Tea And Video Games

Two Point Hospital: Follow Up Appointment

Back when I played Two Point Hospital, a few years ago now, I was fairly lukewarm on it. The idea was solid and the humour was there. For a few glorious moments, the spirit of Theme Hospital was shining bright. Unfortunately, there were too many annoying factors that dragged it down. GP queues ran long and the place was full of ghosts rising from the undiagnosed bodies that littered the hallways. It was a slog and I grew tired of it.

A couple of years later though and the hospital management itch started to show again. I was in the mood for something slow, but with a challenge as time goes on. When I first booted it back up, I felt myself slipping back into the slog for a while. Thankfully, there have been a couple of updates that help out with a few of the problems. Coupled with a few tricks of my own, it breathed some new life into the game.

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• 16 Apr 2020
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The Teacup Awards B-Side (2018)

Not every game fits neatly into an awards category. Think of these B-sides as the participation awards. They are something worth talking about but only when all of the hard hitters are out of the way.  I played a real mixed bag of games last year and didn’t play too many of my usual sort. Very light on survival games, for one, and there weren’t as many stand-out indie games as the year before.

Still, some interesting stuff did come out of the year so I don’t just want to disregard ninety percent of it. It was a year of catch-up really, playing through some of 2017’s biggest hits. So now let’s make up a bunch of different awards and give to games from last year that I think are worth a mention.

Two Point Hospital

The ‘Fly in the Cup’ Award for Killer Problem

I liked Two Point Hospital quite a lot when I first started playing it. It felt like a return to form; back to Theme Hospital, which I enjoyed a lot. It was refreshingly similar but with new diseases and additions that kept me excited. I recorded myself playing it and then created a different save to play in the downtime, something I didn’t do often. So I was obviously enjoying myself. Yet as I got through the game, something started to nag at me. It took me quite a while to find out what it was.

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• 10 Jan 2019
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Two Point Hospital Review (2018)

Back in ‘97, during the reign of Theme Hospital, a man with a grotesquely inflated head walked through the doors of my hospital. The only cure for this was to pop it with a needle and then inflate it with a balloon pump. Miraculously, this worked. Now, twenty-one years later, a man with the charming surname of ‘Blancmange’ walks through my new hospital’s doors. Instead of an inflated head, his head has been entirely replaced with a light bulb. The only known cure is to use a giant machine to unscrew it and then fabricate a replacement head.

As you can tell, if there’s one thing to say about Two Point Hospital, it’s that it knows what made Theme Hospital so funny. I’d go so far as to say if you’re interested in Two Point Hospital then you need to come in for the jokes. All the other parts of Two Point Hospital, while not bad by any means, aren’t really enough to carry it alone for me. That’s quite a heavy statement to unpack, so let me lay it out straight: Two Point Hospital is fun. Just don’t go into it expecting a detailed hospital simulation. There’s no room full of disgruntled office employees being shouted at by a doctor for something that’s the doctor’s fault in the first place, for instance. I might be too close to this.

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• 2 Oct 2018
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