museums

It may not have caught the same attention as Clair Obscur or Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, but Two Point Museum is quietly one of the best games released this year. Two Point Studio’s latest management sim is comfortably its best yet, and a game that nudges the genre forward in small but meaningful ways. A big part of that is down to its expedition system, where you dispatch different brands of boffins on adventures to retrieve ancient, exotic artifacts for display.

This feature also happens to be at the heart of Two Point Museum’s summer update, which targets the adventurers who fail to return from your relic hunting missions. Now, when one of your experts goes missing, you’ll be granted a memorial exhibit that you can place inside your museum to commemorate the loss.

While hardly the sunniest new feature Two Point Studios could have added given the season, it is neat. Memorials vary depending on the MIA staff’s rank, role and gender, ranging from simple plaques for low-ranking staff, to glittering statues for your most intrepid explorers. You can display these like any other exhibit, but if you don’t want to recognise the deeds of your MIA experts, you can also just sell them so you can expand your gift shop filled with tat.

In any case, it’s a clever way of ensuring you never come away from an expedition empty-handed. Memorials aside, the update also overhauls the underlying expedition system, aiming to reduce randomisation so players don’t have to repeat the same expedition ad nauseum to retrieve every available artifact. Two Point Studios says it’s using a “phased approach” to adding this feature in, starting with eight specific expedition locations on the map.

Two Point Museum: Update 3.0 Trailer | OUT NOW ON STEAM! – YouTube

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Elsewhere, the update adds 30 new posters to decorate your cafeterias and gift shops with, while also making several tweaks to the security simulation. Thieves who manage to nab one of your exhibits will now lug it around in a backpack, making it easier to tell the difference between infiltrating and exfiltrating robbers. In addition, burglars who have been revealed but haven’t nicked anything yet will play “more suspicious animations”.

All of this comes with the usual array of balance tweaks and bug fixes. You can now expect your robot staff to get their perks installed properly, while subtitles for the in-game radio show should now pause with the rest of the game. My favourite fix simply reads “added improvements to the Ransom Message”. Nothing like adding an air of mystery to your changelog.

If you’ve yet to check out Two Point Museum among 2025’s deluge of games, I thoroughly recommend that you do. Mollie was similarly enchanted by it in her Two Point Museum review, calling it ” one of the neatest, most approachable management sims in recent memory”.

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Relooted is a heist game about reclaiming African artifacts from the Western countries that stole them, developed by independent South African studio Nyamakop. Relooted is set in a future timeline where Western nations have signed a treaty to return plundered items to their African regions of origin, but things aren’t going to plan. Western leaders are instead hiding the artifacts away in private collections, so it’s up to a ragtag crew based in Johannesburg, South Africa, to strategize and steal them back.

Relooted is broken into missions, and each one includes a briefing about the artifact, an infiltration planning stage, and the heist. Gameplay is a mix of puzzle and action as you case each building, set up your run, and then execute the plan. Once you grab your target artifact, the security alarms go off and you have a limited amount of time to escape, so thorough preparation is key.

In the Day of the Devs reveal video for Relooted, producer Sithe Ncube cites a wild statistic from a pivotal 2018 report on African cultural heritage, saying, “90 percent of sub-Saharan African culture heritage is in the possession of Western collections. That is millions upon millions of deeply important cultural, spiritual and personal artifacts, including human remains, that aren’t in their rightful place.”

The locations in Relooted are fictional, but the 70 artifacts you have to steal back are real, and they’re all currently in Western and private collections, far from their original homes and owners.

Nyamakop is one of the largest independent games studios in sub-Saharan Africa, with about 30 developers working on Relooted right now. Its previous game, the globular platformer Semblance, was the first African-developed IP to ever come to a Nintendo console, hitting the Switch in 2018. In order to get Semblance on the Switch, Nyamakop co-founder Ben Myres had to bootstrap his way around the world, buying one-way tickets and finding new partners on the fly in a daisy chain of game festival appearances. Here’s how Myres explained it to Engadget at E3 2018:

“The entry curve into being an indie game developer in South Africa is like a cliff face. Because you don’t have the contacts, the platform holders like Xbox, Sony. You don’t have reps that live in your country. The press that matter are all here. There isn’t a big enough market locally to sell to, so you have to make works to sell to the West, which means you have to go to Western shows and you have to meet Western press. So basically, if you’re not traveling a ton, you’re not going to be able to make it.”

Nyamakop has grown significantly since 2018, and Relooted is an unabashedly African game built by a majority-POC team, Myres and Ncube said in 2024.

“There is the thing about making games for Africans — we say that a lot,” Ncube told GamesIndustry.biz. “We say that should be a thing, we should make games for Africans because we’re playing games that were made in the West. But will people even play those games, if you make them? And then if you make games targeting people … even if you were to make one that’s really good, there’s no guarantee that you’ll have a lot of people playing it. So I think there’s some level of confusion, I can say, in terms of unexplored aspects of the African games market.”

Relooted is in development for Steam, the Epic Games Store and Xbox Series X/S, and while it doesn’t yet have a firm release date, it’s available to wishlist.

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Two Point Museum’s latest update adds memorial exhibits for staff who vanish on expeditions, which you can put on display or sell for cold, hard profit

Rescue African artifacts from colonizers’ museums in the heist game Relooted