request club items which have their own benefits such as the Speed Walking Wheel for the Speed Walking Club. 

Keep Two Point Campus staff happy too

Students pay for the campus, but the campus pays the staff. Without money, you won’t be able to pay your staff what it needs, leading to resignations, so it’s important to look after your staff too. You can increase the wages for individual employees which will increase their happiness, but you’ll obviously need the profit to cover the pay rise.

A decent Staff Room stocked with items that will boost their stats is also important. The Sofa (not the Brown one) will develop Friendships, dart boards will provide Entertainment, and Tea and Snack Tables will boost Food and Drink levels. Add in a few posters to boost Attractiveness and you should have a high Room Prestige that’ll cheer up the staff.

Complete Two Point Campus Career Goals for Kudosh

Kudosh is an important currency in Two Point Campus that is used to permanently unlock new items, including some of the important stat-boosting ones previously mentioned. While there are a few methods for getting Kudosh, the main way is through Career Goals. Click the Career Goals briefcase icon in the top-right corner of your screen to open the list of Career Goals objectives. You’ll work through most of them simply by playing, so check back every so often to see if you’ve completed any and then make sure you collect your Kudosh to move onto the objective’s next stage, which’ll award even more! Of course, if you know how to find Two Point Campus bookworms, you can get a few more extra Kudosh coins along the way.

Read all your Two Point Campus messages

Finally, you’ll likely be spending a lot of your time reading through your in-game inbox to keep on top of your messages. Since they come in pretty often, it’s a good idea to occasionally pause the game and read through all messages, which range from promotions that’ll offer a challenge in exchange for a reward (you should always accept these, by the way), student requests for events and new furniture, and your monthly earnings report.

Student requests will usually task you with unlocking an item with Kudosh if you haven’t already, and then spending money to place it somewhere on your campus. Fulfilling these requests will cheer up your students and provide other stat-boosting opportunities depending on what they request. However, some requests can be incredibly costly, so if you simply don’t have the Kudosh and likely won’t before the request expires, don’t hesitate to reject the request to clear your inbox.

All this information should be more than enough to get you grabbing A+'s and financially secure - but then again, you could always take the easy option and try out some Two Point Campus cheats...

Use this complete Two Point Campus guide to learn about all the essential things for running a successful university campus. You'll need to know all about making money, and keeping students and employees happy, to levelling up your campus, and finding Bookworms, if you want your campuses to succeed. If you're not sure what any of those things mean, or you're a little overwhelmed from all the introductory tutorials at each campus, this guide and the tips within should clear things up. You'll be on your way to becoming top of the class in Campus Management 101 in no time. Here’s everything you need to know to run the best educational institutions in Two Point Campus.

If you're curious to know what we thought about the game, you can read our Two Point Campus review too.

Top tips to get top marks

These 10 Two Point Campus tips offer some great advice for any player. Whether you’re just getting started with your first few campuses or you’re looking to improve your existing campuses and reach three-star ratings, these tips will help you make your campus profitable and full of keen students.

How to make money

Running a campus is expensive work. You need to pay for new buildings, new rooms, and staff wages, so knowing how to make Two Point Campus money will help you keep you out of the negative and turning a profit. If things get too dire, you’ll also find some advice on taking out loans to fund your educational ventures in this guide.

How to get Kudosh

Money pays for items and construction, but you need to earn and spend Two Point Campus Kudosh to unlock certain items in the first place. This currency is earned much more slowly than money and through some quite specific means, but it’s necessary to permanently unlock a lot of furniture items that can really spruce up a room.

How to get good grades

It’s well and good keeping your campus open by making it profitable but are the students actually performing well? Students with high Two Point Campus grades are going to be happy, successful, and will keep paying their tuition fees, so it’s in your interests to provide a high standard of education for your undergraduates. Make sure you know how to up their grades with our guide.

Keep campus students happy

Academically successful students are obviously good in any campus, but they can’t succeed if they’re not happy! Two Point Campus Student Happiness is one of the most important stats in the game, but it’s affected by lots of different things. Read our guide so you know what exactly affects happiness so that you can keep your students entertained and ready to study.

Raise your Campus Level

Knowing how to increase Campus Level in Two Point Campus will help you expand your colleges further. You’ll get extra Course Points to run bigger and better courses, and access to employee candidates with better qualifications.

Earn Course Points

Knowing how you can get Two Point Campus Course Points is really important as they’re what you need to upgrade your courses and add new ones to your curriculum. Luckily, they’re not that difficult to get, but it’s not obvious, so make sure you’re clued up with our guide.

Make your campuses nicer

Your students and staff will really appreciate a safe and attractive campus with all the right facilities. Make sure you put a bit of time and money into beautifying things to increase Two Point Campus attractiveness and make everyone happier.

Best upgrades

Lots of essential room items are upgradeable thanks to research projects you can undertake at any Research Lab you have built. The best Two Point Campus upgrades are the ones that increase the rate at which other upgrades take place, earn you money and Kudosh, or improve your students’ learning abilities.

Bookworms

Devious Two Point Campus Bookworms have a chance to suddenly burst out of the ground around your campuses for a split second before burrowing back into the soil. If you’re fast enough, clicking one before it burrows away will get you a small reward depending on its type!

Cheats

As with Two Point Hospital, there aren’t any official Two Point Campus cheats or cheat codes that you can use in your game to make things easier, however some third-party tools might be able to help you out instead. However, Two Point Campus includes a sandbox mode that allows you to freely mess around with a few settings to create your own experience – not exactly cheats, but quite close.

Two Point Campus bookworms are little invertebrates that appear in the Mitton campus and spawn outside buildings from that point on. Players have to catch five bookworms for the objective that initially triggers them to appear, but they'll spawn even after that.

But how to catch bookworms in Two Point Campus? They're actually around more often than you might think, but their unpredictable nature and short window of opportunity to catch them makes them incredibly elusive. Fortunately we'll cover how to catch Two Point Campus bookworms as easily as possible, with all the rewards and challenges involved in doing so.

Finding Two Point Campus bookworms explained

Two Point Campus bookworms spawn randomly outside your university building, either in grass or in pathways, but never indoors. They appear as small worms that burrow up from the ground, poke their head out momentarily, then dive back into the earth and disappear, Diglett-like, if not caught. 

Between their appearance and disappearance you have a small window - about 5-10 seconds - to click on them, which "catches" them. If done right, they vanish and provide the player with a small reward (usually Two Point Campus money), though keep in mind that oddly enough, pausing the game with the space bar doesn't affect the bookworms, who appear to be immune to your time-freezing abilities and can still continue their animations before disappearing.

Bookworms spawn randomly, but expect to see one appear roughly every five minutes. However, their small size, the fact that they appear outside the buildings, their short window of appearance, time stop immunity and their unpredictable spawning means that noticing them is very hard to do. We recommend zooming out to see as much of the campus as possible at one time - you can appreciate everything you've done for Two Point Campus attractiveness while you do it - and watching open greenery, where they stand out very noticably. When you see one, drop everything and click on it as fast as you can. Even once it burrows beneath the ground, it's still technically there for a second or two and can be claimed.

The reality is that you'll probably miss most Bookworms, but by casting a wide and vigilant eye, you'll notice more than most people. 

Two Point Campus Bookworm rewards

There's three varieties of Bookworms that we know of, each one of which offers its own rewards when caught. The better Bookworms tend to be a lot rarer - we've only seen one Paperback Bookworm across hours of gameplay - but considering they're all caught the same way, it makes no difference. Grab them whenever you can, and over time you'll earn significant bonuses, like Two Point Campus kudosh - especially if you're also working on one of the randomly generated quests to catch five of them.

• Textbook Bookworm (common): $10
• Furry Tail Bookworm (rare): $50
• Paperback Bookworm (very rare): 5 Kudosh

The best Two Point Campus upgrades and research projects are nearly always those that return the most rewards for the initial time and money investment, so you should prioritise them by the common use and accessibility of the reward. Or, to put it more simply, research the things you'll want to upgrade most often, especially considering that research projects in Two Point Campus carry over between colleges and don't have to be researched again - though you do still need to install the upgrades, if you've got them.

Below we've scrubbed Two Point Campus to find all the best research projects and upgrades you can get in the game, whether for higher grades, Kudosh or more, as well as the best ways to research projects quickly and as fast as possible.

