Two Point Studios continues its release of new iterations of the Two Point series with Two Point Museum. Before we had hospitals and schools, now we’re jumping into the world of discovery and history with museums. Sega gave us a sneak peek at Two Point Museum to see what’s in store for us and our first impressions right before the game releases next year.

Do note that the preview version of the game only covers a small portion which is around two hours worth of game and was tested on Steam.

In Two Point Museum, you take the role of a museum manager to keep your exhibit running, and to attract more people to visit your museum, you’ll need to display items that will draw a lot of attention. But to get any interesting items to exhibit, you need to set an expedition to discover these valuables and hire an expert in expeditions for that. And to keep the museum running, you need assistants to handle your ticket selling, merchandise, and hiring janitors to keep things tidy and equipment working, and then security guards to make sure nothing gets stolen from your donation boxes. But your exhibit won’t bring a lot of visitors in an instant, you still need to make your museum presentable, so you have to add decorations to increase the items’ buzz level and info stands that increase knowledge, both buzz and knowledge will coincide in making your museum a talk of the town as you need to keep your visitors both happy and smart so they can spend more in your museum so you have enough revenue to keep it running.

Whenever you hire employees, they level up to unlock skill slots that you can train them to give them specializations or ability boosts, and that would also mean higher wages for them, otherwise, your employees will feel more unsatisfied which can affect their performance or worse leave your museum. Setting for an expedition is a fun feature in this game, where you can unlock more locations as you unlock more features in your museum or if you have a specific employee that has a required trait skill, and expeditions will have dangers that could injure your expedition team, either delay your expedition progress or causing one of your employees to be out of commission for several days. It’s a high-risk high-reward moment that you may either play it safe in your early play or go all out to earn higher revenue very early.

Later as you progress in the game, you will be able to unlock new areas to branch out your exhibit, and each different areas offer a unique theme that unlocks themed items. There’s a water-themed museum where you catch rare and exotic aquatic creatures for your exhibit and it adds new elements to the game where you need to maintain an aquarium and certain creatures can live in high or low-temperature water and require oxygen and food to keep them alive. Meanwhile, the haunted theme museum almost has the same mechanics as aquariums, except instead of fishes, you capture ghosts or poltergeists and store them in a chamber for your visitors to spectate, and decorate their rooms to keep them happy, otherwise, they can go berserk and haunt the visitors and scare them off your museum. The best part when you unlock the other themed museums is that, you can use their items to other museums to mix different themes for more variety of customization. Do you want a giant aquarium for your Ice Age-themed museum? you got it, how about dinosaurs and ghosts, yep, you can do that too.

Each aspect of the game has a game loop that’s easy to follow and the game will remind you most of the time of your tasks, once you handle your museum management well, you will be able to level up your museum by meeting certain goals given to you to unlock more decorations and unlock new expeditions paths for better items to display at the museum. Your main goal is to get stars to increase your museum’s reputation, so that means more items to unlock, and more space to expand your museum. The occasional events happening throughout the game, such as a sanitary officer setting a scheduled inspection on your museum, or a famous collector looking for rare items that they could buy from you for a higher price, these situations happen mostly random or notify you in a few days advanced and if you managed to pass their qualifications, you’ll earn some bonus money. As for hazards though, I haven’t experienced any of these events like fire outbreaks or ghosts rampaging the museum, probably I’ll encounter more of these in the full version. But you get the idea if you overlook some functions of your museum, it will end up pretty bad.

The game explains the basics very straightforwardly, so you won’t have a hard time remembering how some stuff works in the game. It also keeps reminding you of certain functions you must frequently check, such as unattended ticket booths, areas to be cleaned up, and exhibit equipment that require some maintenance. The objectives are displayed on the side to keep track of your progress and will remind you of which items and decorations work well with each other to maximize buzz and knowledge. Similar to the other Two Point games, there is a financial tracker to check on your monthly revenue growth as well as your employee tracker to check up on your staff’s condition that helps you how to plan out any adjustments needed.

The game’s UI is clean and easy to understand, you know which button to customize rooms and which one to hire new employees, though the input functions when selecting objects may require some getting used to as you’ll accidentally remove or sell objects when clicking the right mouse button, so it may take some time familiarizing on the controls. As a Two Point games tradition, there are funny audio infomercials and PA announcements that keep the mood high even when playing for hours and it doesn’t feel that tiring to hear them, hopefully, there will be more audio clips of these in the full version.

And there are tons of stuff that you can expect in the game, what I got on the preview is just a small fraction of what you can unlock from Two Point Museum. After trying the preview for around 6 hours, I enjoyed the museum theme aspect of the latest Two Point game as it has a lot of customization options to decorate your exhibit, and when you try to become creative on the presentation, it rewards you with higher buzz and knowledge modifiers. For someone like me who is not into simulation games, the game loop keeps you hooked for hours and it’s also satisfying to look at different NPCs interacting in the museum. I’m looking forward to the full release next year to continue managing museums.

Two Point Museum digital versions will be available on PC (via Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series consoles on March 5, 2025. The PS5 physical edition will be available on March 4, 2025.

Pre-order and purchase the Digital Explorer Edition to gain five days early access starting on February 28, 2025, along with various bonus features