T wo P o i n t Hospital
Theme Hospital fans are getting exactly what they want
There are no oceans of vomit in this level, Theme Hospital fans
My hour with the first level of Two Point Hospital is comforting more than anything else. Like playing Cities: Skylines— or any other modern spiritual successor that aims to breathe new life into a mistreated management sim classic—it’s lovely to immediately know how to play a game like this. The opening moments of a Two Point Hospital game feel pretty similar to ThemeHospital. I build a reception desk, a GP’s office, and a pharmacy. I hire a few doctors and nurses to staff them. I drop in some waiting benches for my patients. From there, I add another GP’s office, another pharmacy, and a staff room with a coffee machine, comfy chairs, and a dartboard. It’s a pretty weird-looking hospital with spaces where there probably shouldn’t be any, mostly because I know nothing about elegantly laying out a building. In each room, you’ll be required to place certain objects depending on what the room’s function is, but you can then spend extra money to add little niceties.
“It’s fine at the start of the game to build quite a utilitarian room,” Ben Huskins, TwoPointHospital’s lead designer says. “It’s the minimum size, and has the required items in it. As you progress, we want people to start making a slightly bigger room, a more interesting shape, start putting in things like windows, a plant, and put a picture on the wall. Add that little medical cabinet, the rug, that sort of thing, and start to build a more interesting room that’ll keep the staff happier and the patients happier as well.”
All the objects you place in Two Point Hospital will snap to a grid, which lets you build a hospital in almost no time. Another button lets you place furniture and other objects with lovely, satisfying precision: You can put your benches so close together that they’ll take up less overall space, and personalize the placement of items throughout your hospitals.
sea of sick
I eventually build a General Diagnosis room for diagnosing new illnesses, and a De Luxe clinic for curing lightheadedness —namely, when patients have lightbulbs for heads; one of the game’s illnesses. When the bins need emptying, I hire a janitor. When people start dying in the corridors and ghosts haunt said corridors, I hire a more expensive janitor who specializes in capturing ghosts (the spirits of which can later be used for research). As ever, the challenge is how you use the space for the optimum results. But I spent plenty of time just zooming in on the people wandering through my hospital to see what they’re up to. There are no oceans of vomit in this level, Theme Hospital fans, but I’m assured we can expect vomit from some of the game’s other diseases. While there are many simulated elements in the game, the UI deliberately keeps it nice and simple. It’s easy for hardcore players to access the stats of their hospitals, staff, and finances, but also simple for new players to spring up a working hospital in no time. While it does feel a lot like ThemeHospital to me when it comes to the basics of managing a hospital, it’s worth noting the dynamic of a larger healthcare organization could be a very different proposition—though naturally I don’t get a sense of it in the one-level demo I played.
Crucially, that first experience of setting up a reception desk, hiring staff with their own personalities and specialties, then watching patients filter in will give ThemeHospital fans exactly what they want. That is, a management sim that starts steady, gradually escalates, and reminds you of a game you used to love—a comforting experience.