Best upgrades to research in Two Point Campus

The best upgrades to research in Two Point Campus from the Research Hub are those you'll get the most use out of. Researching isn't too expensive, but it is incredibly time-consuming, so committing to a project means you should pick the best ones. Here's some key focuses you should get early on:

• Lectern: Every course in Two Point Campus requires a Lecture Hall, and upgrading the Lectern improves all learning done within that Lecture Hall, improving the Two Point Campus student grades. It's a no-brainer to stop your students being no-brainers, and serves as a general upgrade to all learning done from that point on.
• Research Hub: Actually upgrading the Hub itself makes it more efficient, decreasing the time needed for all research projects run through it from that point onwards. Get it early, and you'll thank yourself for it later.
• Omni-Cure: Once you hit later campuses, injuries are incredibly common, and have a negative effect on student happiness - and thus everything else. Making your Medical Office more efficient at churning out painkillers and antidepressants is a big help here.
• Training Pod: Improving your Staff skills is almost as important as researching new tech, but the Training Pod is slow - at least until you sink some time to researching better models. Once done, you'll be able to pump out new staff skills much more efficiently.
• Kudosh/Money projects: These are, to some extent, randomly generated and hard to predict, varying from campus to campus - but the principle is the same either way. If you've got nothing else to research and staff without any important work, put them here and make sure they're earning you something back.

Past that, you should focus on researching the courses and projects you run most often. If you're commonly teaching science, research upgrades to that course, for example. It's ensuring the biggest payback for your investment - like the Lectern, on a slightly smaller scale. Building your infrastructure and resources in tandem with increasing Two Point Campus course points is the key to victory. 

How to research things in Two Point Campus

Researching as a mechanic is broken into several steps, which we've laid out below for those who need a refresher.

1. First, build a Research Lab, a dedicated room for researching projects. The lab unlocks in the Mitton University level.
2. Select a teacher and assign them to the Lab like you would with any other room. Teachers can have the research skill (represented by a microscope), which means they research more efficiently.
3. Click on the Research Hub - the giant device in the room - and press "Start New Project".
4. A list of possible projects to be researched will present themselves. Some projects are locked until you meet the right conditions, such as staff with certain skills or specific rooms.
5. Select the project you want and pay the "Greenlight Fee" to have the assigned teacher begin research. There will be an estimated research time attached.
6. When the project is done, you'll automatically be provided with the rewards and alerted.

The Greenlight Fee is usually very small, but the cost of Research is actually in staff wages. Because projects require a teacher constantly at work, it means you lose Two Point Campus money by having a professional looking through microscopes when they could be teaching courses or running private tuition. That doesn't mean that research isn't worth it, but the price is higher than you think - and that's before we get into upgrades.

How to upgrade in Two Point Campus

Once you have an upgrade for your equipment researched, it isn't applied automatically. Click on the object you've researched an upgrade for - for example, the Lectern - and there'll be an icon of a gear with an upwards arrow next to it. Hovering the mouse over that will give you a price of upgrades, a staff requirement (nearly always a janitor with at least one level in Mechanics), and the time needed for that upgrade, which varies according to skill level of that staff member. Click on the upgrade button to commit yourself to the improvement.

Items that are upgraded are done so passively, and still allow the item to be used during that time - so the Omni-Cure can still be used while the janitor is upgrading it, for example. Items you buy always appear in an unenhanced state; nothing comes already upgraded. Also keep in mind that the Janitor will be busy while they tinker with it, so they can't pick up litter and maintain objects for Two Point Campus attractiveness.

How to speed up Two Point Campus research

Research in Two Point Campus can be agonisingly slow, especially for some of the bigger upgrades. Here's a few ways to increase speed in the Research Lab:

• Upgrade the Research Hub itself, as mentioned above.
  
• Place Furniture in the Lab that boosts Research Power, such as the Research Console.
  
• Train your staff in Research in the Training Room.
  
• Ensure that staff are happy, energised, and don't have other commitments that pull them away.

Why won't the students and teachers at my Two Point Campus Knight School recognize its alluring aesthetics? Is it the haphazard way I've plastered posters across its stone walls, or the avant-garde nature of my exterior floral arrangements? Whatever it is, those who wander the halls and grounds of my Knight School aren't best pleased with how it's all looking - but at least the grades are good. 

As the sequel to Two Point Hospital, Two Point Campus is expanding the Two Point world in so many different ways. The most meaningful of them is getting to know the students on a more personal level. You'll not only be looking at how your campus runs from a topline perspective, but also catering to your students' individual needs, from their lust for a specific decorative item, to something they need for their course, or organizing social events like a Student Union party or celebrity cook-off. Fulfilling those more macro-level challenges boosts their happiness, and in turn, their ability - or willingness - to learn. 

Of course, it's also about making sure they have places to eat, clean themselves, and sleep too, and even have a space to air their concerns with the pastoral care assistants. But it's figuring out why little Sally is about to flunk out or Peter's stopped paying his tuition fees that add another managerial layer to Two Point Campus. 

Witches in the Knight

Ensuring you provide that level of care is the thread that holds the entire Two Point Campus experience together, while each of the levels - or campuses - will introduce a new class type. This particular preview is all about exploring the wilder side of Two Point Campus' new classes - Knight School and Wizardry. While my fellow Two Point aficionado, Rachel, explored the Gastronomy school alongside the introductory levels, I was let loose on two new campuses. The olde-worlde castle-esque Noblestead is where I'll be building areas for jousting tournaments and sword fight training grounds, while the imposing Spiffinmoore is the heavily Hogwarts-inspired setting for potions and spellcasting lessons. 

Both campuses are visually impressive, with each new building you create taking on the external theme of the campus. Inside, of course, you can have fun creating the unique classrooms, with the various Wizardry classes creating awesome rooms with different elements to enjoy. You'll start with a Potions room, complete with a giant magic cauldron where your students can try their hand at making all sorts of concoctions. Although, you'll then quickly need to complement that with a medical room, for, umm, obvious reasons. Oh, and did I mention there's a literal curse on the campus? Yeah, good luck with that. 

The Knight School meanwhile, really makes use of your campus grounds, with the rooms required starting with a Battle Ground where your wannabe knights can learn how to wield a sword. Later, you'll also unlock the jousting area which really dials in on Two Point Studios' trademark humor, as the jousting in question is really students running at each other with sticks and horse costumes draped around their waists. 

It's great that the courses keep evolving too. You can use an in-game currency called Course Points to upgrade each one, unlocking new rooms and no doubt additional drama with each passing school year. The wizarding school, for example, adds a Spells room where students can step into a dramatic dueling ring for some wand-based antics. You can also use a separate in-game currency to add fresh items to your decorating and building arsenal. Kudosh is earned by completing a variety of different challenges, and you can then spend that on items that help better theme your campus to your classes. As expected, it's utterly moreish. 

Before long, my Two Point Campus version of Hogwarts was littered with broom stands and wall-mounted flaming torches. The entertainment options moved away from dances and bake-offs, to fiddling with crystal balls and hosting (Dark) Arts classes. The longer you play, the further you can lean into the theme of each campus, especially with the addition of personalized goals for your students (also themed to the classes) and the range of social events. Thankfully all those little extra touches finally fixed my aesthetics rating problem.

While it's not a direct competitor to Hogwarts Legacy, Two Point Campus' take on the school of witchcraft and wizardry is a surprising alternative. Being a voyeur over your budding wand-wielders, having an impact on their lives, and creating their academic world is never dissatisfying. Story might be light here, but trying to run a school amid meteor showers and other curse-related events is always chaotic and gives off its own Harry Potter-esque flair. 

Goth clowns

But you can also make it your own, as it's also great to blend classes. Your Wizardry campus doesn't just have to be wands and potions, as once you've got the Course Points you can start adding other courses into your curriculum. What does a Wizarding / Clown Campus look like? Sounds like a great experiment to me, especially when you think about goth clowns… or is that just a mime?

It's also the observable antics that really makes Two Point Campus pop. Not only are there some medical-related blunders that tip a heavy cap to Two Point Hospital but appropriately themed to each campus - like the pumpkin head for the Wizardry school - but there are also brilliantly silly behaviors from the teachers too. Watch them in the lecture theatre and there's plenty of fun to be had depending on the subject they're teaching. 

I particularly love the new 'invader' mechanics. In both the Knight School and Wizardry campus, rival knights and warlocks will come onto your campus to cause chaos by destroying school property, messing with students, and being general menaces. Employing janitors with the security skill will ensure that someone on campus is hunting down these trespassers to deliver them the justice they deserve - a water pistol blast to the face. That'll teach them! 

With more campuses and classes still being revealed - including the recently announced spy school - the allure of Two Point Campus for anyone who loved the first game, or anything in this genre, is only going to grow. Everything I've seen so far is like Two Point Hospital+, with more ways to engage with the little humans and more ways to grow your Two Point empire. 

Two Point Campus is launching on August 9 on PC, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. Until then though, why not check out our best sim games. 

Two Point Campus is channeling its Hogwarts Legacy with a course all about Wizardry.

The wonderful Wizardry course will be included in Two Point Campus when it launches later this year on August 9. You can check out the reveal trailer for the Wizardry course in Sega's latest management sim just below, where students compete in magical battles, brew intricate potions, and get up to all sorts of chaos.

The aim of the game here is for students to hone their skills in a Spellroom, so they perform better when facing down an opponent in a magical battle. The better their skills have become in the classroom, the better they'll do in a battle, and they'll need to be up for a fight, as there are apparently enemy wizards and other nefarious goings on.

