"There's a much bigger focus on what you think is important as the player": How Two Point Museum evolves on its quirky management predecessors

Long-time players of quirky management sims Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus will feel immediately at home in the cartoon aesthetics and tongue-in-cheek hyper-capitalism of Two Point Museum within minutes of beginning. But, after those few minutes, it's clear that, while in the same mold, there's something very, very different going on with the cadence of Two Point Museum. And it helps to breathe new life into formula.

"As you say, [in] the previous games, people were coming to those establishments with a particular problem that needed solving, right? Or they wanted to learn a specific thing," says lead designer Luke Finlay-Maxwell when we talk about the series' evolution tackling different business types. "Whereas with Museum, we wanted to make sure that the player has quite a lot of agency in how they're shaping the guest experience."

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Which isn't to say guests don't have needs. They'll still leave you negative ratings if they have the gall to be unable to wait ten minutes to use the loo after chugging your deliberately overpriced soda. They'll still have preferences for what they want to see, be it prehistory fossils or haunted artifacts. But it's up to you to choose what to display, and how to guide guests through that experience. "There's still things the player has to cater for, but there's a much bigger emphasis on how the guest sort of looks at your creation," says Finlay-Maxwell. Enticing players is something the team are consciously aware nods to the likes of Theme Park World.

What you have available to place in your exhibits, and when they show up, all revolves around Expeditions. This vital new addition has you sending your experts off periodically to explore, encounter random events, and bring back something exciting. "The very first prototype was just a timer, and you just click the timer and you'd get something," says Finlay-Maxwell. "Then we started looking at, you know, how can we make more impacts on the museum? So then, naturally, that led to things like events, so your staff members can get mucky feet [...], or they can even go MIA."

In practice, it becomes something like a second half of the game that comes in waves alongside your chase for star ratings for each museum you're managing. "We didn't want the expedition system to feel like it was just this completely separate thing," says design director Ben Huskins. "You've got what happens to your team that you send on an expedition, like they come back injured or with a curse or something like that, and that has a real, tangible effects on, you know, then back in the museum, might stop them from being able to do other jobs or go off on another expedition."

But it also adds a whole complimentary progression system. "As you explore those maps, you will encounter interesting new things that you need to think about, whether it's your team needing to be qualified in certain things, or certain cargo items that you can take on the expedition," says Huskins. "And you get to a point where actually at least some of the locations on the maps, you really want to put a lot of thought and preparation into the expedition beforehand, which I think adds that nice level of strategy to the game."

But the somewhat random nature of the expeditions adds a layer of creativity as well. Each area on the map you choose to focus on can pull from one of several possible finds, which can have slightly different details depending on luck. "That was a big part of it, trying to get that player expression through how they make their museum and what they're interested in," says Finlay-Maxell.

It's the kind of randomization that can enhance how personal each players' museum will feel to them, building on top of the more detailed tools Two Point Museum offers for things like crowd management, how guests will flow through the exhibits you present (and, hopefully, right into the jaws of the gift shop). "That was another core pillar for us, making sure that people are having different experiences when they're playing this game. Trying to basically make this game a bit less linear. You know, going from [Two Point] Hospital and [Two Point] Campus," says Huskins, be it where you choose to explore, to how you construct your space.

"All of that is built around different players having different experiences," says Huskins, "and being able to share interesting stories about what happened in their game and show off cool screenshots of: 'look what I did with my museum!', 'Oh, where did you find that thing?', 'Oh, I really want to be able to find that thing.' Yeah, that's definitely something we wanted to get out of this game."

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