Two Point Hospital (2018)

• Playtime: 4h16m

• Played: 2026

• Context: I wanted to try this to see if i might like Two Point Museum.

Intro

Sometimes i feel like we need "new" genres and definitions. This game is basically a city builder. You have a limited amount of space and money, and you need to fulfill your 'inhabitants' escalating needs.

Review

I'm not really a fan of city builders because they tend to feel deterministic. Instead of being free to build the hospital of your dreams, you have to solve the 'puzzle' of what goes where and when. You can't -or i don't feel you can- specialise in specific treatments or something like that. That just means some customers go untreated and you have overcapacity for the chosen treatment. There is also no choice between different kinds of treatment or something like that.

Even worse, the game locks a substantial amount of customisation behind a quest completion wall. Even different colour benches have to be unlocked by getting points from quests. So every room, every hospital ends up looking the same. After

Some hospitals were way too hard, with no difficulty options, and sometimes it took way too much time to finish a level, but it's still a good game, it's just that those flaws keep me from coming back for the DLC, and I know next time I won't go for a 3-star run, cuz that was an absolute drag

in other words

"There’s this emperor, and he asks the shepherd’s boy how many seconds in eternity. And the shepherd’s boy says, ‘There’s this mountain of pure diamond. It takes an hour to climb it and an hour to go around it, and every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain. And when the entire mountain is chiseled away, the first second of eternity will have passed.’ You may think that’s a hell of a long time. Personally, I think that’s a hell of a bird."

• The Doctor

I may have to keep this on my "playing" list for awhile! I've been on and off playing this game for months now, it's just so ridiculous and fun. I have played a little of Theme Hospital in the past, so I was thrilled to see this modern (remake? spiritual successor? copy?) take on hospital management.

"Story"

You start off with a basic hospital and learn the ropes of building needed rooms, hiring staff, managing your budget, and learning about new diseases. As you hit 3 stars with a hospital, you can move on to the next one and do it all over again with more challenges. It has no real story, and it's highly addictive.

Special Features

Depending on how you're playing it (I play through Steam), you can get free and paid additional content to download into your game, which includes costumes, additional adventures, furniture, and more. One of the best elements was during the Sega's 60th anniversary event, I was able to get all the Sonic costumes and furniture to add to make for a crazy looking hospital.

Highly recommend if you want to waste hours trying to cure fake diseases and go into debt with all your unnecessary buildings.

I became quite obsessed with Theme Hospital when I got my hands on it a couple years after release back in 97. There was just something so addictive about the repetitive gameplay loop, in which you’d start the same way but would gradually be introduced to new rooms and features, that got me hooked on it for months. It quickly turned into one of my favourite sims at the time.

Fast forward to 2021 and I found myself playing Two Point Hospital, Theme Hospital’s spiritual successor made by some of the same devs. I progressed through maybe 8 hospitals before I had to put my gaming time on hold for a while, and I never got back to it until now, when I started a brand new playthrough, committed to get 3 stars in all 15 hospitals. TPH is a fantastic homage to TH in just about everything including tone, charm, humour, progression, structure and, most importantly, incredibly addictive gameplay loop. It’s hard to put my finger on what it is exactly, but there is something so incredibly satisfying about watching your hospital grow from literally nothing to a plethora of facilities and skilled staff that kept me coming back. Yet the stroke of genius here is the 3 star rating. Objectively speaking, it’s no different getting a 1 or 3 star hospital: you only need 1 to progress, and all goals are the same except you have higher targets to reach. Yet for OCD gamers like myself, who needs to feel a sense of completion in every game I enjoy, it was almost painful to reach 1 star and not get the other 2 in every hospital. Even when it started getting frustrating, I would push through to reach that shiny 3 star mark and move on to the next location. This, along with the fact that I take my time with games, resulted in a 90+ hour playthrough that surprisingly didn’t feel boring. That’s because, as repetitive as the gameplay loop may be, the game also does a great job of giving you different goals and introducing new features to keep things fresh. All of this, combined with the fact that the game controls better than any other sim I played on console, made it a great playthough from start to finish. To top it all off, there’s also a sandbox mode where you get to design your own scenarios and create the hospital of your dreams from the ground up. Fantastic stuff.

At the same time though, some of the issues this comes with made for an incredibly frustrating experience on occasion. The two bigger problems I have with TPH are 1) not being able to sort out GP patients by health status. This meant I had to manually sort them to avoid needless deaths, which when you have 6-7 GP offices becomes ridiculously tedious. This is such an glaring omission that part of me wonders if it is actually there and I just missed it altogether; and 2) seeing staff choose the furthest staff rooms when they had an identical one right next to their workstation was almost rage inducing. This was particularly bad in big and busy hospitals in later levels, when diagnosis timing was crucial to keep your cure rate up.