Wizardry might seem a little bit out of left field for the Two Point series, what with students growing pumpkins for heads and other goings on, but it's brilliantly suited for the wonderfully weird sim series. Check out our full Two Point Campus preview from earlier this year to find out how Sega's follow-up to 2018's excellent Two Point Hospital is coming along.

Originally meant to launch next month in May, Two Point Campus was hit with a three month delay earlier this year, pushing it back to an August 9 release date. The new game expands upon Two Point Hospital to give you many fields of expertize to expand into for your hundreds of students, as you train them up to become chefs, firefighters, football players, and everything else in between. 

Find out more about what sort of courses you can delve into in our Two Point Campus hands-on from earlier this month.

Spare a thought for anyone who has tried to keep a young adult functional for any amount of time, never mind happy, socially adept, and educated. Two Point Campus throws you in at the deep end, giving you an entire class of freshmen to house, feed, and teach as they try to finish courses in subjects like Gastronomy and Scientography. It sounds simple, but my class is only in its first academic year, and it's chaos.

Twenty minutes into a first hands-on with the game and I'm in the sort of mental health spiral that comes from only the very best management sims. I obsess about the placement of towels in the shower room but forget the instruction the game gave me to build a college library, so my students are all unable to complete their assignments - including a report on "The Origins of Quiches" – and have angry red icons above their heads. I get started but deciding on a pattern to place the bookshelves in is an existential nightmare all of its own. They must line up perfectly. I'm clearly a terrible college president, but damn it I'm having a good time. 

School of hard knocks

It all starts with Freshleigh Meadows, a small, unintimidating collection of buildings in a rural setting, complete with canal and thatched cottages. An advisor, Albert Crank, takes me through the usual tutorial stuff, and then I'm straight into building a lab for my Scientography students. There are a few requirements, a weird-looking machine, a board on the wall, and some little flourishes I can add if I'm feeling fancy, like a plant or shelves stocked with dangerously bright liquids. The building is simple, dragging out rooms to different sizes on a grid, choosing furnishings from the menu, and dropping them in place. Then I have to hire a teacher to staff it, open up the college, and start the academic year. So far, so Two Point Hospital, admittedly with less vomit.

The new challenges really come from the fact that you're no longer performing one function for your little people – come in, get healed, go home – but years' worth of needs. They don't just need to pee, they need to shower. They don't just need vending machines to eat, they want variety and food carts. They want to be social at special events, join clubs, and have somewhere to sleep. Students will request rooms or items they need for class, and their grades will start to fall if they don't get them. 

That's a big deal, because the better your students' results, the more cash you'll have to keep building and improving your school. Making sure you have enough waiting room benches and doctors' offices are relics of a simpler time, now you're trying to scrape together the cash for a stage for your student bar so you can put on a rock concert for your pupils. 

Unlike the patients of Two Point Hospital, each person evolves too, and you can check in on them individually. Maybe student Henrietta Belcher is struggling with class and needs to be sent for some private tutoring? Can you place items that inspire students to be more social, like a water-cooler or a love bench, to help their overall happiness? Your ultimate goal might just be to get them to pass with a decent grade, but with in-game years of interaction and responding to their needs you can't help but start to care about at least a few of them. It's a smart system that only makes the management mechanics more absorbing, rather than getting in their way. 

Art and design class

Just as with Two Point Hospital, the tools and menus feel familar and accessible. They give you a way to build your campus with just a few clicks, but also hide layers of depth for the true control freaks. Heat maps for hygiene or thirst problem points, ledgers to track the finances, and new building tools to really customize every inch of your schools. Some of the challenges of Two Point Campus feel very familiar, my cavalier use of massive rooms early in the level means that I just don't have space to add the new facilities that I need too for the more advanced courses – like a sweet kitchen for my gastronomy kids – and I'm way too financially overstretched to buy another plot of land. 

I start trying to move whole rooms and squeeze an extra few inches by getting rid of some toilets, but deep down I know that I need to just completely overhaul some existing classrooms. While I'm doing that, there's a small crisis developing because I don't have enough janitors to keep up with the student's detritus, and the place is starting to look more like a Target parking lot after Black Friday than an institute of higher education.

The next campus I'm in charge of is Piazza Lanatra, a city college focused on the culinary arts. I've still got the option to build science and VR labs, but I really need to focus on kitting out the campus with the basics for my Gastronomy students. A savory kitchen, a lecture hall, plumbing, and beds. I build a generous kitchen packed with the essentials and then some extras like dishwashing sinks and mixing stations (not all of these touches are just cosmetic, students need specific equipment as courses progress) and start the academic year. 

My advisor for this campus hints that to make good chefs, the students need access to inspiring foods, so I assume that means a few cheese doodle vending machines aren't going to cut it. I throw down a coffee kiosk and a hot dog stand and hope no one was expecting croquembouche platters or sashimi. You're given everything you need in the menus as you progress through the level, but the fun, cosmetic items, like a Hogwarts-style owl on a perch, you'll unlock with the rarer of the two in-game currencies, Kudosh, that you get from completing certain tasks, rather than just enrolling students. 

Teacher's pet

If the Two Point Campus hands-on taught me anything, it's that its new August 9 release day will be one to mark in the diary if you're even a casual fan of the simulation genre. Two Point Campus isn't a management sim that's like the real world, and it doesn't want to be. It's a charming, well-balanced take on something we're all familiar with – whether from our own school years or movies – and it plays with all the stereotypes with a dad joke style of humor that's will make you laugh, but is always gentle with its subjects. The full release will only give me more to worry about, with weird takes on college sports (it's cheese-based, apparently) to manage, new types of students like toffs and jocks, and new classes like Knight School. It'll probably cause a small, Two Point specific nervous breakdown, and I can't wait. 

Two Point Campus will be released on PC and consoles on August 9. Want to study up before then? Read our interview with Two Point studio bosses Gary Carr and Mark Webley.

Prepare to get up close and personal with the tiny people of Two Point County, because the latest game in the simulation series is going to add a whole new dimension to the management mayhem. In Two Point Campus, you'll be able to focus right in on any one of your students to monitor not only their academic achievements but whether or not they're living, laughing, and loving too. 

"Here we're kind of worrying about educating them – of course, because that's the Campus bit – but that social side, their happiness, is just as important," says Mark Webley, one of the founders of Two Point Studios. "Anyone that went to college or university doesn't just say 'I had some really great lecturers', they talk about the parties and the relationships they had. And we wanted to get into that more than we had done in Two Point Hospital."

School of life

As the boss of Two Point Campus, you'll be busy trying to make your academic institution attractive to fee-paying knowledge seekers, because the more tiny minds you can shape (or wring dry of cash with fees) means more applicants and bigger and better facilities for your college. Your students will need teaching, feeding, housing, and entertaining, and all the staff and services it takes to make those things happen. You'll face invasions by rival schools, outbreaks of bookworms, and students who are doing more partying than poring over books. Of course, good results are key, so it's vital your class is coming out with the kind of grades that their moms will brag about for decades.

You can expect all the same hiring and firing, building, maintaining, and budget-balancing that made Two Point Hospital such a compelling world to rule over, but now you need to worry if Tim the class clown is ever going to get together with that goth girl he likes and if he's even going to pass his Robotics class. It all sounds a lot more complicated than Two Point Hospital, but at least when it comes to Two Point Campus there are fewer scenarios where the corridors will end up full of ghosts and corpses. 

"With Two Point Hospital, it was difficult to care enough about patients because they weren't there long enough," explains Gary Carr, co-founder of Two Point Studios.

"Now the students are going to become really familiar. You're going to see them develop and in some cases fail. It's about trying to get you to care about them so that they don't fail and to try and see what the problem is. In some cases it could be a relationship problem, it could just be that they're not fitting in or they're not happy with that course. You'll be able to take time to nurture and hopefully pull them through the process."

Lessons in love

This isn't The Sims though. You don't have direct control over the little people of Two Point Campus, so you'll need to create the right environment to help them succeed. That doesn't mean you can just lock your students in a room with their textbooks and a box of Pop-Tarts and hope for the best. For instance, if your favorite student is lonely, you can influence their world by putting on events for them to meet people or decorate your dorms and corridors with items that encourage socializing, like a two-player arcade machine. 

"You're putting on events for people to get together, to try to meet people, and then for them to develop their relationships and get to the next level. So there are some more romantic items like a rose garden..." says Webley, as Carr chimes in. 

"We tried to sort of desexualize it all," Carr adds. "So there's a weird one, which is a bubble machine, which seems to make them get romantically inclined as well. It's just really about friend groups, really having people who can keep your students interested enough to get up in the morning.

"So there's a bit of group behavior – if you can get it right – which actually helps you not have to manage every single person in the school. Because you might start with a school year of only, say, 10 pupils. But as you get through the game, you multiply that significantly."

