Quick Look: Two Point Hospital

I wish Vinny clarified if it was SENAMH-like or SENAMH-lite.

fuck, I REALLY got my hopes up with that description.

I am absolutely in love with this game so far, wish I'd had a little more time to spend with it. It really feels like a perfect love letter to Theme Hospital: they captured so many of the tiniest details, but then everything still feels new and unique rather than a straight-up copy. Similarly, where they've polished the mechanics it feels smart without drastically changing anything from the original game. As someone who was a massive fan of TH, I'm so happy that they managed to pull this off as successfully as this. Only slight gripe is that the soundtrack hasn't felt as catchy so far, but I can live with that.

They are apparently looking to add copy/pasting rooms after how popular the Copy Room mod has been.

Also you unlock a large radiator by 2-starring Tumble and that thing makes heat management so much easier.

GB staff not knowing about Theme Hospital blows my mind every time, is it just them or is it an American thing to have no experience with one of the greatest games of all time?

@cikame: I am an American that lived in the midwest and LOVED Hospital to pieces, I regularly come back to it. That being said, I haven't actually met anyone that has played it, which leads to me sounding like a crazy person. I didn't know it was popular anywhere until this game came out and now I feel like I have found my people

@cikame: Theme Hospital is definitely one of those popular-among-a-certain-clique games (in the same way that the ZX Spectrum is still popular among classic-gaming-enthusiasts), but was not a main-stream sensation in the States until GOG.com brought it to a wider audience (in my anecdotal experience).

Yeah! I call foul on the false-Danny-O'-Dwyer advertisement, @ybbaaabby!

I played through Theme Hospital just this week and it still hooked me something fierce. I'll definitely get this game eventually, once more content and patches are out.

@bobbykatz: Weird isn't it, Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper, all games loved all across the globe, why is Theme Hospital the odd one out?

Also i had to post again just to say, Vinny, all the things you complained about are not actually issues and don't need fixing.

I know we're very anti "you're playing it wrong", but I feel like most of Vinnys grievances would be solved by figuring out some priorities and common practices. At some point if you refuse to dodge in a game like God of War it's not the games fault if you're not enjoying it.

This is a really solid game. I've put about 30 hours into it, three star-ing each level as I go.

There are three issues I have with it though:

1. The Copy/Paste feature (that is probably incoming) would be nice, but not because little things like a radiator. I'm sort of surprised Vinny is bothered by it so much, as you can kinda just guess where to stick them and be fine. It doesn't need to be perfect. The real issue is when you're trying to make a nice hospital (which, why wouldn't you want to build nice looking stuff?) and you're trying to fill every room with detail and objects for Prestige, Happiness, and because it just looks good. It can become a little dull redo-ing a room repeatedly and having to fill it with 50 objects.
2. The loop for each level is generally the same. They typically introduce a new room/mechanic with each one, but that means essentially building the same hospital over and over again from the ground up, using the same basic rooms to eventually reach the new room/mechanic. The building/plot layout does vary, and that actually affects the whole thing more than you'd think, plus they have stuff like the temperature or earthquakes etc for certain levels.
3. One issue is the whole GP/diagnosis process. As you start building bigger hospitals, you need a lot of GP offices because people seem to need to get diagnosed over and over again. You can curb this a bit by upgrading equipment and having better trained doctors, but it still feels a little disproportionate. The devs seem to be aware and are probably looking into adjusting it.

Other than that though, it's been pretty good. My last hospital, I did the bare minimum in pretty much every room and it was still running fairly well, so you don't have to do all the detail. But then you have an ugly hospital. Training isn't super critical, you can just kinda do it as you go, and as long as it seems to take, your whole hospital isn't going to fail even if you pull a couple people into training.

I do remember playing Theme Hospital when I was younger and enjoying it (and I'm american). If you're into the whole process of making nice looking and efficient layouts, designing and building something equivalent to a factory, then this is for you. There isn't much management stuff if you don't want to min/max the gameplay. It's very casual. Abby said she likes the look of it and wants to build a hospital, then she'd probably enjoy this game a bunch.

It would make the game more fun for me if some of the things I mentioned were addressed as they are mostly quality of life improvements. It's not my fault you hate my quality of life!

I really really dislike the look of those people, they look creepy.

I got unreasonably excited when I thought Danny O'Dwyer was in this

I've played 5 hours so far, and the things Vinny is mentioning is exactly what I'm slowly running into. So far I've made every room prestige 3 and mostly enjoying filling out the rooms, but I've also only done small hospitals so far, and I can easily see it becoming a hassle later on.

The same with training and managing people, I guess since money is the least of your problems, the answer is just to always have healthy surplus of staff, but small things like showing the current activity of all your staffs in the training screen would really help.

Hopefully Two Point Studios is out to prove a good developer with their first title and will fix these things in coming patches (it sounds like from some of the other comments that that's the case), I love casual management games like these, there still aren't enough good ones!

This is sorta key to understanding the game, you're not hiring people to fill jobs, you're hiring a staff. You just gotta make sure you have enough people that can do the right things and they'll figure it out. I dunno if Theme Park was more popular in the states, but the games operate in the same way. The minutia is in the building of the facilities while all the management is very top level.

As for the room copy, even in the most crowded hospitals you'll rarely need more than two copies of any given room outside of GPs office. It does get tedious to make 4-5 GPs for every hospital though. The bigger issue is really that you're making the same hospital over and over and over and then just adding another room on top for every iteration.

They should've cut the amount of levels drastically but made the staging better for each one. So you'd do the first three levels then go back to the first one (which is already built, but it's not some unknown factor) and it needs x, y and z room you've unlocked in the meantime, and you need to research and build a new room. Then after doing that level 3 has an emergency where you need to make the hospital able to diagnose and treat 15 patients of a new illness in 15 minutes, etc etc.