There were other niggles the game had, such as a soundtrack that gets repetitive fast in such a long career mode, the fact that menu and staff sorting/cycling on console wasn’t perfect, and a couple of crashes (including one which forced me to replay the last part of the last hospital to get the 3rd star again). But that I still had such a great time with Two Point Hospital despite these issues is a testament to how great the rest of the game is. As a whole, this was an incredible successor to Theme Hospital, and I’m definitely looking forward to their upcoming Two Point Campus. An 8/10 game for me.

A trip down memory lane in a modern package.

There has been quite a few attempts to create a follow up to the awesome theme hospital. And all of them failed with open theme hospital being the only viable option. Up until now that is.

While Two Point Hospital is supposed to be a spiritual successor to theme hospital it's actually closer to a remake but with slight differences to avoid copyright infringement. Though it does add a lot of what I'd call a quality of life improvements and some new things that it can be considered a game of its own.

The main loop of the game remains pretty faithful to the original. You start from scratch in a hospital and you are tasked with healing a number of funny imaginary diseases while making money. There's a goofy atmosphere all around and the game avoids getting too serious at all costs which makes it a fun, relaxing and light hearted experience. Once you reach your goals of number of patients treated or what not you're promoted to a new post and start all over.

Apart from managing the healing process you'll get to do some research, train staff, take care of marketing, handle VIP visits and emergency situations.

The scenarios try to go out of their way to try to be different and interesting and they manage it quite well - better at least than in the original theme hospital. But the loop gets eventually repetitive which I’m not sure is a pro or a con.

Overall this is a great game. Especially for someone like me who once a year dusts off the old Theme Hospital. I miss certain illnesses that are just no longer here but at the same time I do enjoy all the improvements added. A very high recommendation from me.

Played several hours during Steam free weekend. Beat the first 3 levels and almost the 4th. Got a pretty good handle on the game mechanics and was overall very impressed with how well made and user friendly this game is. The Grand Theft Auto style in game radio gave me a few laughs as well as the silly diseases, that time I put a clock in the corner partially hidden by vending machines, putting a candy machine outside the toilet (inside would be even more hilarious) without hand sanitizer nearby and making a large video arcade.

I will not be buying it because it is not among my preferred genres of games and I have too much of a backlog. I could possibly see spending a couple of $ on it 10 years down the road.

Update Sept 2019

Another free trial and I played another dozen or so hours. I beat a few more levels and left off at Smogley. The difficulty is starting to ramp up a bit with fewer patients coming in making the early game finances tight. Had some more hilarious situations; lack of janitors leading to toilets out of order for too long, leading to people going on the floor, leading to people vomiting all over the place, leading to even more vomit and people slipping and falling all the time. Took a while to recover from that, but profits were still rolling in. There was also a time where the main building was clean, but the second building was decidedly not, and I still got praised by the health inspector. Guess he did not go to the second building. I like to make efficient use of space by putting something in every possible space, which leads to very tight corridors. Game does not seem to simulate the flow of people obstructing each other, so it works.

I have a better handle on the game mechanics and started to play with staff costumes for specialists. Most of my doctors are general practitioners and get trained with focus on that; I leave them in the default white coat. Treatment doctors get green and I have them float around the treatment rooms as needed and keep them out of the GP offices unless they really need to fill in while a GP trains. Researchers get blue (like in Star Trek!) and again I have them mostly stay researching unless they really need to fill in elsewhere. Diagnostic doctors get grey and mostly work in the X ray and Mega scanners and I have them trained in radiology and diagnosis. Psychiatrists get orange and I want them to max out on psychiatry.

The standard nurse is focused on treatment and sometimes I will let them have boosts for specific rooms (like pharmacy). I let them work everywhere. Ward nurses get purple outfit, only get trained in operation of wards and are only allowed to work in the 2 types of wards. Diagnosis nurses get the reverse outfit (which is white), max out on diagnosis training and are only allowed to work in diagnosis rooms.

I did not change the outfits of janitors and assistants. I focus assistants on customer service training but do not care about janitors; they have the lowest priority for training and I do not really care what abilities they have, long as someone can get rid of ghosts and upgrade machines. I like to have training going at all times, mostly 1 person at a time. I will often pay an outside trainer to have someone learn a new skill, and then have that person teach it to others for free. I tend not to hire enough staff to cover for people not working while training, so that is why usually one person gets trained at a time.