For the last few days, I've been playing Two Point Campus - diligently donning my college campus administrator hat (before taking it off as I sat down to work - any administrator will sensibly tell you that a hat is an outdoor item and utterly unsuited to the office environment). The game is the follow-up to Two Point Hospital, which itself is an adoring homage to the Bullfrog classic Theme Hospital, and it firmly establishes developer Two-Point Studios as a safe pair of hands in delivering colourful, cheeky, and relatively accessible management games.
Both games are wonderful. That, in fact, is one of the few issues I have with the Two Point Campus so far; it's wonderful in basically all the same ways as Two Point Hospital, pretty much superimposing the same loops, systems and gimmicks onto a college campus. The game actually feels a bit easier than its Hospital counterpart, with the end of each year giving you some breathing room to rejig and redesign the campus. You also don't need to worry about queues and people dropping dead in your corridors from such infamously dangerous illnesses as Inflated Ego and Cubism.
There's a definite comfort in sitting down to Two-Point Campus if you've played Two-Point Hospital, and while I don't doubt that some people will appreciate the instantly recognisable feel and more chilled pace, for me it feels a bit too comfortable. As I sat there on the fifth mission of the game, watching everything go perfectly smoothly at the wizard academy of Spiffinmoore, I wondered whether the clearly talented bunch at Two Point Studios could branch out beyond what I'd call the 'Theme Hospital' format, and perhaps try their hand at reviving in spirit the Bullfrog classic where this whole style of game began: Theme Park.
In some ways, Two Point Campus feels like it would rather be a theme park game, and seems restricted by the fact that its core visual gimmicks are based around boxy classrooms or outdoor spaces that and lessons within them. Most of the rooms for the various subjects entail having a big bulky object in the centre of the room - a giant cooking pan for Gastronomy, say, or a tower that aspiring knights gather round and lay siege to with their swords. They're decent visual gimmicks, but feel more rote than the myriad treatment rooms of its predecessor. It's a style of game that's begging to be opened out into the sprawl of a theme park.
To be clear, all this stuff is lovely. The hamster-cheeked character models are expressive, cute and embody the whimsical tone of the game - and of course its Bullfrog ancestry. But the quirky classes and their presentation isn't as natural a fit for this style of game as the wonderfully varied and bizarre illnesses of Two-Point Hospital. Campus works safely within the perfectly solid template of their last game, and while many will appreciate the familiarity, it leaves me jonesing for the studio to spread their wings into new territory.
Theme park sims are nothing new, and there's a decent amount of modern ones out there - Planet Coaster, Parkitect, whichever iteration of RollerCoaster Tycoon we're on now. Those games are successful in their respective simulations - Planet Coaster as a kind of 'blank slate' park-building sandbox, Parkitect as more of a business management game - but they all have a bit of a higher barrier to entry, and none of them have that special something that both Bullfrog games of yore and Two Point Studios specialise in: character and humour.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the theme park sim genre is that since the last Theme Park game back in 2001 (Theme Park Inc aka Sim Coaster), no developer has tried to create a game with that same spirit of whimsy that defined Bullfrog's classic. Not everyone wants to spend hours creating a 'theme' for a rollercoaster park from the ground up, or fine-tuning the speed and Gs of a rollercoaster.
The great thing about the Two Point games is that they don't force you to get bogged down in micromanagement. Sure, you can bring up heat maps showing you where people are happiest, or which areas could use a bit of beauty, and you can raise tuition fees for your most in-demand courses (you bastard), but these are optional elements in games about managing the bigger picture, taking on quirky challenges as they crop up, and then watching those beautifully animated hamster-faced folk do their thing.
A theme park game would be a perfect fit for the Two Point loop, though it would also work a little differently to their previous work; the pace of such a game would be quicker (anyone remember how fast Theme Park was?), the crowds would be bigger, and there'd be children running around everywhere, shrieking and puking as they stumble off of teacup rides and poorly optimised rollercoasters. You could still have those elements of curation, of course. Want to kit out the inside of a haunted house or a princess' castle with new jump-scares, furnishings and other decorations? Go for it, but the joy of Two Point games is that they're not fussed about your skills in interior design (so long as you avoid human bottlnecks); they strike a balance between casual and chaotic that other theme park sims - which today are more like rollercoaster sims, really - have been lacking for years.
A Two Point Theme Park would be stepping out of the developer's comfort zone, and it's quite possible that they'd rather stick with a template that more readily fits their work to date (Two Point Retirement Home, or Two Point Building Regulations Office, anyone?). I'd hope that they don't stay behind those walls forever, because with their distinctly British flavour of tongue-in-cheek humour and lighthearted approach to management games, they're the only studio right now that could give us a true Theme Park successor.