The whole reason I played Theme Hospital as a child was for building the rooms and decorating them with stuff, but I can understand not wanting to do it every time.

I never play games like this, but this looks incredibly fun for some reason.

Looks okay. But Theme Hospital is 79p on GOG at the moment, so the only thing this QL has done, is made me go and buy 20 year old game (still have the original disc, but I’m not faffing about trying to get that to run when it’s less than a pound to download it).

Yeah, the things Vinny mentioned really hit around the 5th-6th level. It's really charming and whimsical, but it becomes mind numbing when the scale increases, you stop seeing the whimsy and the charm and just starts to become almost weirdly like a clicker at a point?

I'm 50 hours and 8 hospitals in, and I suspect the key to avoid it turning into a grind is to take it a tad slow. The more I try to marathon it and Get Things Done, the less fun I have.

And rather than a Copy/Paste function, I want to save different Room templates for each room that can have different sizes/decorations and then save them across hospitals.

I agree with pretty much everything. The game makes a great first impression but after a few hours the cracks appear.

Hope the devs are aware of them because, as Vinny says, most of them could be fixed.

First off: There's a room copy mod on Nexusmods.

I've been using it for 40+ hours with no issues. Just point at the room you want to copy (so the whole room is highlighted) and press Ctrl+C to get a full copy of the room, ready to drop, at your mouse cursor.

It massively improves the enjoyment of the game, and I would never ever want to play without it again. I'm now at 59 hours played and I doubt I'd be there without the mod.

Holding Ctrl while placing items allows for finer placement, and Spacebar always paused the game for me, didn't have to bind anything like Vinny. Guess it's because he used to play the beta build?

Having said that: The game is amazing but flawed, I'm also kinda sad Vinny doesn't seem to be into it at all. Makes me wonder if his particular dislike of the temperature mechanics has to do with his color blindness? Pretty much all later hospitals have temperature management.

Just like promoting (or not promoting) and training people is a large part of the gameplay. All the different skills have a purpose and later in the game you want specialized staff, that works for peanuts.

The game has some pathing/AI issues that become especially evident in larger, less optimized hospitals. Patients will sometimes walk across the whole map to fulfill a need, like getting a drinking machine, instead of using one right next to them. Same issue with toilets: You can have a big toilet with 6 stalls, but most of the time ppl will be standing in line for the first stall.

While that happens their appointment with the GP comes up, and every other patient in line has to wait for the one on the toilet/vending machine to return and take his appointment. It also ain't helping that patients need to visit GP up to 4-5 times until they are finally diagnosed and sent to treatment.

The devs have been rather communicative on the Steam forums and released the first patch, the next one is very likely gonna deal with an ward issue that's affecting more and more people. So there's hope some of these issues will be dealt with.

The "Dehumoriser" was kinda horrifying. It was like looking at the internet for a bit.

And now a short reminder about terrifying reality: That "There's gonna be a lot of broken limbs. Cha-ching!" in the description depressed the hell out of me.

At 23:18~ where Vinny is talking about the colour behind the price, *it does* change! Just subtle between dark green / dark blue.

Won't see many hand dryers in hospitals anymore, a study came out finding that they intake fecal matter and geguritate it onto your hands, hand dryers are not sanitary, tell a friend.

https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/511723002

Interesting! Was Theme Hospital not a big thing in the US? I know it was a Bullfrog/British game, so maybe it didn't get exposure over there. Theme Hospital was huge, at least in the UK.

I'm a big fan of these Toast of London-esque names for people.

I really wish there was someone on staff that had even a passing knowledge of Theme Hospital...watching this video was so hard with how much Vinny was complaining about things that were core to TH.

@lionsy: I loved the hell out of Theme Hospital as a kid...but I guess that wasn't the case with many of other PC Gamers of the time. I've tried chatting other Sim Gamers I know up about Two Point and when I say it's basically Theme Hospital I typically get a "Oh yeah, I kind of remember that game" or "Oh? What was that?"

So no, unfortunately it does not seem like it took hold in the states...even with a PS-X release.

Cat Nutt is the new Dong Song

I wish the interface had a more unique style. The overlay, menus, and font are the standard Unity stuff that I've looked at in so many other games. The world map and UX for each level on the map looks identical to Overcooked.

@lyndbako said:

Same. Got all excited at the Danny name drop and then Vinny didn't introduce him and I got all sad.

@lionsy: It wasn't nearly as popular in the USA as it was in Europe.

Dr. Donald Trollope...

@vampire_chibi: They really do kind of look unsettling, don't they?

Oh man, this exactly looks like Theme Hospital remade in 2018. The room assembly process with the grid & item placement stages is the exact same. The rooms are the exact same. Hell, the PA lady sounds the exact same. Seems like they got rid of the mouses in favor of the monobrows. Hopefully that means there are no mouse holes hiding behind your benches & vending machines anymore. That was always the true nightmare of Theme Hospital, lifting all the items in the hope to get rid of the mouses. There's also a lack of puke on the floor. Did they get rid of that?

As someone that loves Theme Hospital, this looks great. But it does seem like it's pretty much the exact same game, with the same progression of building the same hospitals with 1 extra room added. It would've been neat if they gave you some more ways to make the hospitals feel unique. Just like Theme Hospital, plots either feel like spacious spaces where you plopped some rooms down in, or a extremely crowded puzzle where you keep trying to cram as many rooms in. And you don't get to change the appearance of the rooms much.

It was. Just looks like Vinny never got into them.

How could Vinny hate radiators in hospitals :/

Copy/pasting rooms has been added in the latest patch.