Class clowns

Of course, this all comes with a hearty side of humor, the same dad joke japes that made Two Point Hospital a delight to play even when you were killing patients and plunging into debt. This time around, Two Point Studios has played with the stereotypes cemented in our brains by movies and TV – expect to see goths, posh toffs in tailcoats, jocks, and greasers roaming your halls. The lessons aren't the usual English or Economics either, students can study Robotics, make giant profiteroles in Gastronomy, or join Knight School and run around in armor. There's no Euphoria-level drama either, as the most dangerous substance abuse your students will commit will be hitting the milkshake keg too hard. 

In fact, the drama was at Two Point Studios over one of the changes that has been made to the formula; whether or not to give players more freedom over the look and aesthetics of their buildings and grounds. "Mark and I always have a big row on every game about something," reveals Carr. "Customization was one where I was just worried that if you give people more customization – which I love – that they would lose sort of track of the game because they've been making a lovely garden or something."

Luckily the studio found a solution to allow them to add all the new in-depth creative tools to allow players to really make their campuses their own, without worrying about them neglecting the actual students.  "When you get to the end of the academic year, it kind of goes into this holiday time, and we turn the clock off. So you can stay in summer mode until you're ready to go back into the next year." That time also allows you to change your course offerings, fiddle around with the figures and, yes, get obsessed with making your new wing look like Hogwarts or getting your ornamental pathways to curve just right. 

Two Point Studios has proven it can build management simulations for more than one type of player, so whether you're in it for the accessible antics, deep dives into profit and loss, or just want to spend hours making your college look pretty, there's something for you here. "I think great thing is, I think we've got a game where if you're not hardcore, you'll enjoy it. And if you're quite hardcore, you'll enjoy it," promises Carr. "It should feel like you're mastering the game to whatever level you play to."

Two Point Campus will be released on PC, Nintendo Switch PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and  Series X/S on May 17, and you can pre-order (to secure some bonus in-game items) from today.

Zany hospital management sim Two Point Hospital has added a free Sonic the Hedgehog DLC pack celebrating the iconic blue hedgehog's 30th birthday. The expansion includes costumes that let your hospital staff dress up as characters like Sonic, Knuckles, Tails, and Amy, as well as decorations to make your hospital perhaps inappropriately fun.

I'm not sure what to make of a world where Sonic the Hedgehog is someone's therapist and Tails is the receptionist at a hospital, but here we are. To be clear, if you look closely at the skins, it's obvious they're just really well-made Halloween costumes and not Sonic and co. themselves, but it's still a sight to see.

You can also decorate your hospital with Sonic-themed items to distract your patients from the fact that they have 8-bitten, an ailment that compresses your entire body into the 8-bit generation, or Headcrabedness, which turns you into a monster from Half-Life. You can cheer up the place with decorations including a big ol' Sonic statue, decorative rugs, a giant Gold Ring, and even arcade cabinets.

"We are proud to finally unveil the crossover event of the BILLENIUM, as the immovable object of Two Point Hospital and the unstoppable force of Sonic the Hedgehog collide in an explosion of costumes, items, and joy!," reads Sega's description of the new DLC pack.

In case you missed it, there's a Two Point Hospital free trial on Switch, Xbox, and PC in the UK and ANZ right now, while those in the US can play for free on Steam. And if you like it, you can take advantage of some pretty hefty discounts on all platforms and regions; it's 75% off on Steam right now and 30% off on Switch and Xbox in the US.

On the Sonic side, Sega recently admitted to announcing the new game in the series a bit earlier than ideal. It's still coming at some point, but Sega says it jumped the gun just a bit due to the excitement of the series' 30th anniversary.

Take a trip down memory lane with the best Dreamcast games of all time.

A Two Point Hospital free trial is live on the UK and ANZ Nintendo Switch eShop, giving you a few days to play the full game before it's snatched away and bumped up to its normal retail price.

Two Point Studios' comical hospital sim, a spiritual successor to the 1997 classic Theme Hospital, is the latest to be included in Nintendo of Europe's Game Trials series, which allows you to check out full games without spending a dime. In this case, if you do enjoy Two Point Hospital but aren't able to finish it before the trial ends, you have until August 8 to purchase the Jumbo Edition, which includes four meaty expansions and two DLC packs, for 30% off.

In case you just heard "free game" and went here without any knowledge of Two Point Hospital, here's a quick rundown. Essentially, it's an increasingly silly hospital management sim where you'll start by constructing and staffing a hospital and eventually be tasked with handling everything from celebrity visits to earthquakes. At some point, you'll need to deal with local pandemics (eek) by identifying infected patients and administering vaccines. I promise Two Point Hospital is a funny game.

All patients are suffering from fictional illnesses like Turtle Head, where a doctor needs the Turbo-Plunger to pull the patient's head out from a comically retracted position; Banging Headache, an extreme headache that turns the patient's head into a literal hammer; and Root Snoot, a disorder that turns the sufferer into "a big ol' turnip face." A bit on the nose, don't ya think?

In case you still aren't convinced, GamesRadar's glowing Two Point Hospital review called it "a cure" for boredom and sadness. "Between the humor and the visuals, there's no part of playing Two Point Hospital - other than the crippling, thundering stress at realizing that you've forgotten to build any toilets at all an hour into a level - that isn't a delight," Rachel writes. "Every tiny piece, from the people to the furnishings, has been lavished with attention and care, and it shows. It reminds me of an Aardman Animation, with so much detail and work behind the laughter and slapstick. It's a miniature masterpiece."

To confirm, I checked the US Switch eShop for the Two Point Hospital free trial, and sadly it is not there. The good news is that the 30% discount is available on the US eShop, so now's the time to check it out if you've been meaning to.

Otherwise, here are some of the best sim games you can play right now.

Two Point Studios is taking you back to school with Two Point Campus, the follow-up to its ridiculously addictive Two Point Hospital management sim. You can expect all the same dad jokes and charming eccentricity from the world, but with your new role as a college manager, you'll be getting even more involved in the lives of your students and staff.

One of the major changes that you'll notice straight away is that unlike the patients of Two Point Hospital who, if you were doing your job well, were in and out quickly when cured, you'll be looking after each class of students for much longer than the time it takes to remove a saucepan from someone's head.

"In Two Point Hospital there was a trait system and there were relationships being formed between staff members, usually, but you'd never really got to see enough of it, and you rarely saw it from the patients, because they came in to get a diagnosis, they were treated and they left," explains studio director Gary Carr. 

"So what we've done is we've come up with a game where you get to see these relationships and these kinds of personalities bloom, because they're with you for a long period of time, now you've got four academic years with these students. And they spend a lot of time together in groups, this kind of group behavior, good and bad plays out, and you're there to kind of hopefully guide your students through it in a number of different ways."

Student counselor

That means you'll need to take a much deeper interest in their emotional well-being, as well as their educational ones. In their four years, the students will have individual needs, like specific items to complete class projects, or a need to socialize with like-minded people. There will be different cliques, like the classic jocks, goths and nerds, different professors to shape your teen charges, and students will succeed, fail, or drop out altogether depending on how well you keep spinning all those plates. 

"So it's all about trying to balance both the academic side of things and making sure that students have everything they need, like libraries and the right course materials and lecture theatres and all that kind of boring stuff, but also the fun stuff of having the clubs, the societies, the gigs, the events," adds brand director Craig Laycock. 

Carr, meanwhile, admits to a certain envy of other simulation games where players actually formed emotional attachments to their tiny people, and wanted to add more of that to the Two Point series. 

"So it's less of a kind of a farm, as in hospital did feel like you were just farming illness, I think we're trying to make a business out of it, but make you care about your students as well as you're developing them," Gary

"I think some games that we kind of were envious of, Sims being an obvious example is that they have this ability to make you care about the characters. And you kind of, you know, mother of them if you like. And I kind of want, you want to do a little bit of that, we want you to have a little bit more feeling that you know, you want to not see this as just commodities, you want you to want to try and make your care about them."

Don't worry if that all sounds a bit too serious and heartfelt though. As always there are the quirky touches that elevate the Two Point world above all the other management sims. There's a cheese-based sport, sort of like a stinky Quidditch, that the colleges can compete in, and classes go beyond the usual English or Economics and into areas like jousting and cooking humongous pizzas. Oh, and now there's the potential for architectural torture. 

DIY Hogwarts

If the building limitations of Two Point Hospital cramped your style, you'll be pleased to know that you've got an almost dangerous amount of freedom in Two Point Campus. Instead of buying set building layouts to fill with rooms, you now buy plots of land, which are yours to carve up with buildings, paths, and decorations. There are different building styles too, from the American frat house style columns to the more Hogwartion turrets and spires. Two Point Studios are fully expecting players to torture their staff and students by building nightmarish mazes between key locations. 

"For players who do want to be completely creative and not have limitations, we will have sandbox mode at launch. So there's a whole playground if you just want to play with these creative tools, or even just set settings to whatever you want them to be and kind of play your way," says senior UI designer Lauren Woodroffe, as she demonstrates just how much power you have over your Two Point Campus world. 

