Two Point Museum hands-on: Ghost breakouts, diarrhea curses, and acres of gifts shops breathe new life into the quirky business sim

Sensibly guided through Two Point Museum's tutorial, I'm finally let off the leash to chase star ratings, building as I please. Focused on fossils in these early hours, I naturally send one of my experts off on an expedition to scoop up more dino bones that'll juice the ol' donation boxes. As I'm placing display ropes just how I want them, I receive an alert from the journey-in-progress: my expert has found a mysterious flask. Should they approach it? Erm, yes, sure – it could make a nice centrepiece after all. Yet, unable to resist slurping its forbidden contents, my Expert is stricken with the Toilet Terror trait. Meaning every time they use the toilet, there's a 100% chance it'll ruin the stall.

Of course, this also puts pressure on my janitor team, as they've been struggling to keep up with toilet demand as it is. After all, if I don't place a litany of fizzy pop vending machines every few paces for museum visitors to chug, how will I make money? As a result, the janitors are demanding more money or threatening to leave, and at this point I'm only making a little bit of money every week as I try to build a better reputation

Callously, I'm tempted to let my Toilet Terror expert go… but I already spent a hefty sum training them to learn the Survivalist specialist in order to brave even worse conditions from Expeditions. Not to mention my other favorite Expert is already about to quit. The reason? "Broken face". (That's a whole other story). Don't they realize they're putting too much strain on my budget which otherwise needs to be freed up to employ a whole legion of Assistants to maintain the gift shop and its dozen or so cashier tills?

This is, somehow, Two Point Museum at its most normal, always bouncing you between dealing with the fallout of these absurd situations as you try to build the museum of your dreams, and mastering that silliness as an ultra capitalist in order to eke out money as efficiently as possible from the guests enjoying the fruits of your (well, fine, your staff's) labor.

Ticket to ride

While Two Point Museum's predecessors, Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus, were also about making as much dough as possible, Two Point Museum is a breath of fresh air in how it approaches your relationship with your institution's visitors. In the other games you were providing services to cater to specific needs – curing illnesses or teaching courses – but in Two Point Museum you're enticing visitors to, simply put, show them a good time, selling tickets and encouraging extra spend on top. It immediately feels much more freeform, coming closer to the likes of classic games like Theme Park World with its ride-based attractions.

"The game loop having some overlap with something like a Theme Park game was definitely something that we talked about," says design director Ben Huskins. "We knew that exhibits were going to be the heroes of this game, and obviously with this being a Two Point game, we were going to make them larger than life – things you wouldn't necessarily see in a real world museum, but mixing with that stuff you would expect, like the fossils and dinosaurs and things. We knew that was going to be a really important part of the game, and they're almost like the rides in the theme park."

Some of these are even interactive exhibits that have to be crafted by specialists before they can be placed, and then actually have people queue to use them, be it a dinosaur model for kids to clamber on or a seance simulator. "There's lots of interactions with the exhibits, which is cool," continues Huskins. "Even though, to some extent, we emphasize like 'oh, guests are getting their grubby hands on your exhibits, and now your experts have to restore them'. We intentionally built lots of cool animations and interactions into a lot of them, because that just felt like it'd make it a lot more fun, and alive, and interesting. And there's so much opportunity for humor there as well."

The aforementioned seance simulator is a standout, with different group combinations lining up to have very different experiences. "That's got so many animations," says executive producer Jo Koehler. "It looks amazing! I could just watch that, and get drawn into watching the interactions between the visitors and the children."

Who you gonna call?

Wait, wait, wait, a seance simulator in a museum? Yep. While we earn our training wheels earning a single-star in Memento Mile, which, while geared towards Pre-History fossils at the start, can house pretty much anything, that's not the case for the other museums we get to go hands-on with in our demo. Each new one will onboard you to a new type of specialism, which you can then incorporate into your main museum later on, while giving you a playground centered on certain exhibit types all of their own.

Wailon Lodge is the next one I take on – a former haunted hotel, its dead owner still knocking around to give us advice on all things supernatural. Though finding room for standard features like a staff break room, training area, and workshop are a must, the different exhibits here immediately add a distinctive flavor. Haunted dolls and mannequins form the bulk of my first display area, and as they can come with their own mysterious curses these also affect the way I gear up. The doll, for instance, causes more litter to accumulate nearby its display, so I have some janitors on hand to give the area spruce up at a moment's notice.

But that's not as strange as this former hotel gets. It can still take guests… but only of the deceased variety. In the context of building a truly spooky museum, actually being haunted by the departed is a massive plus, and each new ghost who wanders in can be placed into special ghost rooms with one-way mirrors – becoming special exhibits themselves. Grouping up poltergeists from the same era of history makes them feel more at home, as does adding correct decorations, like antique fireplaces and gramophones. And you'd better keep them happy or they'll break containment and cause chaos for your guests.

"So we had the aquarium system, and we thought that was quite interesting the way the dynamics were there," notes lead designer Luke Finlay-Maxwell when we ask about coming up with the concept. "A clown fish is a clown fish is a clown fish, right? [But] a ghost, that's a whole new person. They have a life – or they had a life – and treating them more individually and [when you're] thinking about their needs and Buzz bonuses and things like that they do feel distinct."

I only got to play with the more basic elements in this museum, but Finlay-Maxwell does add that "eventually you come across more famous spirits that are even more fussy". Some of them, we're teased, will even reference some figures established in previous Two Point games, just as some of the ailments Experts and other staff and visitors can come down with are informed by Two Point Hospital features. Everything is connected.

Gift horse

That aquarium formed the backbone of the third museum I got to play with, and it's one where I really started to get into aesthetics of the museum. In the previous games, I've always prioritized efficiency first due to the nature of hospitals and schools fitting that mold. But here, as I try to entice visitors to spend, I want to make these spaces worth spending time in. Which also means directing the flow of people through these spaces which, compared to those prior entries, are also a lot more open (though it's completely up to you to organize walls and guide-ropes how you please). Later tour functions even task you to think specifically about that movement experience as you put together the best routes that will excite.

But Two Point Museum also has you think about how to use that space space, and most importantly that natural flow of visitors, to your benefit. With staff doors to maximize movement of your crew, and one-way doors to funnel visitors through certain directions, can I make sure they spend big in a gift shop that takes up nearly a third of the whole museum (the answer is: yes). Can I funnel groups of guests through choke points to ensure security guards can pick up any ne'er do wells? Can I ensure members of the public don't accidentally cut themselves off from being able to loop back to a bathroom (that was one time – please reconsider that star rating, sir).

These are all tasks you think about while also juggling an optimal stream of expeditions to actually get new exhibits to display. While the star-rating system is still the main goal you're chasing, you're also prompted to tick off other objectives to unlock new parts of the map to send expeditions, in turn unlocking new exhibits you can use to adjust your layout. It's an incredible feedback loop as more and more elements come together, all giving you more to play with. Which is to say there's more to work towards than ever before, with more exciting rewards, all while mastering a whole new type of visitor behavior (and how to best squeeze 'em for cash). To get to the point, Two Point Museum is as Two Point as ever, but fresh enough to be worth a visit – while exiting through the gift shop, of course.

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