Two Point Museum’s Arty-Facts DLC reminded me why this is one of the best simulation games

Two Point Museum‘s Arty-Facts DLC, out now on PC and console, drops you into a run-down industrial port with $100,000, a third of a cubist triptych, and a painter who only knows how to paint one thing: love. (No, not like that. It’s still an E-rated game, after all.) Anyway, your job is turning these unusual beginnings into a five-star museum, which sounds a lot like every other major challenge in Two Point Museum. But this very much isn’t just more of the same. Where the Zooseum DLC (the game’s previous expansion) experiments with different ways to interact with exhibits, Arty-Facts occupies itself with the complexities of managing the artistic temperament, thinking deeply about your museum design — and using it to manipulate your guests into shelling out more cash.

Art experts start with a specific emotion they specialize in, and they can only paint variations of that emotion. The variations are certainly… interesting, like a theme on “love” that consisted of a clawed purple hand with an evil-looking eye in the center of the palm. The people loved it, though, so who am I to criticize? But single emotions only get your museum so much attention.

Commissioning artwork is a bit like sending expeditions off in other museums, but your expert’s emotions and unique style influence which events you’re likely to see. In my current museum, one of my favorite experts has the “technicolor” trait, a cute way of saying he uses too much paint and everything he does costs more. On the bright side, the quality is typically very high, which means more donation money for me. Others might have a “destructive” work style or additional quirks that make you stop and think more carefully about which projects suit them best and how to train them, something you don’t have to pay close attention to in other museums.

Frugality matters in Arty-Facts, at least for a few in-game years. Like in the Zooseum DLC, doing business gets expensive fast here. Commissioning art is pricey, and you have normal expeditions to contend with on top of that, which occasionally turn up counterfeit art — a sad return for the thousands invested in the trip. You’ll send experts off to places that inspired the museum’s founder, and they often reward you with pristine-grade pieces of rare art. Exciting! Eventually. The plebs visiting your museum think it’s neat you have such nice art, but they aren’t exactly falling over themselves to fill your donation buckets until the rest of the museum is in good order.

But these pricey expeditions matter in the long run, because they’re how you teach artists with the capacity for emotional intelligence (a learnable skill in Arty-Facts) to incorporate different themes in their work. I sent one to a post-industrial wasteland where she learned how to make people sad, and since she likes to paint the sky, the result was sad sky paintings. Theme is important beyond emotion, as you can take certain themed paintings to other exhibit types in different museums (like haunted ones or science ones) to get a special buzz or entertainment boost. It’s a natural extension of the base game that encourages you to mix stuff like botany with prehistory, and it makes your museums more vibrant and planning them more exciting.

Emotion is the thing that surprised me the most, though. When I first started Arty-Facts, I thought it seemed a bit gimmicky. Does it really matter if guests get overstimulated and don’t care as much about high prices? They’ve already paid for their tickets. Turns out, the answer is yes, it does matter. Fleece incoming tourists with high prices, then direct them toward a rage-inducing exhibit to make them forget how much they hate you. Or mix it with a few other emotions that encourage spending, steer them toward a gift shop, and jack up the prices of plushies and books. Art is a business, buddy. There are also less manipulative things you can do, like inspiring emotions that make people happier when they’re together, so you fill them with the warm fuzzies and shoo them off toward the cafeteria. It’s an excellent way to bump up your satisfaction rating without having to spend too much.

You don’t have to do any of this. You could just make a nice art museum. But I’m having a blast figuring out these layout combinations. Normally, I’m a sloppy builder when it comes to simulators. Architecture is a foreign concept, and the new rooms and buildings that appear haphazardly out of the aether are born from pragmatism, not aesthetic considerations. Arty-Facts makes me think more deliberately about how my museums are structured for maximum gains. Since I don’t like bad layouts (yes, it’s a contradiction to my building style), I make sure everything looks good on top of having moneymaking potential.

Image: Two Point Studios/Sega

It helps that the DLC gives you a whole swathe of new decoration items — abstract things like blobby cylinders, art deco-style wallpaper themes, a bunch of psychedelic floor patterns. The variety of new design and lighting possibilities is absolutely fantastic. There’s also a series of crayon pillars that are oddly phallic-shaped, which… sure, okay. Patrons aren’t discerning enough to care whether you’ve decorated an exhibit with cheap garbage and wax genitalia, or if you’ve turned it into a themed masterpiece, but I care. To the point of distraction, actually.

I should be busy getting my art museum’s ranking to three stars and beyond. But I’m far too preoccupied making blended exhibits at my other museums and planning ahead for the future of the art gallery, when I’ll try to blend blue sad art with a marine biology room. I’m hoping for some less grounded art from my experts too, so I can mix them in with the fantasy exhibits at the haunted museum, and there’s room in my pre-history-slash-botany museum for some joyous paintings that make people happy when gigantic fly traps turn their friends into clowns.

I haven’t even dug much into the live performance aspect of the DLC yet. As you progress, you can put on shows with your art experts who specialize in theatrics of varying kinds. It’s a completely different, more enjoyable way to entertain your guests, which felt rather passive in previous expansions and the base game. It’s ludicrous thematically when you start putting these in your other museums, but y’know what? What the hell. Why not. Why not have a mime show next to the dead dinosaurs and the outdoor wildlife enclosures. Does it make sense? Absolutely not! But spring-loaded giraffes don’t make sense either, and nobody seems to mind them.

Two Point Museum was already up there as one of my favorite simulation games, and I thought the devs had already done as much as they could with the concept after Zooseum. Arty-Facts proved how wrong I was. It’s the game at its best and, like the concept of a warehouse art gallery itself, a superb way of reimagining what you can do with familiar spaces.