"You have a blank canvas to work on this time around rather than being limited to pre-existing buildings." 

Woodroffe has also worked hard on one of the big challenges for simulation games, making sure they feel intuitive to use whether you're on a mouse or keyboard, a controller, or the Nintendo Switch. 

Graduating class

As a huge fan of simulation games and a Two Point Hospital addict, I can't wait to start bossing around students and professors and discovering all the eccentric little details that make Two Point Campus special. Most of all I can't wait to see how it feels to see my class grow and change, and hopefully leave with top marks. 

"You're are shaping their lives, you are developing them. If they get to the end of the process, you will get continual income, and the prestige that your university will get through high grades is obviously beneficial from a gameplay kind of scoring system," says Carr.

"But the byproduct we want is when you say goodbye to your first enrollment, if we can make you have a little tear in your eye as you're waving them off into the great wide world, that's awesome."

Two Point Campus will be released on PC and consoles in 2022. 

A spin-off of Two Point Hospital appears to be near as a Two Point Campus listing seems to have outed the game's existence.

The Microsoft Store (via VG247) has let the cat out of the bag about the off-shoot game from Two Point Studios. The listing has now been taken down, but not before details of the game were discovered.

Art from the game was pulled from the listing, which shows classrooms, music stages, and a basketball court. There's also a kitchen cooking an oversized pizza, as well as a jousting arena, which seems like it would be a nightmare to approve on a college campus.

Unsurprisingly, this new game would turn in its medical licence from Two Point Hospital and go back to college. The management simulator will see players take over the campus and help the operational environment. Players will be tasked with running successful education centers where they will try to teach the world's brightest students.

There was no release date shared as part of the listing, but it did specify that the game would be coming to PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. More platforms may be coming, but for more information on that front we'll have to wait for an official announcement - it's worth noting that Two Point Hospital did eventually come to PS4 and Nintendo Switch, but only after more than a year had passed since the game's original release. 

In Two Point Hospital, which launched in 2018 as a spiritual successor to 1997's Theme Hospital, players are entrusted with the operations of a hospital, covering everything from patient management to finances and upgrades. While the management formula has been applied elsewhere - most successfully to theme parks - a take on education is a new direction.

More details will likely be shared when the game is officially announced, though it is not immediately clear when that will be. However, with a listing including assets and details around the game already on show, it does feel immanent.

Two Point Hospital: Jumbo Edition, which included the base game as well as various other DLC packs, released in March of this year. However, it looks like the team is ready to move on from its debut title now and explore this new field of education.

If you want to try your hand at besting reality in video game form, why not take a look at our best sim games you can play right now list.

The Two Point Hospital: Jumbo Edition release date is set for March, bundling up the base game and all of its current expansions for console players.

Sega plans for the Two Point Hospital: Jumbo Edition release date to land on March 5, and it will be available for Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox One, as well as PS5 and Xbox Series X via backwards compatibility for their respective last-gen versions. The console version of Two Point: Hospital that arrived last year bundled in the Bigfoot and Pebberly Island expansions, and the Jumbo Edition includes those as well as the alien-themed Close Encounters and eco-friendly Off the Grid expansions. If you already own Two Point Hospital on console, you'll also be able to buy the new stuff on its own.

Sega and Two Point Studios says Two Point Hospital: Jumbo Edition includes a total of 189 illnesses to diagnose and treat across 29 locations, counting the base game content and its expansions. On top of all that, the Retro Items Pack and Exhibition Items Pack will help you decorate your waiting rooms, infirmaries, and other locations that need something a little bit more vibrant and life-affirming than a 50th potted plant.

Two Point Hospital: Jumbo Edition will be available as both a physical and digital purchase across PS4/PS5 and Nintendo Switch, though the Xbox One / Xbox Series X version will only be available digitally.

Have fun with real-life situations (off-kilter or otherwise) with our guide to the best sim games you can play right now.

Running a successful infirmary is a delicate and tricky balancing act, so having some Two Point Hospital cheats to hand can help make things easier for you. Who wouldn't want a shortcut to unlimited money, instant staff improvements, and patients who never get hungry or thirsty? You'd be forgiven for assuming there'd be a selection of cheats included in the game – after all, many consider it to be the spiritual successor to Theme Hospital, and that had cheat codes coming out the wazoo. 

The bad news for players on PS4, Xbox One, or Switch is that there are no built-in Two Point Hospital cheats, so on consoles you'll just have to knuckle down and do everything above board, though you can at least take a look at our Two Point Hospital tips for some advice the help you on your way. Those using PC, on the other hand, do have several options for trainers to install, so if you're playing on a desktop or laptop then come with us and we'll explain what Two Point Hospital cheat options are available to you.

Two Point Hospital WeMod Trainer

The first option we'll look at to add Two Point Hospital cheats is to download and install the WeMod Trainer, which currently supports the Steam version of the game only. The cheats are presented in a tidy user-friendly interface, and there are 15 different options in total that include unlimited energy, money, and kudosh, plus the ability to improve your staff and turn off hunger, thirst, and toilet requirements with a simple button press.

Two Point Hospital Cheat Engine

For a different approach you can try out Cheat Engine, an open source program that anyone can use to create instructions for modifying single player games. Once you've installed the main program and got it running, you can then import user-created Cheat Engine Tables that drop a selection of cheats directly into your game of choice. There are several Cheat Engine Tables linked in this forum post that you can play around with to unlock infinite money and kudosh, max out your staff energy, and make staff and patients happy.

Once you've finish cheating your way to a new and improved hospital, why not take a break and read more about how Two Point Hospital ALMOST had Alan Partridge as its resident DJ.

Having some Two Point Hospital tips at your disposal will help no end if you're getting into the medical business, trying to keep on top of everything and turn a profit. The simulation runs pretty deep in Two Point Hospital, so as well as building your wards and employing your staff, you'll need to keep everything running smoothly and ideally prevent your patients from dying while you balance the books. If you just throw everything together without any forethought then either your emergency room will become a disaster zone or you'll exhaust your funds and tumble in to debt, so follow our Two Point Hospital tips for PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC to give yourself the best start.

1. Take your time when building

Don't rush to build everything at once, or you'll end up backing yourself into a corner and running out of money. Start off with the basics, including a reception, GP office, pharmacy, staff room, and toilets, then hire a doctor, an assistant, a nurse, and a janitor. After that you can sit back and observe your patients' needs, then cater for them as they happen, which will allow you to build up gradually while maintaining a steady income.

Don't push to expand your campus until you have to, as that money could be better spent elsewhere – there will be larger rooms you need to construct eventually and at that point you can consider an expansion, but don't do it just for the sake of having more space until you need it.

2. Keep your rooms small

When building, stick to the minimum room size wherever possible so you get the maximum use out of the space available, and smaller rooms are much easier to improve the prestige of. Consider the layout of your hospital in advance, leaving space for corridors between rooms that are at least two construction squares wide, so people won't bump into each other (which slows them down) and rooms can still be reached easily.

You can always pick up and move rooms around by selecting them then choosing the Edit option, as well as increase or decrease their size by following the prompt at the top of the screen to switch between the + and - cursor.

3. Further your career

Keep an eye on your Career Goals in the top right corner of the screen, and work towards them wherever you can. These will improve your hospital rating, unlock new items you can place, and earn both cash and Kudosh Points which are used to unlock special items that will help you out as the game progresses.

4. Step up to the Challenge

Always take on Challenges when they come up, as they can earn you some bonus cash and Kudosh, as well as improving your hospital reputation. Be mindful of their time limits and make sure you focus on completing their tasks first, building extra rooms and redeploying/hiring additional staff if required to get the job done.

5. Increase your Prestige

Once you've started earning Kudosh, you should use some of it to unlock posters and paintings that are flagged to increase room prestige and hospital attractiveness. You can then place plenty of them in every room until you reach at least Prestige Level 3 - it's a cheap and easy shortcut to improving the overall rating of your hospital.

6. Watch what's happening

Look around and pay attention to what's happening in your hospital, to determine if you need to add extra facilities. If patients are standing around waiting for particular rooms then more seating is required nearby, so pop some additional benches outside. If there's rubbish piling up on the floor then add more bins, and if little 'accidents' are occurring then you definitely need to install some more toilets! You can also monitor your patients' needs through the Patients List from the bottom left menu to identify any problems brewing, or highlight people who need urgent attention so you can focus on them first.

7. Take a minute when you need to

Don't forget that you can pause time at any point if things are getting too hectic, giving you a chance to catch up on messages, review the overall situation in your hospital, and make decisions about what to do next without a time pressure against you. You can build, hire, place new items, and much more without worrying about any more patients flowing in. Conversely, if everything is under control then you can also speed up time, to get through patients quickly and rack up the cash without hanging around.

