Two Point Museum starts off cosy, then descends into a frenetic management mania

REVIEW: This hilarious take on managing a museum will hook you with its initial ease, and keep you playing with its drip-fed complexity.

With 200 people visiting my museum, this is far from ‘cosy’!

My chief science specialist has quit on me. Without realising, I'd been working them to the bone, and for several years they had been begging for a pay rise.

I'm not a heartless museum overlord. But amid the hustle and bustle of my 30-exhibit museum, their demands just got pushed to the back burner. I was too busy defending my collection from thieves invading through my museum's toilets. And I had to decorate new exhibits, ensure the gift shop was stocked—forcing guests to exit the museum via it—and adjust the prices of my vending machines for maximum profit. Oh, and a few of my exhibits caught fire. All of which bumped pay rises down my priority list.

It wasn't always like this. In the early days of my museum, my staff were treated like kings: several luxurious break rooms, regular 1% pay rises for no extra work, retreats when they got ill. But I guess that's the price of growth?

Two Point Museum, a management sim where you run a series of wacky museums, pulls this miraculous trick where it starts off as an easy-to-play cosy game. I was playing it to fall asleep. But as you progress, it morphs into a plate-spinning challenge. In doing so, the game overcomes the sim genre's usual problem where gameplay can get kind of boring, repeating the same actions over and over. It's why many Sims players end up inventing their own challenges to keep things interesting. While Two Point Museum is frenetic, it's never punishing. It may fracture, and you will lose momentum, but your museum will never break beyond repair. Believe me, I've tried.

The premise is simple. You curate a museum to earn money, you then spend that money on improving the museum and finally on sending staff on expeditions to find new exhibits. Every successful expedition unlocks new areas to explore for more artefacts for you to claim. Each new exhibit raises the overall buzz of your museum, drawing in more guests. The process then repeats. Eventually, you start to draw in all sorts of weird characters to your museum: Yetis, vampires, aliens. All of them have particular conditions that they are looking to have fulfilled in order to attain their "dream visit" to a museum. Thieves start to get wind of your success and try to rob your museum, forcing you to install security. Certain exhibits have temperature requirements or need to be maintained by particular experts. Staff require training to keep up with their escalating duties, and as mentioned, they'll want pay rises too.

Your security guards arrest thieves with large pepper grinders in this game.

That's only a handful of the overlapping systems at play here. I didn't realise exactly how much I was juggling till I stopped to actually write it out. All need to be acknowledged by the player, but, thankfully, not dwelled on too deeply.

The game's humour also helps Two Point Museum dodge the controversy at the centre of the game: the ethics of museums. As someone who incidentally managed to visit both The British Museum—where I saw the Rosetta Stone—and Egyptian Cairo Museum—where guides complained that The British Museum has their Rosetta Stone—in one holiday, I'm well aware of this.

Exhibits and themes in this game are fantastical, including relics from space, bonkers dinosaur bones, carnivorous plants that transform guests into clowns, and impossible fish monsters. If anything, the game pokes fun at the weird philanthropic yet incredibly commercial nature of museums. Perhaps better than any exposé ever could.

A prehistoric computer, just one of the weird exhibits you can display in Two Point Museum.

Even just reading this, you are likely thinking this is all a lot to take in with all the mechanics and varying themes. Two Point Museum is an expansive game, taking me well over 60 hours to see most of what it has to offer. Thankfully, its campaign mode is a fantastic onboarding for the overall product, drip-feeding you each system and only adding more once you master it. Conversely, its Sandbox mode throws you in headfirst but gives you the ability to design something unique without the constraints of meeting objectives. I personally like working toward a goal, but the option of a Sandbox mode is fantastic for those who just want to build something unique or interesting — and don’t need a tutorial.

Playing on the Steam Deck, the interface for Two Point Museum is pretty clean and easy to navigate. The game’s font can get a bit small at times, but building a good-looking museum—that screenshots well—isn't a challenge, even without a mouse and keyboard. Some of the more nuanced options, however, like intricate wall or floor tile placement, aren't easily accessible with a controller. It's a small quibble, but an important one for a game where decoration is not only encouraged but matters.

Create a garden display in the middle of an industrial complex? Two Point Museum says, why not?

While Two Point Museum looks great, and its cartoonish design suits its treatment of the subject matter, the crown jewels of this game are its in-game radio announcers.

Your museum busy work is punctuated by some calming tracks that are topped and tailed with audio skits performed by these announcers. The wry humour of Hayley von Trowel is a standout, whose comments drip with classic British humour and overall frustration over the stupidity of Two Point Country's denizens. Your museum's PA announcer will also chime in to lambast you, your guests, or point out anything that's going wrong. These barks, while funny at first, can be a bit repetitive, especially if you are playing for a few hours at a time. There's only so much criticism one curator can take!

As for the music itself, with only a handful of tracks in the game, you are certain to hear each one at least a dozen times. Much like the PA's barks, it gets a tad repetitive. The game feels like it's designed to be played with a podcast or your own music in the background—to this point, you can switch off the music quite easily in the options. But it feels like it's missing a crucial third way here, where you can somehow listen to your own music but still engage with the game's excellently performed radio trimmings and PA announcements.

Two Point Museum served as a perfect companion for my recent holiday, not eating too much of the Steam Deck OLED's precious battery—lasting around 3.5 hours on a full charge—and being easy to both pick up and put down. I suspect I'll be dipping in and out of it for years to come, when I get that management sim craving that comes knocking every so often.

As for my chief scientist, it took a bit of time to hire and promote another to take their place. But here's the catch: They ended up wanting a higher salary than the one who quit. If there's one point the game has driven home: Management ain’t easy.

Reviewed on: Steam Deck OLED

Worth playing if you like: The Sims, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Sim City.

Available on: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac.