Staff – December 4, 2018 at 8:38 AM
Two Point Hospital isn’t any ordinary business simulation game. Sure, at first glance, it might appear like a simple hospital management experience, requiring you to coordinate the flow of patients and doctors to receive and deliver diagnoses and treatments. But look closer, and you’ll notice that some patients have light bulbs for heads; some are dressed as clowns; and some walk the hallways dressed like Queen’s Freddie Mercury.
Two Point Hospital deftly balances a playful sense of humor with deeply complex systems for designing and maintaining a fully-functional hospital. This makes for a game that keeps the player in high spirits while still offering a wealth of compelling challenges.
The game’s willingness to entertain the absurd is one of its most special features. Two Point Hospital’s roster of illnesses is a litany of puns and gags: The light bulb-headed patients suffer from “Lightheadedness”; the clowns have a bad case of “Jest Infection”; and the Freddie Mercury look-alikes have contracted an illness called “Mock Star.”
Even the medical equipment featured in treatment rooms have “punny” names. Clowns are treated using a machine called the “Dehumorfier,” while “8-Bitten” patients—people who have become pixelated husks of their former selves—are treated with a machine called the “Debugger.”
“All of the ailments, machine names, etc. usually start as a joke in the office,” Brand Manager Craig Laycock explained. “As you can imagine, when there’s a room full of people with the same sense of humour, these things tend to get messy!”
Sometimes, the small, sixteen-person dev team would get into lighthearted arguments about naming illnesses and machines, Laycock said. “Jest Infection,” for instance, was an illness for which they couldn’t settle on a satisfying name, so they turned it over to their fan community. “The winner was Jest Infection, but Humourroids was a close second!” Laycock said.
But beyond Two Point Hospital’s absurdity is a game with a lot going on under the hood. Players who relish in the ability to micromanage every detail will be pleasantly surprised with how much control Two Point Hospital grants them; Laycock assured that players will have access to all sorts of data, from revenue to staff happiness and morale.
Players can adjust exactly how much they attend to these metrics based on their own preferred play-style. “If you choose to ignore all of that, you can,” Laycock said. “But if you dip in, you’ll find it really rewarding, and you’ll have a genuine impact on the quality of your hospital.”
With the introduction of a free-form sandbox mode this past October, Two Point Hospital lets players build and maintain their hospital at their own pace, creating their own challenges and experiments.
For instance, Laycock described a livestream in which Two Point Studios decided to create a non-profit “charity hospital” in the sandbox mode. They started with a budget of $10 million and ended up curing a total of 250 patients at a cost of $4.8 million. “I think we can probably beat that,” Laycock said. “Can you?”
Two Point Hospital is currently available for PC.