8. Keep track of your staff

Watch where your staff are, and check that you don't have rooms that are needed but aren't being staffed – you can tell by icons above the desks/machinery if they're waiting for someone to operate them because patients are queuing, or if the maximum queue size has been reached. Remember that you'll need to employ more staff than you have rooms for them to work in, to ensure that your employees can actually take breaks when needed without delaying treatments for your waiting patients.

9. Pick the right staff for the job

In the Staff menu under the Jobs tab, you can allocate what areas particular staff are allowed to work in. This means that if you have staff who are particularly qualified for a certain role, you can make sure they work in that area and don't wander off elsewhere, as well as stopping other less qualified staff from coming in. This will improve your diagnosis and treatment stats, which will increase the overall reputation of your hospital in the long run.

10. Keep your staff happy

Make sure you monitor your staff needs through the Staff menu, so you know that they're happy with their pay and are having their other personal needs met – making adjustments to their salary or what items available in the hospital if needed to balance things up. At any point you can pick up a member of staff, and drop them in a staff room to force them to take a break or into a room to make them work there.

11. Maintain your machinery

You can check the condition of your machines at any time by hovering the pointer over them, and you should make sure you hire enough janitors to keep them serviced, otherwise they could end up exploding which is the last thing you want. Install several fire extinguishers in each room that contains equipment, just so you're prepared should the worst happen.

12. Get an overview of your hospital

Use the icons on the Information tab to get an overview of various factors in your hospital, including its attractiveness, hygiene, and temperature. Temperature can be particularly important as you progress to later levels, so make sure you install heaters or air con units as required to keep the temperature in check. You only need to use the small heaters or coolers in smaller 3x3ish rooms, so save the bigger units for any large wards or corridors.

That should be enough help to get you up and running in your new hospital, but if you want to read more medical musings then here's how Two Point Hospital ALMOST had Alan Partridge as its resident DJ.

The Two Point Hospital console release is just under a month away after a delay, and the developers are ready to take you on a video tour of building your own healthcare empire from the comfort of your couch. A new developer walkthrough video starring lead designer Ben Huskins and senior UI/UX artist Lauren Woodroffe will show you how the game works. It's worth watching even if you're already familiar with the PC counterpart, since the developers show off some of the tricks and new features you can use to efficiently manage your hospital with a gamepad.

Features like filters for lists and copying rooms rather than drawing each one in manually will be especially handy when you don't have a mouse and keyboard handy. The game will also make ample use of hotkeys so you can pull up frequently used options without needing to scroll through menus to find them.

One all-new feature coming for Two Point Hospital's console version is Overview Mode. This special view mode allows you to zoom back to an abstracted view of your hospital, making it easier to see how everything fits together at once. It will provide key information on rooms, staff, and patients while simplifying everything else, so you can quickly suss out bottlenecks and other big-picture issues. It looks like a great way to keep the game legible even when playing a room's width away on a TV screen. Stuff like this proves the developers are thinking about how you play their game on new platforms, not just if you can play their game on new platforms.

Two-Point Hospital is coming to PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on February 25. It will arrive with two of the PC version's paid DLC expansions, Bigfoot and Pebberley Island, bundled in with the base game. Console players will also benefit from many of the free updates and tweaks the PC version has received since it launched back in 2018.

If you enjoy Two Point Hospital's off-kilter sense of humor, you can look forward to a whole Two Point "world" of games ahead.

After a slight delay earlier this year, Two Point Hospital is now scheduled to come to consoles on February 25, 2020, Two Point Studios announced today. The game will launch on PS4, Xbox One, and Switch simultaneously. Additionally, it will enter the Xbox Game Pass library on day one. 

The console version of Two Point Hospital comes with the Bigfoot and Pebberly Island expansions, adding new environments, challenges, and illnesses. It will also feature new decorating and building options like an interior designer mode, copy-paste support for room layouts, and greater character customization.

Regarding the delay, Two Point Studios reaffirmed that "making a management simulation game on three consoles (and making it the best it possibly can be on all three) is a tricky programming puzzle." As an isometric management sim, Two Point Hospital naturally favors mouse and keyboard controls, but based on what we played of the console version earlier this year, Two Point Studios found a way to make even the tiniest functions snappy and intuitive. 

For those wondering why the console version of this one-and-a-half-year-old game is so hotly anticipated, I'll let our review of the base game do the talking: 

"Between the humor and the visuals, there's no part of playing Two Point Hospital - other than the crippling, thundering stress at realizing that you've forgotten to build any toilets at all an hour into a level - that isn't a delight. Every tiny piece, from the people to the furnishings, has been lavished with attention and care, and it shows. It reminds me of an Aardman Animation, with so much detail and work behind the laughter and slapstick. It's a miniature masterpiece." 

Two Point Studios is planning a whole world of games based on Two Point County - the hospital is just the starting point. 

Two Point Hospital is getting in on the Halloween festivities with a revised version of its Spooky Mode event, which first debuted last year. This year's spooktacular is now live, and will run through Tuesday, November 5. 

Spooky Mode introduces nine creepy tracks, colonies of roaming bats, as well as atmospheric lighting and UI changes. It also messes with some diseases and hospital fixtures. The Light-headedness disease, for example, is known for turning peoples' heads into light bulbs. But in Spooky Mode, patients will contract Fright-headedness instead, turning their heads into jack-o-lanterns. 

Developer Two Point Studios outlined several other Spooky Mode changes in a Steam post. Here are a few of my favorite lines:  

• "What's that in the brain jar?" Is it a brain? It must be a brain. 
• "Pretty much every picture of a dog now has a rather unusual element to it…" Oh no. Cats? 
• "When it comes to the Nurse Station, don't look in the bedpan." I choose to believe that these bedpans now contain the horrible baby thing from P.T. and no one is gonna tell me otherwise. 
• "And the Ward Bed… whatever you think is under there… it's probably worse." It's Resident Evil 2's Mr. X, isn't it. 

If you haven't played Two Point Hospital and you're looking to give it a shot, you can get it for a spooky 66% off on Steam as part of the annual Halloween sale. This discount will be available until Monday, October 28. You can also get the big DLC bundle for 55% off. 

Given the newly delayed console ports of Two Point Hospital, PC is the only place you'll be able to play this masterful hospital sim for a few months at least.  

The PS4, Xbox One, and Switch versions of Two Point Hospital have been delayed, Two Point Studios announced today. The console ports were originally scheduled to release this fall, but are now on track to release in the first half of 2020 - in or before June, in other words. 

"Why the delay?" the studio said in a blog post. "Put simply: making a management simulation game on three consoles (and making it the best it possibly can be on all three), is a tricky programming puzzle. We have to take the game apart and figure out how to fit it into what is essentially a smaller box. That takes a fair amount of time and engineering work, and it turns out we need to take a little more to iron out the remaining creases. So, we’re going to take a bit longer to get that right." 

The good news is that, when the console ports do arrive, they'll come with all the updates from the PC version and both the Bigfoot and Pebberley Island DLCs, which add new hospitals and illnesses. And based on what we played of the in-progress PS4 and Switch versions, Two Point Hospital's made the jump to console remarkably smoothly thanks to intuitive UI and snappy controls, so it ought to be worth the somewhat extended wait. Check out our full Two Point Hospital review for more on what makes this medical sim so engrossing. 

We've seen multiple delays in the past few weeks, from the Xbox One port of Session to Fallout 76's Wastelanders NPC expansion. 

Two Point Hospital is free to play on Steam this weekend, giving you a long weekend to try your hand at curing wacky diseases. The base version of the game has more than 100 ailments including Turtle Head and Mock Star, but if you want to pick up the new Close Encounters DLC that just went on sale today, you could even treat them aliens. Two Point Hospital is free from now through Monday, September 2 - perfect for Labor Day vacationers in the US to bid farewell to summer by staying inside and purchasing virtual medical equipment.

Haven't heard of Two Point Hospital before now? It's a modern spiritual successor to Theme Hospital, the 1997 sim game of cartoon medical malpractice, that was made by key developers from the original. If reading that sentence was enough to get your blood pumping, you should check out Two Point Hospital.

If you decide you like it, you can pick Two Point Hospital up permanently for 50% off its standard price throughout the free weekend. The Bigfoot and Pebberley Island DLCs are similarly discounted. You could try calling up your insurance to see if they'll cover the remaining costs of the purchase, but you'll probably be on hold for half an hour just for them to tell you that Two Point Hospital isn't in your network. Dear UK readers, if you don't know what I'm talking about, please just hold your socialized healthcare close and never let it go.

Even if you're not big on PC gaming, you may want to check out the free weekend to see if you should pick up Two Point Hospital when it hits consoles later this year.

Wacky medicine is just the start - the developers say there's going to be an entire Two Point World some day. 

It's easy to imagine the vales, mountains and weird nuclear wastelands of Two Point County filled with more than the multitude of hospitals that make up the core game, and accompanying DLCs for Two Point Hospital. From the Two Point Radio station hosts to the celebrities that pop in under the guise of VIP visits, the County is already taking on its own personality. And thankfully, developer Two Point Studios has big plans for its little simulated world.

