Two Point Museum, one of 2025’s best and a top-tier strategy game, is free to play on Steam and Xbox now until June 22. On Two Point Museum‘s Steam page, you can click “play the game” to start. It’s also included in this weekend’s Xbox Free Play Days, though that’s only available to current Game Pass subscribers.
Two Point Museum is a quirky management simulator where you’re tasked with running the best museum imaginable. The gist of it is that you send expeditions out to find new exhibits and then do all the business management necessities to keep the actual museum running, like employing janitors and experts in specific fields to care for your finds. There’s a lot more to it than that, though.
The free weekend grants access to the full base game, which includes a lengthy campaign and a sandbox mode where you’re free to run your museum however you like — even if that’s into the ground. It doesn’t include the fantasy, zoo, or art DLC. (The latter is especially excellent.) However, the base game is still loaded with an impressive variety of challenges and design opportunities.
Two Point Museum blends the best bits of Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus. It keeps the strategy of Hospital‘s people management while making the stakes slightly less lethal. In Hospital, for example, a doctor with just one or two points in their treatment stat might accidentally kill a patient. Museum guests aren’t at the same risk, but your operations are. Depending on your staff traits and skills, you might have a janitor whose infectious pleasantness and “nice-smelling face” improve the mood for anyone who sees them (or the opposite, a jerk who ruins everyone’s day). Maybe you’ll have a tour guide who gets morbidly excited when an expedition goes wrong and does their job better. Among (many, many) other possible combinations. You’ll still run into trouble without the right skills, as every expedition has a random set of events, good and bad, that trigger depending on which staff members you send out. The negative results are just (usually) a bit less disastrous.
On the design side, Museum takes Campus‘ expansive approach to decorating and makes it even deeper. There’s an almost overwhelming suite of items, prints, flooring styles, murals, decals, and themed objects to spruce your space up with, and while most exhibits have requirements to fully max out their “buzz” potential, you’re free to place and design however you want. And there’s some absolutely fantastic designs floating around on the internet if you need layout inspiration.
Campaign mode teaches you the basics of how to manage your space and people effectively, along with more advanced techniques like breeding your own fish in a marine museum or using the power of science to cloud guest judgment and make them less likely to point out flaws. You’ll start with a prehistory museum before gradually moving on to others — a haunted hotel where you bring ghosts back from the netherworld, an aquarium with ties to a sunken continent, a mysterious research outpost visited by aliens, just to name a few.
As you expand, you can start mixing exhibit types, too. Maybe the prehistory museum needs some fish and a selection of ancient botany exhibits. The frozen finds section could do with a weird glowing frozen tree, too, or perhaps that’d be better in the space section with the cheese displays. The more exhibits you have, the more types of guests you can attract, which is where layout strategy starts to matter. A museum with a gift shop tucked away in the corner is far less likely to see good profits than one with a gift shop front and center, sporting trinkets and plushies relevant to the types of guest visiting and what they’re seeing. You can really dig deep into the management aspect if you want to min-max.
This isn’t even getting into admin things, like:
- Building interactive exhibits
- Maintaining appropriate museum security
- Putting on your best face for visiting VIPs
- Making sure guests have access to water and food
- Placing map stands in the right places to keep people from getting frustrated and leaving
- Running marketing campaigns
- Acquiring new exhibits for research purposes
It’s a lot to wrangle, but Two Point Museum eases you into everything so it feels like second nature by the time you’re ready to hit sandbox mode. It’s a supremely chill game and an excellent way to spend a weekend.
Two Point Studios is running a sale until June 25 where Two Point Museum is discounted to $20 on Steam if you wanted to buy it after the free weekend. Save data will carry over to the full game, whether you buy it during the sale or after.
Two Point Museum shamed me into being a better boss
Well-paid employees belong in a museum
