When people ask me what my favourite game is, I usually give them a comprehensive list of any and all narrative driven open-world role-playing games I’ve played in the last two decades. Think Witcher 3, Dragon Age, Like a Dragon or something within the Final Fantasy line-up. Or, mayhap, if I’m feeling a little bold, I’ll offer them something a little more streamlined like Uncharted or Life is Strange.

But while it is usually the story that pulls me along, I do tend to play almost all aspects of a game before the credits roll. And so, often within the games I play, there are minigames that may occasionally feature extensive management mechanics.

While I did enjoy my time looking after a cabaret club or running a confectionary company, I never once thought I would enjoy playing a game where managing was the sole focus.

Enter: Two Point Hospital.

I never thought I’d ever want to be the administrator of a hospital. As I child, I did play the occasional simulator in the vein of Simcity or The Sims but they were never able to capture my attention for long. Then, of course, there were the distractions I had on my phone to keep me entertained for a few short minutes like Mini Metro or Game Dev Story.

Yet there was something about Two Point Hospital that caught my eye. Maybe it was the irreverent British humour. Or perhaps it was the graphics.

I, for one, would like to contribute it to watching a few snippets of the game on popular gaming channels (like Oxbox and Oxboxtra that finally sealed the deal for me).

After all, I also bought both Two Point Campus and Two Point Museum before even getting a chance to properly sit down and try my hand at the actual games (technically a lie since I did play a demo of Two Point Museum while at PAX in 2024). Worse, they sit on my Steam account, mocking me. All ready to be played if only I could free up some time from my busy life (and extensive backlog).

Still, now that my mother has returned to Australia and I’m no longer left in the lurch of being the primary caregiver for my ageing grandmother, perhaps there will be more time to live my life…in the world of make believe. Gods know I need it considering the chaotic nature of the world as it is now.

All I can say is that I’m glad I’m not an American citizen.

But speaking of looking after the elderly, Two Point Hospital is all about turning the art of providing hospice care to the sick and dying into an enticing addiction. Though I can’t say how they did it.

Perhaps, of course, it’s merely the perfectionism in me seeking to create efficiency that fuelled my 50 hour playthrough. Or maybe the developers have actually stumbled upon a simple formula that can easily capture the attention of gamers everywhere and mixed it with good humour and excellent mechanics.

It’s certainly a mystery. One I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to solve.

Despite the fact that from a narrative standpoint, there was no overarching story beyond a few snarky comments about helping out the hospitals already in disrepair across the fictional country that the game is set in, I found myself hooked onto the game. There was something about being an omniscient God-like hospital administrator that scratched some part of my brain. After all, it’s not every day I get to hire staff, assign their duties, set up specific policies and build rooms to fit inside my ever growing health care empire.

As the hours passed, I soon found there was a rhyme and a rhythm to the game itself – from building one’s first GP clinic to setting up a pharmacy or ward in quick succession to help rake in the cash. In later levels, where you started with a lot more money, this meant creating training and marketing rooms to speed up the initial cash flow. After all, no clients meant no diagnosis. No diagnosis meant no treatments. And a lack of treatments meant a lack of revenue.

The only major downside I found? Not being able to template my rooms from previous levels. While I could copy and paste the ones I’d made in a level, the same could not be said when I would finally move on and start anew in a different town.

Of course, if that were possible, my play time might have been a lot shorter than it ended up being.

That said, kitting out a room was fairly therapeutic. Making sure I had a nice looking room (before filling it with all manner of gold star awards) was paramount to increasing the happiness of both staff and patients. And though it might have been tempting to cover every square inch of them with a slew of items, I soon found a quick sure-fire way to keep them understated but still maintain a prestige of four or higher.

By game’s end, I’d be swooping in to check in on the staff I’d trained, being amused by the antics of patients, or simply ensuring I had enough janitors on hand to keep the ghost population down.

Of course, deciding when to call it quits was a difficult thing. In the end, I aimed solely to earn my gold star from the last level and have the credits roll. With it, I was able to put it to rest and move on.

While I don’t know when I’ll get to the other two Two Point games, I’m sure they’ll be a barrel of fun. Even after taking a brief break (I thought I’d be able to finish the game before I travelled to China but alas, I was unable to do so), I was able to pick it back up with ease. That said, following on from their three major successes, it’ll be interesting to see what the team at Two Point Studios decide to tackle next. Will it be theme parks? Or will they try their hand at something a little less grand?

On a side note, you just have to love the puns they come up with for all the illnesses and how they’re all represented. Being lightheaded means having a light bulb for a head? Animal magnetism involves having a ton of animal plushies stuck to you? Give whoever came up with those ideas a RAISE! I’d never thoroughly enjoyed seeing such wilful glee in coming up with the most unabashed names for terrible (and life threatening) illnesses ever!