Two Point Museum‘s Arty-Facts DLC is a robust addition to the base game that provides hours of new gameplay challenges, with layers to its mechanics. With this arrival, you can now create your own art gallery, although you’ll need to pair your forays into the art world with an understanding of expertise, emotion, and the buzz of housing ‘famous’ artworks.
Like the base game, Arty-Facts is also about the presentation, with your art gallery requiring deep planning to be a beautiful space worth exploring, filled with artwork to change the minds (and lives) of your visitors.
Two Point Museum: Arty-Facts DLC review – quick links
Two Point Museum’s Arty-Facts DLC requires a careful eye
To begin your time with Two Point Museum: Arty-Facts, you’ll head to the new location of Undee Docks, where you’ll be greeted by a plain gallery in need of some serious revival. With bare walls stacked with empty boxes, and just a single artwork on display, you’re tasked with injecting some pizzazz to liven the place up.
You first steps are to establish a studio location and hire artists to produce paintings inspired by their emotions – joy, sorrow, and romance, to name three of the seven – as well as to hire staff to head off on expeditions to find moving, emotional, artful works to display.
Arty-Facts leans into the base game mechanics for its expeditions, but there’s a layer of new ideas here, too. For example, artistic experts sent on expeditions can gain new emotions by visiting certain places. They might journey to a dour back alley in search of artworks, and come away recognising the emotion of ‘sorrow’ based on their experiences.
From then on, they’ll be able to create artworks of great sorrow, with these impacting visitor responses when they view the artwork. It’s a novel twist. Engaging with a variety of emotions allows you to unlock new and different artworks created in the studio. Emotional auras will also change the vibe and tone of your museum.
Artworks that spark anger can help to increase the cash flow of your gallery. Other artwork emotions and perks may inspire greater happiness, or longer visit times.
Plan carefully, and you can define a new strategy for your gallery adventures.
Arty-Facts introduces new strategic challenges
In addition to planning out a welcoming, beautiful gallery space, you’ll also need to figure out where best to place your artworks for maximum impact, and to improve their ‘buzz’ rating to attract more visitors and positive impressions.
Pairing artworks with similar auras tends to work best, but there are also additional buzz requirements for certain artworks, such as those that need to be paired with famous artworks for maximum impact.
These artworks tend to attract more crowds and more donations, with plenty of buzz generated for surrounding works.
In each expedition, there’s a diverse number of these artworks to collect – many of them based on real-life works – and they’ll all shape the tone and vibe of your gallery space.
Of course, you’ll also want to place these artworks in a way that makes sense, and brings visitors along for a journey. Do you want them to come away feeling hopeful and joyful about the future? Do you want them to be introspective and sad? It’s all about how you dress up your spaces, where you choose to place your artworks, and how they all vibe together.
To that end, this DLC also introduces an array of new wall and floor decorations, hanging works, and art-themed installations, each of which can also improve buzz, and allow for a coherence of your art gallery space. If you’re collecting modern pop art style work, you can consider placing 90s-inspired cartoonish carpet or paint splash walls.
For more classic works, you can attempt an ornate baroque room, complete with chandeliers, rich red carpet, and gilded frames. If you’re planning something more esoteric, you can also set up a theatre for performance art, or a room for sculptural 3D works.
What works best about Two Point Museum: Arty-Facts
There’s a diversity of options here that allow Two Point Museum‘s Arty-Facts DLC to shine. Starting slow, the DLC eventually opens up to allow you to experiment with your works, curating a gallery space that allows for art to be anything you like – paintings, sculpture, performance art, and beyond.
Discovering new works in your quest is always delightful, with fun surprises in each new expedition, including hilarious interpretations of classic artwork in parody form – like The Stinker statue, parodying The Thinker, which unleashes a green gas cloud when visitors pull its finger. It’s also neat to see which artworks you can create with your own crack team of experts, and to see how emotions can guide their creations.
Since its launch, Two Point Museum has evolved in some surprising ways, with its museum curation mechanics being translated to an array of settings. Following on from its delightful zoo-themed DLC, Arty-Facts is yet another must-play expansion, with plenty of new content, and a robust storyline to build from.
A PC code for Two Point Museum’s Arty Facts DLC was provided by the publisher and played for the purposes of this review.
