In a lot of ways, Two Point Museum is another solid entry in the popular “Two Point” franchise - the look and feel of the game is markedly similar to previous entries Two Point Hospital and Two Point University. However, calling it “another sequel” puts it in a group it doesn’t belong, in the same company as thoughtless, reskinned money-grabs with tacked on features and a marked lack of effort. Two Point Museum is none of those things, and in fact, it’s similarities with previous titles in the franchise are a key part of why it works so well as a cozy comfort game.
Iteration is the key to Two Point Museum’s success - it isn’t successful despite it’s similarities, it is successful because of them - but its not as simple as all that. Each of these games, be it Hospital, Campus, even Museum, are tailored to give the player ultimate control over the game-world - but in relinquishing control, they also invite intense scrutiny over the mechanics of the simulation, which is not without it’s flaws. In a typical game, the player controls a single character, and interacts with the world the same way a soccer player might interact with the field: they control a single point of interaction with the world, and can revel in the success or suffer the consequences of failure, depending on the actions they take. In the “Two Point” franchise, you are the field. In this way, failure or victory is far less straightforward than typical games - and beyond that, by taking control of essentially the whole world of the game, you have far more points of stress for the game - more places for things to go wrong, to not quite fit, to not fulfill the vision that the player has of what the game should be. In a single player game, when a player attempts to, for example, jump from one platform to another, and fall to their death, their reaction is typically “I guess I can’t do that yet”. When the player essentially controls the whole world of the game, their reaction becomes “Why can’t I do that?”. This is one of the challenges of granting your players what is essentially godhood, and its a challenge handled extremely carefully by the “Two Point” series.
Back to iteration, the key to all of this. In creating a series of quite similar games, the developers have run into these “Why can’t I” sticking points in each title, and had the foresight to smooth them over for the next iteration. More importantly, they’ve paid attention to the little things. Moments of open frustration at a games stubborn refusal to comply with the players will are actually fairly rare - more frequent are the small annoyances at things that shouldn’t be a challenge, but are. Two Point Museum, purely by virtue of being the most recent entry, has the benefit of two previous games worth of content being unintentionally analyzed - of the small problems the developers never caught being made glaringly obvious. It soars because virtually every moment of frustration in a previous game has been noted, and a solution has been proposed. That’s an attention to detail that everyone can appreciate.
Why does all of this work so well, anyway? Well, the “Two Point” franchise is a beautiful blend of business management and city building simulation: It takes the best part of management games (the gradual and satisfying climb from small-time to mogul) and city building (designing the layout and watching your citizens navigate it) and combines them. The trick to these types of games is that, more than any “choose your own adventure” style game with multiple endings, they allow the player to find their own solutions. No two players approach to solve the challenges the game poses for them will be exactly the same - that allows for a type of satisfaction that supersedes beating a challenging boss fight. You didn’t simply whack something with a sword until it died - your victory wasn’t based on reaction-time or split-second decisions: it was a careful, slow climb up a challenging summit, and you can be sure that no one else’s path looks exactly like yours. It’s not an adrenaline rush, it’s a quiet, simple satisfaction that is hard to master, and mastered it, Two Point Museum has.