Two Point Hospital

PC

This is a game that understands that nostalgia is a core part of its appeal

Developer Two Point Studios Publisher Sega Format PC Release Out now

Agaggle of Freddie Mercuries strut back and forth in front of an empty psychiatry room, waiting for the hospital’s lone psychologist to finish wrenching a pan off a man’s head with a big magnet. A patient with a bad case of Jazz Hands stumbles out of a ward and promptly dies, returning as a ghost to send Freddies fleeing, terrified. There are no janitors available with the Ghost Capture skill, so one must be hired – flung down from the sky to scoop up the unwanted spectre with a vacuum cleaner, the cost of doing so covered as pan is freed from head with a gratifying pop.

Theme Hospital’s influence is felt in every aspect of Two Point Hospital, from its fundamental mechanics to its visual design and humour. This is a game that understands that nostalgia is a core part of its appeal – and that its links to Bullfrog via Mark Webley and Gary Carr are robust enough to contextualise its development as an act of homecoming, rather than appropriation.

Two Point succeeds mightily at evoking the spirit of mid ’90s British game development. In the transition from 2D sprites to 3D models your hospital’s patients and staff have retained the sense of tactile goofiness that was core to Theme Hospital’s charm. Its various illnesses each start life as puns, with flagship ailments then translating into silly visual effects and sillier treatments. Sufferers of Animal Magnetism are covered in furry creatures which must be forcibly blown off them by a nurse with an air cannon. Light Headed patients have a lightbulb for a head; they must be provided a De-Lux Clinic where a doctor can remove it with an arcade-style claw machine. And so on, and so on.

Playing Two Point means deep and slow exposure to a particular kind of gentle daftness – indeed, its developers’ devoted commitment to a joke format established over 20 years ago is one of the most remarkable things about it. In addition to the regular stream of sight gags provided by the moment-tomoment operation of your hospital, you are treated to a meticulous pastiche of British daytime-radio punditry – a background hum of edgeless, pleasant wit.

It’s an appropriate accompaniment to a game that isn’t interested in challenging the player too steeply – at least not at first. The majority of the new hospitals you unlock in your tour of Two Point County begin life as an empty floor plan and a short list of modest objectives. Meeting this low bar means laying out rooms, arranging equipment and decorations, and ensuring that your patients have their needs met as they journey from reception to GP’s office to whatever form of further diagnostics or treatment proves to be necessary. Your doctors, nurses, assistants and janitors will automatically move from room to room to meet demand, provided that they’re not too overstretched.

Your role, primarily, is to attempt to foresee future needs and plan for them: adding a new wing to the hospital, building more diagnostic rooms or waiting areas, monitoring patients as they walk around to determine whether they’re too cold, too hungry or too far from a toilet. Sometimes a crisis – such as the ghost of a deceased patient causing havoc in the psychiatry queue – might call for the drag-and-drop deployment of a janitor. But one of Two Point Hospital’s particular strengths is the way it remains accessible, even toylike, at this basic level of play. It is possible to achieve a passing grade, and to see the majority of what the game offers, from a reclining position.

This is reinforced by a modernised UI and revamped set of construction tools. Entire rooms can be picked up, rotated, shrunk or enlarged at any time, and the game is transparent about potential pathing issues and the consequences of any changes you might make. It is reliably gratifying to drag out a new room blueprint and populate it, with new decorations being steadily unlocked as you amass a special currency by completing achievements. You have limited choice when it comes to overall decor – each room type has a pre-set style – but in a sense this curtails the choice paralysis that can result from greater creative freedom. It is a game of pleasant busywork, calibrated to devour an afternoon in thousands of tiny bites.

The weakness of this system, however, is repetition: a thriving hospital inevitably needs a lot of GP’s offices, for example, and each one is more or less the same. You can’t copy rooms, or deploy pre-set layouts for them – it’s a manual job each time – and the prospect of redeploying overfamiliar setups time and time again can be enough to sap enthusiasm for starting a new level. There is perhaps a worry that letting players take shortcuts through room creation would effectively let them bypass much of the game: but it might have been better to give that choice to the player. The pursuit of higher star ratings for each hospital reveals Two Point’s chops as a management sim, as do stages with unique requirements – such as the university training hospital where all new recruits are complete novices, or the public hospital where patients don’t need to pay for treatment. These are the high points of the game, forcing you to rethink your assumptions and rewarding you with a deeper understanding of the game in return – particularly the importance of ‘X factors’ such as reputation, which eventually allow you to approach new hospitals with greater finesse.

Two Point Hospital offers plenty of opportunities to put that understanding to work, with new illnesses and facilities continuing to arrive many hours in. It extends beyond its predecessor both in terms of detail and scope, and in doing so it achieves something vital for any project born of nostalgia: it replaces the thing that it’s based on with something better.