Two Point Museum Review — The Simulator That Should Be Put On Display

The gaming landscape in 2025 is filled with simulation games for just about everything it seems. If you want to design a zoo, you can play Zoo Tycoon. If you’d rather make a theme park, Roller Coaster Tycoon and Planet Coaster are classic options for fulfilling that desire. However, if you wanted to curate a museum, you’d have been fresh out of luck — until now. Finally, Two Point Museum is here to fill that void.

The “museum simulator” segment of the market is a lot quieter than others, so Two Point Museum is entering the landscape when it has the best chance for success. While simulation games can fall into various pitfalls, Two Point Museum manages to avoid those and create a delightful, creative experience.

Two Point Museum brings many classic controls from other games in the genre and ensures they all work together seamlessly. Smooth camera rotation and the ability to go from top-down to nearly horizontal allow you to immerse yourself in your museum. You can take out loans, explore new locations, hire as many staff as you need, and even set up new buildings in adjacent lots to further expand your franchise.

Everything from the toolbar to the current objective you’re working toward is collapsible from the side or bottom of the screen. Compared to other games in the genre, it’s a welcome feature when you get further into the game. Objectives take longer in the late game, so not having them block a quarter of your screen feels like a blessing. This holds particularly true given how much you need to see at any given time.

Two Point Museum is a dense game in more ways than one. There’s plenty to do to modify your museum, and the game introduces these options at a pace that makes the whole game feel approachable. Many simulator games either shoehorn you into success or give you so much freedom that you don’t know where to start, making them predictable or confusing, respectively. In this case, Two Point Studios has found the perfect balance.

As you get further into the game, it becomes clear how much managing you’re doing without realizing it. What starts as, “Oh, I need more decorations to get more buzz on this exhibit,” turns into carefully planning every dinosaur footprint you place on the floor. Two Point Museum wants players to customize their properties while letting them feel like those have a tangible impact.

Customizing your museum is not only a key to success, but it’s also a pleasure to build a full collection. It feels more like you’ve earned your exhibits than in other games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, where you only have to purchase rides and hope they succeed. Rather, sending your staff on expeditions and discovering new objects to display feels so natural that it becomes addicting to keep growing the collection.

If the customization options in the game just aren’t enough, Two Point Museum also comes with mod compatibility on PC. You can access the Steam workshop from the main menu and incorporate new cosmetics into the game. Wallpapers, benches, and cafeteria upgrades are available currently, along with foliage that isn’t in the base game like cacti and mushrooms. This is all before the game is officially released, so there will likely be even more after launch. Once the community can get their hands on it, there’s no telling what could be added to your museum.

Along with pleasing your museum guests, you’ll also have to please the county at large. From health inspections to exhibit collections, as you play, representatives will check if your museum is up to snuff. These may feel like a hurdle you’ve got to clear at first, but you can use them to your advantage. Maybe you didn’t notice that your guests think the museum is dirty, but when you get notified that the health inspector is coming, you’ll probably focus on hiring more janitors and placing more bins.

Two Point Museum’s graphics are exactly what they need to be, which works perfectly to its advantage. It doesn’t aim for hyperrealism that it can’t attain, but it’s also by no means juvenile. The characters are exaggerated enough that you’ll always know what game you’re looking at, but it’s grounded in its own adorable, cartoonish style.

At first glance, the game might look simple, but zooming in makes it clear that Two Point Museum is detailed in all the right places. Zooming in doesn’t just blow up the image, but it invites you into a whole new world where you can see your museum from the perspective of your guests. While this may seem unimportant, it adds to the overall connectedness of the game. You can see people taking pictures and climbing on or in exhibits (regardless of whether they should), and their various afflictions and emotions. If you want to know how people feel during their visit, zoom in and see how things look up close.

From goths to yetis, people from all walks of life will come wandering through your museum doors. Different guests want to see different things, so if your museum is tailored to just one fascination, others will be disappointed. You’ll need interactive exhibits to entertain children, but you’ll also need info stands to stimulate professors. Different guests will interact and boost each other’s enjoyment, so you’ll need to keep a wide variety of visitors in the building at all times.

