“It’s your hospital! Build it the way you like it, with specialist treatment rooms aplenty. Lay out and spruce up your rooms and design the optimal place to definitely not die”

When playing a game, sometimes you just need a clear to-do list and to be able to cross things off that list. No, just me then? Ok. While I’m typically an action RPG or strategy game player, occasionally I just want a game I can ‘zen’ out to; a game that doesn’t require me to put a lot of thought into and that I can just go through the motions on it. Typically, I turn to farming simulators like Story of Seasons, Stardew Valley, or in the past few months, Animal Crossing. But I’ve seen people playing Two Point Hospital online in the last few months, and so when I saw the library had a copy, I thought I’d give it a try.

Two Point Hospital is a game that is almost exactly what it sounds like. It’s a life simulator where you are in charge of getting a hospital (eventually multiple hospitals) up and running and making money. Originally created for PC it is now available on most consoles (if you own a Nintendo Switch, you can check out the library copy here).

I’m currently only three hospitals in (though if I didn’t want a three star rating on everything I could be a lot further) and so far I’ve treated diseases like “Light headed-ness (which involves the patient having a literal lightbulb for a head), Pandemic (…they just have pots on their heads), Mockstar (where they believe they are a Freddie Mercury looking popstar and 

need psychiatric help as a result), as well as having had a few patients die on me and needing a janitor to clean up their ghost, ghostbusters style.

In addition to dealing with patients’ medical needs, you also need to keep them, and your staff, happy. This can be accomplished by making sure your hospital is well decorated, that wait times are short, and by making a suitably comfortable staff room where doctors and nurses can take breaks. If you don’t, both staff and patients will get mad and leave and your hospital will quickly go bankrupt.

So far, I’m really enjoying the amount of freedom I have to design each hospital how I want it. Sure, each level sets goals for me that I may need certain treatment rooms to accomplish, but aside from a few required items for that specific treatment the rest of the room design, and the overall design of the hospital is up to me. If I want an entire hallway filled with nothing but cactus plants, I can have that. If I want to put the only restrooms on the hospital grounds in the second building with nothing else in it, forcing staff and patients alike to take a long hike just to use the toilets, I can…it’s gonna make them real unhappy and potentially lose me money and productivity, but I can do it.

Overall, Two Point Hospital is a fun game to play if you’re looking for something low stakes; it can also teach prioritizing and time management skills, which is a fun bonus.

~~Brittany, Youth Services