Management sims have never really been my cup of tea. But there is one exception to this rule: Rollercoaster Tycoon. I think the low barrier of entry, friendly presentation, and deep layers of gameplay have always kept it a comfort game of sorts. That being said, I’m always on the lookout for a modern approach to this gameplay. While Two Point Hospital passed me by, I had quite a bit of fun with Two Point Campus. Having worked on the arrangement of an actual museum, Two Point Museum seemed like a great fit for me. But while its humor and fun scenarios kept me engaged as a curator, the performance issues and lack of quality of life features on Switch 2 leave a lot to be desired for this particular port.

In Two Point Museum you get full reign of running and curating a museum’s collection. While there are designated themes such as prehistory, botany, and aquariums there are also unorthodox ones like supernatural and ‘digital’ museums. Running the museum is divided into different tasks, but primarily you’ll be recruiting experts to work as curators to maintain and collect exhibits to display in your museum and attract guests. Via the helipad you can send your crew on expeditions to try and retrieve pieces ranging from fossils and spirits to flesh-eating plants and videogame artefacts. Meanwhile, you’ll be designing your museum to house these collections, hiring security guards to ward off thieves and keeping janitors around to sweep floors and develop new interactive displays for kids. Once you get into the gameplay loop, there is quite a bit to do as the money starts flowing in. This fun begins when you’re presented with additional challenges and tasks to increase your museum’s rating and need to keep multiple museums going across Two Point country.

The visual style and comedic writing helps keep the game feeling breezy. From sarcastic announcements over the speakers reminding guests that they need to leave the museum with exactly the same amount of bones as they arrived with, to firing employees stating: “I knew this would be a bad day when you told me I was being fired". The cracks at corporate culture in contrast with how museums are public goods are a great continuation from those in Two Point Campus. Especially when the game starts to combine different elements, such as the supernatural museum also turning into a kind of hotel management sim to keep trapped spirits at ease (as observable exhibits).

But once I started digging deeper I found myself quickly running into issues with the way in which the game is presented on Nintendo Switch 2. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. At launch there is neither support for mouse controls nor using the touch screen in handheld mode. This may sound trivial or gimmicky, but with the amount of menus and tools you’ll need to manage I found this often to be deeply annoying. Given that this is the third game in the series and I still need to use multiple buttons to navigate to a hub menu, then go manually over to the right with the L/R button and then still need to press the right directional button twice in order to manage the payments of my staff is ridiculous. You cannot assign specific button shortcuts or have different layout options. A radial menu would’ve been ideal on consoles, but alas, these are barriers you’ll need to work through the hard way. Especially when you need to press buttons within menus to make them scrollable and read the additional information. That’s before we get to building, where a lot of the finer details can easily get lost because you overshoot placing wallpaper with the joystick, or need to draw a line for the placement and removal of walls. The game doesn’t tell you how certain controls even function, such as pressing the minus-button to swap between placement and removal of walls. Nor is there an undo button, which I deeply missed.I am aware that this setup is similar to previous editions on console, but still given that gyro-controls for cursors, touch controls and mouse controls are all possible here, it is a missed opportunity for the Switch 2 version to set itself apart from the crowd.

The real problems however arose when I kept growing and improving my first museum to increase its rating. Framerate drops, performance issues and especially input-delays became the norm and incredibly distracting. Often I needed to wait upwards of a full two seconds for a menu to open after pressing the button. This may sound trivial but that is your basic interaction in a management game and it only started occurring when more visitors entered my growing museums. And we’re not talking about an enormous map-filling museum here. The game started to slow down and show hiccups before I was even building my third museum. It became harder and harder to track visitors or even staff and I really had to put the game down because it was such a distraction. It broke the immersion completely and especially for a title that isn’t graphically that demanding. For a game that runs on brand-new hardware it simply felt like it was defaulting to the performance of Switch 1 after the opening hours.

All this makes it currently very difficult for me to recommend Two Point Museum wholeheartedly right now. While I adore the style, humor and general gameplay loop, it is now becoming a struggle to fully enjoy the game as it reveals its deeper layers. I wish to explore the depth of its gameplay and for that I will now refrain from giving the game a fully scored review. In part because it feels like I have just gotten the hang of its systems and controls in more depth. But also because I want to believe that the developers need a bit more time to optimize and finetune the game for the Nintendo Switch 2. In its current state, at launch, I would not recommend picking up Two Point Museum unless you’re willing to deal with its shortcomings in terms of both performance and presentation. I hope that the developers are able to take the time to get more acquainted with the Switch 2 hardware and use it to optimize the game. In particular I want to see them embrace the features that help a management game such as Two Point Museum thrive on Nintendo Switch 2. For now, this museum is, in my opinion, still undergoing renovations and I hope to see it reopen in the near future to make its exhibits shine.