When you’re not bopping your head to the catchy, jazzy soundtrack, you’ll get the occasional interruption from the news, advertisements, or radio hosts. This is a prime example of Two Point Museum’s humor. Subtle little comments are enough to get a chuckle out of you while tending to your guests, and you can only imagine that they’re laughing right along with you. The names of staff members may be customizable, but you may not want to change anything when you hire people named Dippy Eruption or Kim Masterstroke.

The progression system in Two Point Museum can’t be praised highly enough. Your museum starts small and simple, and within only a few hours of playing becomes almost overwhelming to look at. You can start with only one or two of each staff member before suddenly finding yourself with 10 to 15 of each without realizing it. Every decision you’re instructed to make follows a clear path, so it doesn’t feel like the game holds your hand too tightly.

Once you’ve outgrown your first museum, the game will introduce another one with a different theme, rather than casting you off into an infinite sandbox. You’ll make more expeditions to new places, build new exhibits, and please unique guests. This keeps the overall flow from feeling repetitive at any point. There’s plenty of variety, not just in how you curate your museum, but what you’re putting in it and where it comes from.

Each museum type functions differently, meaning you’ll have to employ new mechanics depending on what theme you play. It’s an interesting spin on the simulator genre, and it makes Two Point Museum feel exceptionally well thought out and replayable. If you want even more replayability, hop into the Sandbox mode, which cuts you loose with whatever restrictions you do or don’t want.

Once you’ve achieved a one-star rating on your second museum, you might think the game will introduce you to your third museum, right? Not so fast. Two Point Museum will send you back to your first museum to introduce even more mechanics you can use to further improve and expand both of your existing properties before opening the doors to a new adventure.

Just when you might think things are starting to get easy, you’ll begin to run into certain situations where you and your staff aren’t up to par. First, once you’re out of the early game, money starts to get tighter. You’ll notice the majority of your income goes to paying your staff, and as you continue training them, they’ll have higher expectations of what they should be paid. Unfortunately, the more you expand, the more staff you need, and the more money you’re spending on wages.

This adds extra challenge to the game because suddenly you can’t fix every problem by throwing money at it. Instead, you’ll have to closely consider what you can do and how long it should take to implement. From making staff happy with bathrooms and vending machines to increasing wages to keep them satisfied, Two Point Museum makes sure you’re focused on balancing your budget rather than letting things get out of hand.

Balancing your budget becomes one of the main challenges in Two Point Museum, making it a bit difficult to play smoothly as you get further into the late-game stages. The time feels like it moves a bit too quickly, with months flying by faster than it feels like you can address arising issues. It gets difficult to keep up with the days unless you pause time to sort your finances or rearrange your exhibits. Thieves expose this issue the most because if your attention is focused anywhere else, they can make away with your exhibits before you even have a chance to spot them.

This affects the overall flow of the game because it starts to feel like you can’t maintain the same pace you worked at in the beginning stages. If your museum has an inspection coming up, it gets difficult to address the potential concerns before the inspector arrives, meaning you can wind up with a lower rating than if you broke the immersion and paused time. Having to pause so much at the later stages breaks up the overall flow of the game in a way that feels like it could have been avoided with a slower day-to-day pace.

On top of that, just as you start settling into what to expect going forward, the game hits you with a criminal curveball. The training wheels come off after you reach a high enough prestige, causing thieves to target your museum en masse. This can throw off the flow of how you run things, forcing you to make space for security chairs, cameras, and a lot more guards. If there are too many thieves at once, you may find that you’ll need more guards or have to pause the game more just to fill in for those who are chasing criminals out the door.

Through all the problem-solving and potential financial struggles, Two Point Museum never feels overwhelming. If anything, it’s addictive, turning “just one more expedition” into 10 more expeditions and trying to set up your next five-star tour. You can curate the museum of your dreams, educate and entertain your guests, and show the county that you’ve got what it takes to run a successful franchise. As far as simulators go, Two Point Museum deserves to go down in the history books.

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