I was playing a lot of Theme Hospital growing up, and a couple of years ago, this Bullfrog classic was remade into Two Point Hospital. Since then a couple of Two Point games have came out based on the same concept; Two Point University and Two Point Museum.
The idea is that you establish a museum, you recruit experts, send them on expeditions to bring back exhibitions, to use in your museum. You build buzz, decorate, and research to gain traction which will bring your museum visitors.
It’s fun. It really scratches that Theme Hospital itch. The exhibitions are fun, the missions are great and you get a lot of dopamine kicks along the way every time you finish some minor goal.
Then you reach mid game and you have pretty much seen it all. You have unlocked all the different themes, you have explored most of the map, and you’re not getting those kicks anymore. You’re just going through the motions, expanding your museum. The missions have deteriorated into simply “get 4 more stars on your museums” and it stops being fun and starts become a chore.
This is clearly a game that is intended to be played with a mouse. I played it with a controller on PS5 and it worked well. Sometimes you get lost in all the buttons and have to just reset, but the conversion for console is good enough.
Most often the game makes sense, but sometimes it doesn’t. All my visitors started to just run around frightened and I couldn’t figure out what was scaring them. Turned out that I had two employees that were possessed by ghosts, so the visitors ran from one, and then ran right into the other, and then ran back, in a loop.
I did not finish the game. When I quit I had 2-3 stars across my museums and it took me 27 hours. A full playthrough gets you 5 stars on all museums and it takes about 40 hours.
I rate this game as GOOD.
