You guys like Sims so much, you ever thought about maybe playing a different variant of it? A game where you control doctors sucking patients' heads out, for their wellbeing? Where say, you have to traumatize a patient to suck their clown disease out of them using a station device called the Dehumorizer? This last bit will also sound crazy; try unscrewing people whose heads have turned literally into lightbulbs.
If any of these descriptions sound familiar, that's because this game is a big spiritual successor to Theme Hospital. Made by Bullfrog Productions in 1998, their last game was Theme Park Inc, before EA merged the studio with their UK branch. A lot in this game is familiar to the Theme game series and that's because the people who worked on this are ex-Bullfrog employees.
I was a BIIIG fan of Theme Hospital when I was like 14 years old. I found the game CD somewhere in my family's cabinets. I had an old DVD drive, and I mean it was 2012 old. Remember ever using a DVD drive? That must have been like 6 years ago or much further for me till I started downloading games instead.
Theme Hospital played kind of similar to this game, with wacky characters, voice-overs, and nonsensical scenarios. That game came out in 1998, which meant that everything was rendered in 2D pixelated sprites. It wasn't obviously just for show, so it held more substance in gameplay than the visual presentation could make up for.
Play ZooTycoon, Jurassic World Evolution, Farm Simulator, Stardew Valley and anything similar. They all have common traits and are simulation games. Two Point is like handling people you just don't understand and hopefully never see them again, anywhere else even in real life.
But a doctor's job isn't to discriminate, it's to treat however you can...and make lots of money out of it. So while I am doing just that, I also start remembering why I never liked visiting hospitals in the first place, just sitting in the waiting room while people around me are completely miserable.
First 6hrs of playing this game, all I had to do is complete objectives to assure each hospital level reaches 3-star max rating. All the while trying to make sure each patient that visits a doctor leaves happy and content. That becomes harder to achieve because of a thing called RNG mood swings. Good and bad patient moods make or break treatment success 😒.
Other factors include good environment, well-trained doctors, making sure the facilities are checked by janitors who also do maintenance stuff. You know, being in management. All that becomes ridiculously hard to manage when you buy off land from each level and expand your hospital as well as hire more staff.
Employees would annoy me constantly about promotions, raises, how I have to put more expanses on improving hospital decor, buy more facilities, I mean I was earning and losing money, one at a time😩. I had to take a loan even and that almost put me on deficit 😣.
But I learned and started to improve; I lowered the salary raise a bit, started hiring backups to work in roles for those who've taken staff breaks, fired people who took more money and brought less revenue for hospitals, and also yeah, putting up decor actually helped. That and having toilets.
Also, it kind of helped that I had a family doctor who gave me free advice and told me how hospitals worked, lol. Before I knew it, my expenditure took only 1/3 of my income and I was blazing with the moneymaker. I mean, sure, you can't make medical progress, without the mulah.
This game can be fun, really fun if you can dig the dry, sardonic humor it gives. I mean, a radio broadcaster was asking what his future self was upto, because his left arm went missing all of a sudden. Another radio DJ shuts down a little girl, asking him what's his age is from a letter.
Ah yes, British humor. I like my fill of Monty Python and IT Crowd once in a while, and this game sort of delivers that. More than that, when patients die, they turn into ghosts and start scaring everybody off. Hence why you need janitors to suck them off(as you saw from the first image, also that's a low-key Ghostbusters reference, I think).
Like the Oscars but for medical field, I was sweeping awards. But playing for 12hrs, I just realized finishing levels meant that I was playing a long-playing tutorial. And that unlocking new facilities, and items need me to continue playing. Which I mean, is something older games before this have done, I hope it doesn't take me long to unlock everything.
Understandably there is always a progression system involved, and doing challenges, and career objectives would reward me with these "K" currencies which I use to unlock stuff. There's no microtransactions in this game, thank god. And a nice online leaderboard to go up against my friends.
So, to advance further in the game, I have to put in hours and hours of my time. Which is fine for me, and I want to share more stories here of me continuing. If you want to see more of this game, you know what to do.
(Look below)