At a recent event showing off Two Point Hospital running on PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, I got the chance to sit down with Two Point Studios' three co-founders to talk about the Two Point County, and the future for the team – especially now that it has been officially acquired by Sega. The Studios' three co-founders comprise of Mark Webley, Gary Carr and Ben Hymers. Webley and Carr both worked on Theme Park back in the '90s, and Webley went on to co-found Lionhead Studios to make Black & White, and more. 

The pair also worked together on Theme Hospital, so you can see exactly where the skills to make Two Point Hospital has come from. Hymers, on the other hand, is ex-Rare and ex-Creative Assembly, and was working on a simulation incubation within Rare when Carr and Webley approached him. It's clear that this is a fledgeling studio with some serious experience, and I, for one, am excited to see where the team take Two Point next. 

"[Two Point Hospital was] always a start point," explains Carr. "[Two Point County] wasn't anything else, really. It was a place that we could pour our ideas into it. So it's a world, basically."

"I think, eventually, we won't be talking about what the subject matter is of Two Point County, whether it's a hospital or another [idea]," he continues. "We're going to have what you imagine in any kind of world or any soap opera… that will work in our game. Ordinary relatable themes, which people have an opinion on – you know, people have an opinion on the transport system; the people have an opinion on healthcare; or how a country's run. I think ordinary subjects can make for interesting Two Point games, because we can really lampoon, twist, and exaggerate them. I think sometimes, if you go too fantastical with an idea, it's difficult to take it anywhere – with something like fantasy or space there's no route through that."

"You think you know how a hospital runs. You probably don't," jokes Webley. 

The guys laugh about Two Point Motorway Services as another possible game, or even sewage centres, or another about managing roundabout systems in Basingstoke (which is a very niche British joke that I don't expect everyone but a certain subset of readers to truly appreciate). They're not ready to talk about what the next addition to Two Point County is likely to be, but it's clear they're thinking through all creative avenues. "In fact, the challenge is the more rubbish the subject matter the more we're into doing that," Carr chuckles.

"We always went for something that was easily accessible. Something you could relate to," explains Webley of the team's choices at Bullfrog, and now at Two Point Studios. "I think if we can get someone playing for half an hour, then maybe they can play it for two hours. And suddenly they're playing a sim game, and they don't even like sim games. That was always our approach, and a lot of the Bullfrog games were like that, and some of the earlier Lionhead stuff. It was something nice and accessible."

"And then you're a few hours in [to Two Point Hospital], and then you have to train people, and you have to research, and do surgery. We're slowly introducing things. I think that was the core bit of it, and I think our vision for Two Point County was what we wanted to do the same with. We're starting with this subject, but we've got a whole bunch of ideas that we think would go really nicely – not in the same game loop, but in the same vein. It's little people, personalities, different parts of the world having different problems or challenges."

The team see Two Point County as a version of The Simpsons' Springfield in some ways. It's a space that can continue to evolve, a place that can change to suit creative pursuits. "You've got this little microcosm of all these different things, but it's all familiar. You go to Moe's Tavern. You know the characters, and the settings are all different," Webley tells me. 

I imagine that'll involve some of the quirkier characters of Two Point Hospital showing up elsewhere in Two Point County. Like the trio of brilliant Two Point Radio hosts, Harrison Wolff, Sir Nigel Bickleworth and Ricky Hawthorn, or the VIP visitors like the Health Inspector Henry Jobsworth, mayor Tabitha Windsock, or local pop star of questionable talent Jasmine Odyssey. The more you play Two Point Hospital, the more you get to know these characters and find yourself immersed in the world of Two Point County – even if you are just moving from hospital to hospital. 

But whatever comes next, you just know that it's going to have the team's trademark – and regularly quite British and slapstick – humour attached to it. Whether you're ready to see what Two Point Studios can make of other career paths or national services, I just know it's going to be hilarious, and a glorious way to waste time. 

Until Two Point Hospital hits consoles, why not check out our picks of the best games like the Sims to keep you busy...

If you've had the pleasure of dabbling with Two Point Hospital on PC, then you'll know that this healthcare simulator is one that will stick with you for months to come. And now, sometime in late 2019, it's coming to PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Two Point Hospital presents a universe of bizarre illnesses and British slapstick humour, and it's a much-needed prescription for a lot of hours lost to your sofa – and that's speaking as someone that has already clocked some 50-odd hours in the game on PC already, and will totally be playing all over again on Switch later this year. 

The console version hasn't been given a firm date just yet, but you should feel safe in the knowledge that it's coming, it looks fantastic, and will include all of the updates from the PC version to date and the two DLC expansions for free as a special console bonus. That's 21 hospitals to build and maintain and 119 illnesses to treat (and generally giggle at) all for one convenient price of entry. 

Before you start panicking about the game's viability on consoles though, I have already had the pleasure of getting my hands on both the PS4 and Nintendo Switch versions of the game down at Two Point Studios itself. And oh boy have the team absolutely nailed the console command conversions. Handily, the UI itself has remained mainly the same between the PC and console versions, so for anyone making the transition, it'll feel quite seamless. 

But it's the ingenious allocation of menus to specific face buttons that'll have you zooming through the UI with ease, laying out rooms faster than you can on PC. The majority of your building, hiring and firing menus are assigned to your Square button (Y on Switch), with moving between the various menus mapped to L1 and R1 (L and R on Switch). Because all of the building elements are locked to a grid-based structure, it's easy to pick up and place items without the use of a mouse. Two Point Studios has done an incredible job here, in ensuring that the control scheme is as easy to pick up as it is intuitive to use. 

It's a terminal obsession

There are some nice new additions coming to the console version too, including some new visual cues to help make navigating the hospital and menus easier. When you're building a new room for example, you're given a checklist at the top of the UI to work through, and all it takes is a simple hit of triangle (X on Switch) to place a room and get it up and running. This makes it quick and simple to see what you need to place at a glance, which is handy revision for the minimised console UI. Of course, you can add more items if you want – I'm partial to a plant or two, for example – but as long as you hit that critical criteria you're good to go. 

There is still a cursor if you want to use it though, and it comes in especially handy for browsing through the different skills of potential employees. It also loiters in the middle of the screen, allowing you to select individual items, or workers, within the world. It's surprisingly unobtrusive, and just relies on your manoeuvring the camera to wherever, or whatever, you want to highlight. 

Otherwise though, it's the same brilliant Two Point Hospital. In our original review we praised it for being a cure for boredom and sadness, and the fact it takes the "the funny bones and beating hearts of Theme Hospital and transplants them into an entirely new mini-universe of glee and medical mischief." That's all still there in the console version, and it'll keep you tapping away trying to cure its various illness for days to come. Whether it's Lightheadedness where patients are wandering around with lightbulbs instead of heads, or Emperor's Complex that will have patients convinced they're clothed, when actually they're strutting around in their birthday suits, every little animation, cure and activity is worth paying attention to in Two Point Hospital. There's always something going on. 

It's amazing to see Two Point Hospital arrive on consoles in such an impressive fashion. It's a brilliant game, and this will really open it up to a new audience. I'm so relieved that the console controls translate so well. Seriously, if you haven't played Two Point Hospital before now, please do. 

For now though, why not check out our pick of the best Nintendo Switch games you can play?

Two Point Hospital can't make real-life healthcare affordable, but at least its free Steam weekend is making zany medical escapades accessible from now through March 18. All Steam users get full access to the game and can even keep their progress once the weekend ends. Best of all, you can play around with a bunch of new tie-ins to other games, including... headcrabs!

The creepy, annoying, and yet beloved mascot of the Half-Life series joins Two-Point Hospital as a new disease. Be-crabbed victims lurch through the halls of your hospital until seated in a special headcrab removal device, where a big crane plucks the parasite from their craniums and tosses it in a bin. Man, that's all you need to do to cure a headcrab zombie? Now I feel bad about the 5,000 or so I've beaten to death with a crowbar in all my Half-Life and Half-Life 2 playthroughs.

The other crossover content comes in the form of various decor items inspired by other Sega-published PC games. There's some ancient Chinese-esque furniture from Total War: Three Kingdoms; spacey rugs, paintings, and arcade cabinets from the Endless series, and general footballer's decor from Football Manager 2019. If you ever worried that your hospital decor wasn't quite referential enough before, these items are the cure.

Though you can play as much of Two Point Hospital as you want during the free weekend, you'll need to buy the game to keep playing once the promotion expires on Monday. Sega has a prescription for that too: Two Point Hospital is on sale for 33 percent off on Steam through March 21, making the final price $23.44 / £16.74.

Find so much more to love in our list of the best PC games.

I'm no doctor, but medical management simulation Two Point Hospital is definitely a cure for boredom, sadness, and my dreams of having a career in the business sector. A perfect blend of intricate systems, a British sense of humor, and miniature animations of people vomiting into trash cans, this is much more than just a pretty remaster of its 1996 predecessor Theme Hospital. 

