Two Point Museum is all about turning expeditions into exhibitions, provided your staff survive

I don’t like to brag, but it turns out that running a museum is actually well easy. Within an hour of sitting down to play Two Point Museum at Gamescom last month, I was running a modest monthly profit, educating the masses about one-fifth of a dinosaur skeleton, and most importantly, had not ordered a single staff member to their death.

This is a very real risk in Two Point Studios’ latest management sim, which not only shifts setting from a hospital or university campus to a natural history museum, but compels you to send expedition teams out in the field to search for new exhibits. Dig them up, bring them home, completely ignore the potential for any international disputes over ownership, and they’re yours: the centrepieces which your hallowed hall of learning shall be built around.

This is crucial because unlike, say, Two Point Campus, money flows in fairly easily – yet isn’t tied quite as closely to progress. With just a stone footprint and a couple of trilobites in my otherwise cavernously empty museum, I could easily generate enough in ticket sales and donations to hire a functional staff of historians, cleaners, and receptionists, while also funding some chintzy decorations to really wow the crowds. You know what people like seeing? A rock. You know what people love seeing? A rock flanked by two plastic palm trees.

However, you can’t simply buy new attractions, and without these, your museum will never grow beyond a sparse hall and an overly hopeful gift shop. That’s where expeditions come in: one or two of your staff’s history experts are shipped to some far-off land, with orders not to return without at least a mildly interesting pile o’ bones. You’ll gradually unlock different regions to dig up on a world map, though while the spoils will improve from small fossils to proper chunks of dead dino, higher-level expeditions will also present more dangers to your away team, with tar pits and animal attacks potentially injuring staff. Or leading to their tragic, uh, "disappearance".

I don’t yet know common these permanent losses will become, though it does seem that dealing with the survivors of a mission-gone-south still presents one of Two Point Museum’s biggest recurring challenges. One of my prehistory experts returned from an expedition having fallen into a tar pit, meaning he was in a foul mood and, worse, tracking inky black footprints all over my nice floor. While my cleaning staff had to redirect to the splotches of primordial ooze, a litter pile-up formed in the employee break room, and the culprit was so hacked off that he neglected his own duties in maintaining the prehistory exhibits. That led to a room of dusty fossils, unimpressed visitors, and reduced donations, leaving me with no choice but to launch an employment tribunal where I repeatedly picked him up and dropped him as punishment. It’s just a bit of liquefied asphalt, Phil. Need you to be a team player here.

Despite the chances of death and discontent (and the fact that you don’t really see them happening – yours is very much a desk job), these expeditions are also set to be Two Point Museum’s brightest highlights. From gearing up the crew to the amusingly lootbox-like moment of cracking open your next exhibit from its crate, there’s an air of anticipation and excitement around them, one that I never sensed from any particular bit of building or personnel work. They’re a reward, a milestone, and a challenge all in one, and I especially like how successfully steering the museum’s fortunes simultaneously opens up more of the world map to explore – like you’re expanding more than just a single building.

Of course, it’s not all about sending employees into tar pits and murder jungles. Back home, you’re tasked not just with filling the museum’s coffers, but with generating Buzz: essentially a score for how informative and entertaining each exhibit is. A well-maintained ancient marvel surrounded by description boards and decorations will keep the Buzz flowing and drive more donations, while unfinished or unattractive sections will merely drain cash and confuse onlookers.

A close relative Two Point Campus’ stars system, then, though perhaps not as simple to cheese. Whereas dumping an improbable number of arcade machines in students’ dorms was more effective at happiness-farming than an elaborately furnished rec room, here, lining up rows of contextless fossils won’t produce the Buzz required to fund new expeditions. You really do need to be thoughtful with the space, balancing the exhibits themselves with info boards, decorations, and tactically positioned donation boxes.

Still, Frostpunk 2 this ain’t. Two Point Museum is an expectedly lighthearted affair, and its finer points (like Buzz buildup) are introduced delicately enough that even the least experienced of aspiring curators can pick them up. While, naturally, it fires off near-constant jokes. The museum’s PA operator continues the tradition of Two Point tannoy jockeys, this one delivering her offbeat announcements with a very British flavour of ennui, and details as small as the trait titles for staff members ("Nice smelling face") can raise a smile. As can some of the expedition rewards: one of my first was a fossilised floppy disk.

A grumpier outlook would focus on how these out-of-office jaunts are the only real departure from an established routine. If, two months ago, you’d been told to close your eyes and imagine a Two Point game about a museum, you’d come up with something at least 85% identical to Two Point Museum. I think that’s fine, though; this latest take on comedy book-balancing still makes its share of refinements, and expeditions themselves are no small shake-up. It’s out on March 4th 2025.