Two Point Museum: Release date, price, features and platforms

Two Point Studios are the folks behind the triumphant return of Theme Hospital with a fresh coat of paint and a release under a new name: Two Point Hospital.

Retaining the original game’s irreverent humor and escalating crises gameplay, Two Point filled a niche in the management sim genre that had been empty for quite some time.

They followed it up in 2022 with a game of their devising, Two Point Campus. Instead of a hospital, players were designing universities, hiring lecturers instead of doctors, and designing classrooms instead of operating theaters. Gags and gaffes were just as integral to Two Point Campus, and by the looks of things, that through-line of comedy will continue into the studio’s newly announced game, Two Point Museum.

When is Two Point Museum being released?

Two Point Studios have not given a single hint as to when we can expect Two Point Museum to release.

There’s an announcement trailer that says “Coming soon” but ‘soon’ is a very nebulous time frame in video game development. Soon could mean as soon as later this year, or it could mean in the first half of next year, we just don’t know.

Two Point Studios released Two Point Hospital in 2018 and Two Point Campus in 2021, so a 2024 release of Two Point Museum would fit a similar time frame.

TBA! We aren't ready to share just yet, but we're working to get you news soon so you've time to book holiday (:

(also: MEGA appreciate you wanting to book time off, that's so sweet tyy!)

— Two Point Museum Gamescom (@TwoPointStudios) August 15, 2024

What platforms will Two Point Museum be on at release?

We know for sure that Two Point Museum will be available on Steam (because there’s a page where you can Wishlist it there now). It will also be on the PlayStation 5 at launch, as indicated by the PS5 logo and stinger in the announcement trailer.

According to a brief report in GameSpot, the game will also be available on Xbox Series X|S, but take that with a pinch of salt because none of the officially released information confirms this.

How much will Two Point Museum cost at launch?

Once again, this information has not been released by Two Point Studios or Sega. Two Point Hospital launched in 2018 at $34.99 and Two Point Campus at $39.99 in 2022 (though hopefully you picked it up during the Free Play Days sale) so we imagine Two Point Museum will be at a similar price point or slightly higher given we’re now in 2024.

Two Point Museum gameplay and features

While some details are hard to pin down, Two Point Studios has not been shy in sharing gameplay details. Two Point Museum will follow the tried-and-true formula of the studio’s previous games with some new twists and points of interest to differentiate it.

Your museum needs to balance entertainment, education, and profitability

Players will need to run a thriving, profitable museum while balancing the entertainment and educational value of exhibits, the needs of guests, and now, the expeditions that your experts must embark upon to retrieve goodies for your museum halls.

Naturally, you can’t just buy museum exhibits from a warehouse somewhere. You need to send your experts out on expeditions to try and find….something. Who knows what, if anything, they’ll bring back with them.

Maybe some dinosaur bones (Sharpontops or Tugowaurus are two possibilities, highlighting the game’s tongue-in-cheek humor) a caveman frozen in ice, or maybe dysentery. Maybe the expedition will be more perilous than expected and nobody will return!

New danger: Children

Players can also expect to grapple with a new menace: children. Keep them entertained enough so they don’t climb the exhibits but make sure your museum remains a place of education and learning. It sounds like a challenging new balancing act for players to manage.

Expedition mechanic

The expeditions are an interesting way Two Point Museum will be set apart from the previous games.

In an interview with Eurogamer, the design director for the game, Ben Huskins, said “We’ve got a list of lots of different ideas we consider for future games. The thing that really got us excited about Museum when we first started talking about it was this idea of building up these collections of these amazing artefacts… How do I get these amazing things to find and display in my museum? That immediately sparked lots of ideas with us.”

The game’s executive producer, Jo Koehler, added “All the exhibits are really meaningful and have lots of gameplay integrated, which gave us quite a lot of flexibility. We’re seeing more than the previous games where people are building up their museums, they look genuinely unique because as soon as we got past the gameplay, we really pushed into the how do we get these museums feeling and looking amazing and incredible?”

Smarter use of space

Another point of difference Museum has going for it is a change in the way space is used. No longer are different functions and features confined to their own rooms.

Partition walls can be used to break up space and guide the flow of your exhibits in a much more ‘museum-y’ way. There will of course be tons of new, thematic decor as well as building options like archways.

Of course, every great museum has more than just fossils and dinosaur bones, but so far demos and screenshots have focused on prehistory so the game can keep something in its back pocket for release hype.

Trademark sense of humor

“We have some stuff that is grounded in reality,” says Huskins, “so we obviously look at what are the sorts of things people would expect to see in a museum, because we always want that grounding. But then we have those slightly more out-there things that make sense in the world of Two Point County.”

The implication that Two Point Museum will draw inspiration from lore established in Two Point Hospital and Campus is objectively hilarious. I hope to discover the origins of the “pandemic” from Two Point Hospital (a disease where people’s heads are pans).

Altogether, the museum looks like an exciting and engaging new venue for Two Point Studios to flex their creativity and show us a new batch of daft jokes, and we can’t wait to learn more about Two Point Museum.

Featured image credit: Two Point Studios/Sega

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