Two Point Museum, the latest business sim from Two Point Studios, is an engrossing museum management game that keeps you hooked with constant rewards. The very act of sending out an archeological team to acquire more exhibits nets you a (totally free) loot box of ancient antiquities. Exhibit-buffing gems and additional themed decorations can be unlocked by researching the duplicates you find.
You’ll also be assigned quests on your path to ranking up your museums, and each of these can have multiple objectives. Early on, these assignments nudge you to learn new game mechanics or focus on small improvements to your guest experience. These requests and your museums can be quite fantastical: one museum was located in a haunted mansion with actual ghosts I needed to wrangle and my space museum required carefully arranging alien artifacts in order to activate their secrets. But on my path to a five-star museum, the trickiest challenge I faced was figuring out how to pay my employees enough.
The specific objective was to reach “75% pay satisfaction” for all my employees, a stat I admittedly hadn’t been paying attention to. I certainly had employees occasionally complain about their pay and threaten to leave, and a quick raise took care of that problem. But achieving this for my entire staff? Where would I find the money!?
As colorful and silly as Two Point Museum can appear, it’s still a business sim at heart, and this challenge forced me to think that way… in my employees’ best interests! My museum ran on a shoestring budget cobbled together from grants, donations, and gift shop sales, so I needed to think about increasing all of those cash streams and add some more.
First, I took some inspiration from real museums and redesigned my gift shop so my guests had to pass through it to reach the dinosaur wing, increasing foot traffic and sales. Next, I grabbed a sponsored poster and stuck it next to the bathroom — which is to say, I put it in a high traffic area where it wouldn’t detract from my pristine exhibits. Investigating my museum rating, which ties directly into the grant you receive monthly, I found that leveling up my employee skills would actually increase my rating, and the grant. Training my employees did increase how much pay they desired, but the benefits outweighed the added cost. It’s almost as though investing in your employees makes your business run better!
Slowly but surely, I was able to raise my wages, which was easy to do in the employee management window. One button lets me immediately deal with any specific wage complaints by agreeing to a new salary, raising employee pay above the threshold where they’ll grumble about leaving. To go further, I could continue to manage each employee’s pay individually, but the game also has a handy “1% raise” button you can jam a couple times when your cash flow looks good. (Something something they should make that button in real life something something.)
While it was tough at first, meticulously managing my budget and slowly raising my average pay, eventually my employees’ higher happiness levels started improving my museum directly. This feedback loop quickly helped pay for all these raises. Finally, the mission was complete and my museum was more popular than ever. What a whimsical concept!
