Two Point Museum Review (PS5) – In a twist that shook me to my core, Two Point Museum seemingly achieves the impossible and manages to take the concept of museum management and make it into one of the most compelling and engaging management simulators that I’ve played in a good while.
With the characteristic charm that the series is known for, Two Point Museum is equally layered with mechanical depth and enough levity to cut through the micromanagement that will always be at the heart of the genre. Two Point Museum joins the previous two entries as a fantastic management game with a heart of gold, while also avoiding some of the most lethal pitfalls of console real estate.
Two Point Museum Review (PS5) – A Revolution In Management
Dusting The Shelves
It’s no secret that museums in general are scrutinised for how they approach preservation and curation of natural artifacts. This isn’t me getting on my soapbox, and neither is Two Point Museum. But there’s a tongue-in-cheek self-awareness that I couldn’t help but absolutely love as I sent hapless employees on cross-country expeditions to unearth and bring back a dinosaur at the risk of their own health.
As the name suggests, Two Point Museum is a game all about building and managing the museum of your dreams. From gathering interesting exhibits, all the way down to stocking the obligatory gift shop and staff management, you’re in charge of everything here.
After a pretty robust tutorial, you’re set loose on the Two Point county to repossess and turn all kinds of weird locations into historical tributes of varying ethical concern. (Seriously, some of these do raise some questions).
When opening a new museum, you’ll employ a team of experts, security staff, janitors and assistants to help operations run smoothly. You’ll send this team off on expeditions to procure new exhibitions and further push your museum into relevance and economic success. For how many moving parts there were, I didn’t ever find it to be overwhelming.
Opening Up Shop
Once you’ve chosen the spot to set your museum down, you’ll be introduced to the core floor-plan and some specific mechanics for the spot you’ve chosen. This ranges from a standard urban landscape to settings like an abandoned hotel where you need to balance satisfying guests and making sure that wayward spirits don’t actually harass them. How about an abandoned alien crash site?
When most people think of a ‘museum’, they imagine pretty stuffy environments with a focus on education. It’s a pretty narrow scope for imagination and yet Two Point Museum manages to take this grounded concept and run miles with offbeat humour and scenarios to navigate. If you’ve played any of the other games in the Two Point series, you’ll immediately know the type of comedy you’re in for, and it delivers on that promise.
As you’re milling around your museum, you’ll have the occasional chatter from an incredibly sarcastic PA system accompanying you. Or maybe you’ll tune into an in-game radio station with some offbeat commentary! I was pleasantly surprised by the variety here and it made the time spent waiting for work to be done all the easier. I didn’t quite expect to come across “chill beats to manage a museum to”, but I won’t complain either.
A First For Everything
The previous games in the Two Point series were always pretty solidly built on console. Compared to others in the genre, it never felt like moving the game from PC to console was seen as an obligation. While I’m sure people will argue that playing on PC is the optimal way to experience this type of game, Two Point Museum makes a convincing argument to the contrary, and puts its siblings to shame in the process.
With the sheer depth on offer here, making the control scheme work on a traditional controller is nothing short of a miracle. It isn’t perfect – but it’s pretty damn close to being completely spot-on. Tabs are easily navigated using the face buttons, and responsive use of the d-pad for precision that I’ve never had on console before.
I was constantly thinking back to other games that I’ve played and how onerous it was to even do the basics when within half an hour, I was managing and mastering museum work. There’s still the odd bit of clunk here and there, but the overwhelming feeling is that console players have been at the front of the developer’s minds here.
Luck Of The Draw
One major difference between Two Point Museum and its older siblings is the inclusion of some more “random” elements to the main gameplay loop. Most of the previous two games were very much wholly in your control. You wee the one managing your hospital and growing your academic empire. There wasn’t ever really need for random discovery elements to form a part of the game.
With the shift of primary setting to a museum, there’s a renewed focus on “exploration” – at least to some extent. As mentioned previously, not only will your employees be the backbone of museum operation, you’ll also be sending them on “expeditions” to various parts of the world in order to procure exhibits for the museum, while you lay back and reap the profits.
Each museum unlocks a new area to explore, with appropriately themed exhibits to recover and send to be displayed. And each area is split into smaller zones with their own potential items to find, with specific requirements to unlock them. This is where the majority of the main loop comes into play, as you train your staff in a variety of disciplines to improve their abilities in the field.
Each expedition comes with its own risks to consider, with the possibility of injury or even going “M.I.A.” under certain circumstances. (They’re still alive though – promise!) You’ll want to try and ensure that this doesn’t happen – especially to some of your more seasoned and trained employees as you progress. The unfortunate thing is – these events are pretty much always a random chance that can only be slightly influenced by the way that you distribute your staff.
Risk and reward is great when I’m not leaving it to the roll of a dice. There was nothing more frustrating than having to retrain a core member of my team because of something I couldn’t even see.
You could argue there’s a self-awareness to this mechanic – and arguably to the whole game. More than anything, you’re encouraged to rinse your visitors of as much money as possible with donation stands, vending machines, tacky gift shops. In order to actually learn more about the exhibits and raise your “enlightenment”, you send spares off to a lab and literally deconstruct them to improve the information you can provide.
It’s been a minute since I’ve had any relation to the curation industry, but I don’t think it involved actively desecrating historical sites and destroying artifacts for a museum showcase.
That’s Museum Life
Despite my frustrations with the random element behind one of the game’s core systems, I do somehow think that was the point here. Museum management is a hard sell; this kind of absurdity is exactly the compliment that it needs to appeal to a larger crowd.
Two Point Hospital had the benefit of ridiculous fictional illnesses to cut through the malaise of running a hospital. Two Point Campus manages to draw on the absurdity of student life, and Two Point Museum has your respected institute being raided by hooded gangs and robbers that look straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon – while your staff team is karted off to the Netherworld to find another haunted doll.
Balancing the comedic and the actual mechanics of a management simulator is no small task and most don’t succeed; Two Point Museum staggered me in its confidence to not only be a good game but also be funny at the same time. The mask was constantly off and I enjoyed that a lot.
Even if I’m still waiting for my loyal paranormal expert to return from their ill-fated trip to actual Hell.
Two Point Museum is available on PS5 on March 4, 2025.
Review code generously provided by the publisher.