Two Point Museum Preview - A Fresh Take

Two Point Museum Preview Highlights

• Unique expeditions system for acquiring exhibits.

• Creative museum layouts with diagonal walls and hexagonal floor designs.

• Themed levels including fossils, underwater aquariums, and ghostly exhibits.

• Employee management systems tied to expeditions and museum operations.

• Launching on PC and consoles on February 27, 2025

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I recently had the chance to play an early build of Two Point Museum, the latest simulator from the developers of Two Point Campus and Two Point Hospital. With three levels available during my limited playtime, I got a taste of how this quirky formula evolves in its newest iteration, set to launch on February 27, 2025.

If you’ve played any Two Point games, you’ll already know the core gameplay, as the formula of keeping visitors happy, maintaining and building up your establishment, and managing staff remains largely unchanged. With the new museum setting, unique systems have been added, as it’s all about creating a bustling and informative museum through various exhibits.

Thinking outside squares – creative museum layouts in Two Point Museum

These exhibits create buzz, and with enough buzz, visitors will come, and if they like what they see and are fascinated by an item, they’ll donate, further funding your growth. An exhibit's appeal can improve if you apply the right amount of information stands and designs to make it an attractive piece to trigger donations.

The concept is refreshing, as designing a museum requires you to think outside squares. To be specific, this game isn’t all about creating multiple rooms, as exhibits can be placed in the middle of rooms, along walls, or beside other attractions with no walls dividing each one. This is where I felt I could be more creative in designing the museum, as I could use floor designs to color-code certain exhibits. For example, I designed a section themed around fossil exhibits with red floor patterns, then went with icy floor and wall designs to signify the entrance to the ice age exhibit. 

Designing them this way is not required, but I like the option to do so. You can change the color and design of each floor with the use of triangles instead of changing the whole square, giving players the option to partition certain locations into hexagonal shapes, if you’d like. Walls can also be built similarly, as you can place them diagonally, giving you the option to make curved layouts with exhibits partitioned hexagonally.

This new addition is a perfect fit for Two Point Museum, as it gave me the tools to create a space that guides visitors’ experiences, with mechanics like entrance-only or exit-only designations, offering players complete control over visitor flow. It also supports the tour guide mechanic, as later in the game you’ll be able to create a tour guide, which sets a group of visitors to be guided by one of your employees through a set route, visiting specific exhibits. This opens up a new level of customization options that make the game slightly deeper off the bat to make creations more colorful, sparking creativity.

Expedition: randomized treasure hunts

But how does a museum obtain potential exhibits in Two Point County? This is where expeditions come in - it’s a unique system where you send a team of explorers to retrieve an item to display in your museum. There’s a helicopter stationed at every level of Two Point Museum, ready to embark on the expedition you’ve unlocked. You assign the crew and pick a location that will have a randomly generated series of events that might affect the expedition. Expeditions may trigger events such as shortcuts that reduce travel time, bonus experience for crew members, or injuries that sideline employees for a few days.

Once an expedition is complete, a large crate arrives at your museum, and clicking it reveals a new exhibit that you can display. It’s a familiar loot box system, as each expedition location has a pool of possible items you can get. In the earlier levels, most expeditions yield new exhibits, but eventually, you’ll find yourself revisiting the same location to collect missing pieces of certain exhibits. For example, dinosaur exhibits are three-piece sets that become more appealing as you complete them. I don’t know how expeditions will work at the later stages, but you don’t have much control over what you’ll get in an expedition, as there are chances of getting exhibits that you’ve already unlocked.

Duplicate exhibits from an expedition may sound frustrating but it fuels another system in Two Point Museum as you can build an analysis room by breaking down duplicated exhibits. Doing this improves the quality of your currently displayed exhibits by increasing the total amount of buzz or information for that exhibit. This system also unlocks add-on slots for your exhibits, improving their appeal and increasing the donations they generate from visitors.

You can even add unique cargo to the trip, as you can craft items that would make the expedition more fruitful. One example was crafting a wider net that allowed an expedition to bring back two fish instead of one. At times, players will be asked to make a critical decision. During a snow expedition, the crew encountered an icy barrier and I was given the choice to either tell them to climb over the ice, use shovels to go through, or slide down (only available if a crew member had Survey skills). I chose for the team to slide down, and that resulted in the expedition time being cut by 3 days.

The expedition system further fuels the museum theme, as its employee management resulted in my covering the responsibilities of those embarking on the expeditions, as some expeditions require specific toolsets, such as needing someone with survival skills. You may even require janitors to join the trip, so the need for personnel isn’t exclusive to just archeologists.

Different themes, different museums

With the three levels available in the preview build, I was able to experience three of Two Point Museum’s different themes. The tutorial level focused on fossil exhibits, which further expanded with the addition of frozen fossils. These are exhibits that require a certain temperature to prevent them from melting, so you’ll need to build air conditioning in these areas in order to maintain them.

You’ll be dealing with similar challenges in the second stage, which is themed around underwater exhibits and allows you to build aquariums. Each water expedition might give you new fish to display in your aquarium, but each fish also needs to be within a range of temperatures to stay alive. This was a nice touch, as I had to create two separate displays for both warm- and cold-water fish.

The third stage featured ghostly exhibits, with the unique addition of capturing ghosts and displaying them similar to the fish. You’ll need to keep these captured ghosts calm by placing objects that are familiar to the ghostly apparitions. For my first captured ghost, I had to place a fireplace and antique clock with a couch and tables to make it feel like a living space set in the 1900s. Unhappy ghosts may escape their enclosures, haunting the museum and scaring visitors. I didn’t test this ‘for science’ because I was too focused on optimizing my museum.

Those are the three themes introduced in my preview build, and just like previous games, these themes add a new layer of unique challenges to change things up as you progress.

The aquatic and ghostly levels both had access to the fossil and aquatic expeditions, giving me the impression that you can design your museum to have multiple themes if you wish, as just like previous Two Point games, new levels just introduce new themes and abilities rather than limit the player.

Two Point Museum stands out with its enhanced customization options and unique systems for the museum theme. In comparison to previous titles, I felt more room to be more creative with my layout, and the expeditions fit in nicely with the rest of the systems.

But I’m curious about how it will play out in later stages, as I hope we don’t find ourselves spamming a specific expedition to complete an exhibit’s set, but failing multiple times by receiving duplicate exhibits already present in the museum. I hope the exhibit pool for each location remains manageable to minimize frustrations with duplicate rewards.

For now, Two Point Museum is shaping up to be a nice flavor for those who enjoy the Two Point Formula. Two Point Museum is set to launch on consoles and PC on February 27, 2025.

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