KOCHI: As a gamer, I have mostly played as an assassin, an unemployed person in a post-apocalyptic world, or a contemporary treasure hunter. Till ‘Two Point Campus’, I have never had the opportunity to have a life-like job with real career advancement opportunities. Two Point Campus is an excellent business management simulator, and I intend to convey my experience here to future employers. In TPC, I have got the task of handling an academic institution.
I am provided with an empty campus and I must fill in rooms: lecture rooms, toilets, dormitories, research centres, libraries and staff rooms. The central task of the game is ensuring that these rooms are placed appropriately in a mighty bounded Tetris board, while also quietly looking at my budget slide down to zero.
I must then employ teachers and start the next academic year. With the influx of students, I find my budget being refilled with fees. Temporary relief. But there are new outflow sources. Hungry students want operating food stalls. They cry and leave the school if I can’t give it to them in time.
Jasper Skiver, a rich student that I must keep on campus for economic reasons, thinks the campus doesn’t look “cool” enough. So, I must put cool posters on the walls. Mia Eggnog is threatening to fail her assignment if I don’t build a dragon tower. I spent my last 20,000 in-game currency to build her one.
Meanwhile, I also employ janitors to clean up the mess and maintain functional equipment in the growing number of rooms on campus. While it’s a lot to handle simultaneously, the term time announcements are quite entertaining, and the game plays nice music while I am hard at work.
Eventually, I met the criteria to upgrade the campus to a “one star”. This opens additional campuses spread across the map. Each campus is unique and presents itself with new challenges. But I am a better manager now. I can handle it all. TPC is an excellent game where I get to give infinite parties to students and decide whatever courses I want — for example, I was once employed in a school for knights, and I had the unique opportunity to make baking a compulsory course in their curriculum.
It is one of the exceptional few games where I feel completely calm and in control of increasingly chaotic situations. I played it on the Nintendo Switch, which I feel is the best platform for this game. But it is also available on the PC, Xboxes, and PlayStation.