Have you ever gone to a museum and thought, “I would have done that exhibit a little differently?” Then you’re going to love Two Point Museum, a delightful management game that lets you play a mad scientist creating the most unhinged museum experience ever. A near-perfect fusion of style and function, Two Point Museum can be genuinely hilarious, but it’s also one of the most mechanically rich management games ever made. And now that it just hit Nintendo Switch 2, you can take your portable museum on the go. It’s a perfect handheld title, allowing you to pop into your museum between classes, on the train, or anywhere else you may be.
Two Point Museum follows in the footsteps of Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus, which are both exactly what they sound like. The series has always tried to blend depth with approachability: these games are easy to pick up and play, and serve as a great introduction to the management genre, but there’s a lot going on under the hood for those who crave complexity. This is blended with absurdist humor, like Museum’s carnivorous plant exhibition that turns guests into vampires.
Two Point Museum sees you construct your buildings, place exhibits, hire a variety of employees, then repeat. The goal is to get your museum to a place where it can run itself as you find new exhibits, but it’ll take some work to get there. Staff have a variety of stats and skills that grow as they complete tasks, and you need to keep enough people on hand to run things while sending others on expeditions to find more items to display. A helicopter pad gives you access to a world map full of expeditions with unique requirements, like the need for an archaeology specialist. At the same time, an expedition’s threats can injure your employees, necessitating a healing chamber back home.
These kinds of juggling acts drive much of Two Point Museum. You’ll need to balance making money and funding expeditions, fending off thieves with security guards, keeping exhibits clean, and ensuring guests feel happy and educated. Thankfully, a fantastic tutorial system eases you into each of these elements before leaving you to juggle everything at once.
The campaign offers a variety of museums to manage, each with a different theme that elevates the game from good to great. A museum’s theming isn’t just an aesthetic change, but a distinct new gameplay layer that shakes up the gameplay in some wild ways.
The aquarium, for example, has a whole system for catching different kinds of fish and managing their tanks. There’s a spooky museum where you have to capture ghosts, assign them to historically accurate rooms, and contain them if they break out and start scaring guests. Meanwhile, a sci-fi-focused museum requires you to collect alien artifacts and link their power together in your exhibits by completing visual puzzles.
The variety is astounding, and leaves you consistently feeling like you’re discovering something new and exciting. On top of this, Sega and Two Point Studios have done a fantastic job with free post-launch content that adds even more variety, like the “Fantasy Finds” update that turns the expedition map into a miniature Dungeons & Dragons game.
And now that Two Point Museum is on the Switch, it really benefits from portability. You can spend two hours with it or just 20 minutes, and either way, it feels like you’ve done something meaningful. It’s bizarre that there’s never really been a definitive museum management game before now, but Two Point Museum fits the bill to a tee. If you’re hankering for some strategy on the Switch 2, there’s simply no better choice.