Like all the best sim games, it seems simple at first. You build a hospital, hire the staff, and sit back while the cash rolls in. Slowly your doctors will uncover new illnesses, so you'll need to build additional treatment rooms. Staff will want training, and breaks, and promotions, so you'll need to set aside the cash for their increasing demands. Emergencies will happen, celebrities will visit, and you'll need a marketing department to get the word out. As you conquer each hospital (you can score up to three stars on each, but one is enough to progress), you can go back to the toy town-like map to choose what to tackle next. 

The hospitals themselves get steadily more complicated, but the learning curve is just right. Before you know it, you're overseeing a huge, sprawling town of buildings, filled with different medical offices and machines. Once that feels like second nature, the game adds small complications, like different climates (so radiators and air conditioning become a key part of your to do list) and big ones, like earthquakes and electric storms. Then comes the pandemics - where you have to spot the infected in the crowd and administer vaccines - the infestations of 'monobrow' bugs and, toughest of all, the challenges of running a non-profit hospital. 

Two Point Hospital has two different currencies to manage: the cold hard cash you'll spend on building, hiring and that you earn for curing people, and Kudosh, which you'll quickly become obsessed with. This is earned by completing special challenges, like impressing VIPs or treating a certain number of emergency patients in a given time limit, and allows you to unlock special items for your hospitals - a tiny Sega arcade machine, an anatomy model, fancy pop art paintings, that sort of thing. All have an effect - nothing you do or place is for show, everything matters - reducing patient boredom, or raising hospital attractiveness. The fact that my latest project has a painting of a dog on every wall is actually a sign of my strategic genius, rather than mental decline. 

Through all of this is a very British humor - think 'Dad jokes' if your old man had a short career on a sitcom set in Surrey. The illness are all fictional and funny, like Turtle Head, where patients need a plunger to pull their heads into the right position, or Jest Infection, where people are turning into clowns. There's a rotation of DJs whose gentle waffle starts off making you chuckle, before settling into a soothing sort of white noise when your mind is busy solving staffing issues. The interjections of the hospital announcer, asking patients not to urinate anywhere in the hospital or alerting you to a fire in a bored voice, becomes actually useful once your hospital spans four or more buildings. 

It's easy to play the whole game zoomed right out, so you can see where queues are building and which machine is dangerously close to catching alight, but now and again it's worth zooming in to appreciate the perfect animations in your tiny world. You'll spot a surgeon pulling a rubber duck out of someone, a nude patient lunging (suffering from Emperor's Clothes illness), or a tiny Freddie Mercury wannabe chatting to a psychologist to cure his Mock Star disease. 

Between the humor and the visuals, there's no part of playing Two Point Hospital - other than the crippling, thundering stress at realizing that you've forgotten to build any toilets at all an hour into a level - that isn't a delight. Every tiny piece, from the people to the furnishings, has been lavished with attention and care, and it shows. It reminds me of an Aardman Animation, with so much detail and work behind the laughter and slapstick. It's a miniature masterpiece.

The team at Two Point hasn't rebooted Theme Hospital for a new generation, it's taken the funny bones and beating hearts of the original and transplanted them into an entirely new mini-universe of glee and medical mischief. 

Theme Hospital's spiritual successor Two Point Hospital has made sure to stay true to one of the most delightful elements of the original: comedy diseases. It's no fun building your own medical empire if you're having to deal with the realities of MRSA and septicemia. Gamescom After Dark gave us an idea of some of the more mischievous maladies you'll have to cure to prove yourself, and one of them bore a striking resemblance to the frontman of rock band Queen. 

The Freddie Mercury lookalike is suffering from a psychiatric disorder, which means you need a trained psychiatrist. Other psychological problems you'll have to deal with is mimes trapped in invisible boxes or climbing invisible ladders, and athletic nudists. 

"The Emperor's New Clothes is exactly what you thought, just a bow tie and shoes," says lead animator Chris Knott who joined Zoe Delahunty-Light on the stream. "Also their animations are totally different when they've got that illness, because they'll start lunging and touching their toes right in front of your face. And they always look really really happy with themselves as well."

We also get to learn more about how plants, windows and paintings are surprisingly important to medical success,  and find out why building coffee machines means having to make sure you have plenty of toilets. "You're not placing anything that doesn't have an effect on the whole game," says lead artist Mark Smart. 

Can't make it to Gamescom but want to feel like you're part of the action? Be sure to check out the full Gamescom After Dark schedule and tune in. 

Last week I learnt two things. One, it only takes five minutes for an award-winning hospital to become a bug-infested hellscape, and two, Two Point Hospital is so much fun it's even enough to cure the misery of a devastating World Cup loss. 

The last time I played the hospital simulation game the preview was limited to the first level Hogsport, a sort of toddler pool of minimal catastrophe and manageable diseases. This time around I got to explore three new hospitals in the game's campaign, and each one came with new skills to learn and challenges to manage. It all started well, with a tidy reception area, some lovingly built toilets, and ended in a catastrophe of ghosts, monobrows, and radiators. 

The game's campaign runs across Two Point County, which the development team describes as a whole world smashed into one map. There are tropical hospitals, like Sweaty Palms, hospitals near nuclear reactors like Melt Downs, and alpine regions where the cold will start to bother patients. All of them lovingly laid out across a map that looks like a little toy town begging to be played with. 

Aiming for the stars

"What we're trying to achieve is that it feels like a real place, and different challenges will come with being up in different areas." says lead artist Mark Smart. "We wanted each region to have its own characteristics that would impact on the gameplay."

You progress through the levels thanks to a star system, one star will let you move on, but if you really want to prove you've got medical management skills you can go for the full three. You'll do that by curing patients, building up the hospital's value, and earning cash, and you can always go back if a third star is proving tricky. 

"The whole idea of advancing through the map of Two Point County is that you can come back. You're not just burning what you've done," says Smart. "That was the intention, to make it feel like you're progressing, to challenge you - because it gets very challenging at the end - but to build it up and give you a sense of urgency. "

The dog's bullocks

He isn't joking about the end game. At the moment the final level is in an urban region, Croquembouche, and there you'll need to cure 200 patients to earn even one star. I couldn't even manage to keep patients happy in Lower Bullocks, the second of the cheekily named towns. I was dealing with a couple of outbreaks, one where people thought they were rockstars and needed doctors with a special psychiatry skills, and another where people were running around with skillets on their heads. These people could only be cured with a pricey device called... wait for it... Pan's Lab. 

All the time you're watching your bank balance, considering a loan from the bank, trying to save money, but there's a secondary currency that quickly starts to feel more important than your profits and loss. Kudosh can only be earned by completing challenges, and can be used to unlock different cosmetic items - anatomy figures, posters, plants - and special items to keep patients happy, like salty snack machines. 

It took awhile for me to hire enough psychiatrists to treat everyone, and to figure out how to keep my doctors happy so they stopped quitting. But once there were three TVs in the staff break room, a Sega arcade machine, and pretty paintings stuck on all the available wall space, everyone seemed happy enough that I could progress onto the next hospital guilt free. 

Medical schools and monobrow

At my next stop, Flotternig, the challenge is a lack of staff, so you need to get a training licence and try and transform a frankly lacklustre bunch of medical chancers into super doctors. It was satisfying arranging all the little desks in the training room, sending my doctors off to school, until I quickly realized that while my staff were twiddling their pencils in expensive lessons, they weren't treating anyone. Profits fell. Patients suffering from Freudian Lips started filling the corridors, raving about a lack of toilets, inconsiderately dying right in front of the newspaper stand. I had to hire extra janitors with ghostbusting skills - because death is not the end in Two Point Hospital - just to cope with all the spirits hanging around. Just when I thought I had things under control, there was a sudden attack of monobrows. 

Unlike my own monobrows, that can usually be kept under control with some $20 tweezers and a prayer to the holy virgin, these ones were small bugs that hid under vending machines and scuttled across floors, freaking out my already pretty unhappy clientele. While I can't say I was happy to have the infestation, it was a perfect example of the little surprises tucked beneath the many layers of Two Point Hospital. 

Curing the common cold

Somehow, with some loans and some luck I progressed far enough to try my management skills at Mitton University Hospital, an establishment specializing in research, but afflicted with a cold climate. Let's just say I have a whole new respect for the art of radiator management. 

That's the magic of Two Point Hospital, a game that squeezes delight out of everything from disease, to death, to finances, and even central heating issues. No matter what you're doing there's a smile just tugging at the corners of your mouth, and a warm baked potato glow of satisfaction in your stomach everytime you master a new hospital. There's plenty of great simulation games out there for PC, but none of them quite have the charm or magic of this Theme Hospital spiritual successor. 

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the whole day? The game will be out on PC on August 30, which is only weeks away. "It's stressful," laughs Smart. "There have been gasps in the room when we've said that's when it's coming out, and occasionally we've gasped too."

Two Point Hospital will be available on Steam for PC from August 30. Are you going to be playing? Let us know in the comments below.