Two Point Museum—available now on PC and consoles—is the third game in the Two Point franchise. The wacky sim series started off with Two Point Hospital in 2018 and then leaped to colleges and universities in 2022's Two Point Campus. Now, players are able to build their own wild and weird museums in Two Point Museum.
And after spending over 40 hours with the game, I talked to Ben Huskins, design director at Two Point Studios, about this latest entry. We discussed why the team went with museums, how they researched the topic, the new features they are excited about and also, if they too struggle with spelling “museum” accurately.
According to Huskins, spelling museum wrong became a “running joke” in the studio during development.
“Lead Designer Luke is a big fan of ‘musuem’ – we think he’s trying to push for the word to be officially updated in the dictionary,” said Huskins. “Throughout development, we’ve been discovering a wonderful smorgasbord of museum typos in every nook and cranny of the game. It’s particularly amusing as our trailer ends up with the line ‘You can’t spell museum without u and me... um...’ Turns out we can’t spell museum full stop.”
While the devs might have struggled with spelling museum right, they nailed making a great game about these places dedicated to history and knowledge.
But I was curious as to why the team decided to go with museums for the third entry in the first place. While it defiantly worked out, a museum sim wouldn’t have been my first choice after Campus and Hospital. According to Huskins, the team wanted to make a game about creation, exploration, and discovery, and once they started talking about museums they were “inspired by the possibilities.”
“Something that’s great about museums is they all have completely unique collections of exhibits,” said Huskins.
“We thought it would be great to allow players to build up their own unique collections, with every player finding different things. The expedition system felt like it would give us this wonderful sense of adventure, allowing you to choose where you want to explore, and then adding that sense of excitement and anticipation about what you might discover. Then, as your collection grows, we wanted you to have complete creative freedom to decide how to lay out your museum, and to craft an awe-inspiring and educational experience for visitors.”
And while the museums you build in Two Point are filled with strange and cartoonish exhibits, like giant man-eating plants and ghosts, the team still did a lot of research to figure out how real museums work.
“We spoke to several people who work in museums. We even got a few behind-the-scenes tours, which were amazing,” explained Huskins.
“There are so many different roles involved in running a museum, everything from the people designing the exhibition spaces to the technicians looking after the exhibits. There was no way we could represent them all in the game, but there are so many little features we added based on these conversations.”
For example, the director told me that staff-only doors were one such feature they added based on museum research. They also discovered that many museums in the real world categorize visitors in to “various personas” such as thrill-seekers and explorer. This helped guide how the game handles digital guests and their preferences.
And some of these guests are vampires and aliens. Yet, like the other Two Point games, Museum perfectly balances real-world details, like having to manage your staff’s pay and build restrooms for guests, alongside these outlandish aspects that are only possible in a video game. According to Huskins this is a key pillar of the Two Point formula.
“Having that juxtaposition is important for us – if everything is absurd, then nothing feels absurd, so we like to have that contrast,” said Huskins.
“Of course, we’re also trying to design a game with a lot of depth to the simulation. We’re not specifically trying to model reality, far from it, but we take some inspiration from real world organizations, then distill it down into something easier to understand. Ultimately, our priority is fun, so we’ll pick and choose the elements that give us the depth and the variety we want, whilst keeping the game approachable and lighthearted.”
Two Point Museum is out now digitally on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC.
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