To know if you’re going to enjoy Please, Touch The Artwork, all you have to do is glance at the bookshelf. If you’ve got any art books out there, we can pretty much guarantee you’ll have a blast with this wonderfully fun, unpretentious, thought-provoking puzzle. Likewise, if you’ve ever gone to a gallery or museum by yourself. If you like puzzle games and have even a passing interest in modern art, you should actually download this, right now.
Three games make up this unusual fusion of art history and narrative from developer Thomas Waterzooi, who creates ingenious mechanics around an art style you’ll instantly recognize, even if you lack the knowledge. The light story is interwoven to entertain and surprise you without falling into boredom or repetition. If you want to ground yourself with playtests, Thomas Was Alone with a touch of Ape Out’s jazzy presentation comes close to describing the atmosphere. But, you know, in the form of a touch art puzzle.
The three games are presented as a trio gallery and will stretch your gray matter in different ways and to different degrees. There’s an attendant at the front desk who will point you in the right direction depending on your mood or give you enlightening quotes from Piet Mondrian, the artist whose abstract works — part of the De Stijl (‘style’ in Dutch) movement — inspired the entire game.
The style gallery consists of 58 puzzles that start with the completed composition on the left side of the screen, and the same canvas replicated on the right side, without specific lines or colors. The goal is to make the right canvas look identical to the left. As you work through them, a quirky seven-day creation-style narrative unfolds across title cards as new ideas are introduced while a distilled overview of the De Stijl movement appears on the gallery ‘walls’ between the puzzles.
The mechanics are presented and implemented with meaning. Trial and error play a natural role as you experiment and reset compositions. The primary colors, which are introduced with hilarious fanfare, are not accompanied by explicit instructions detailing how to apply them; the name of the game is all the instructions you’ve been given and all you need. Touching any ‘box’ on the canvas sends a wave of color outward that fills every adjacent space that touches that box, including the corners. Imagine a white square divided into four equal squares. Tap the top right square and the three adjacent squares will turn yellow and the one you touched will remain white.
The addition of more colors and, later, other complications such as diagonals will slow your progress once you’ve raced through the opening compositions, although a hint system appears after multiple failures. We have to admit, the last few compositions were beyond us and that hint system was well used.
So the Style gallery offers some real puzzles for puzzle lovers, but the other two galleries are simpler. Boogie Woogie follows two squares “who just want to be together.” In this gallery, lines are generated across the canvas, with squares placed along the outer edge where each line ends and a target square at the end of one of them. By touching one of the outer squares, they travel al ong a line, and where the lines intersect on the canvas, colored squares materialize that have different effects on your traveling square.
Reds, for example, turn it 90 degrees to the right, and whites send it to the left. The blue squares send you back the way you came, and so on, with traps, tunnels and other hazards appearing as you progress. Far less plodding than Stilo, Boogie Woogie strikes a nice balance between narrative and mechanics, bringing the two together without overwhelming you as you mentally project the route of each square waiting on the outer edge of the canvas to pick a winner.
The New York City gallery is the most expressive and meditative of the three modes, depicting the emotions of moving to a big city through an increasingly complex set of labyrinths. You move through them from left to right by dragging in the cardinal directions anywhere on the touchscreen. Collecting the balls that open the exit, it seems like a combination of Pac-Man and Snake, but without the danger and stress inherent in those games. Did you take a wrong turn? Simply go back the way you came and take a different route.
Although mazes look complicated, even the most visually noisy examples are deceptively simple in practice. The NYC gallery is easily the least taxing of the three, gameplay-wise. Completing the screen reveals the song’s lyrics, but again, the developer’s choice to tone down the mechanical challenge as the tone gets darker keeps things from getting heavy, which we found refreshing. There’s no end to the indie games available—many of them excellent, we should add—that go to complex, emotional places and require content warnings, not to mention a certain mood to digest and enjoy. Please, Touch The Artwork is not one of those games. It’s thoughtful and thought-provoking, but it’s also ‘just’ a fun little puzzle if you want it to be. Don’t want all the sensitive junk? Just tap through it.
That’s the real beauty of Please, Touch the Artwork, however; not a ‘high forehead’ at all. Through interaction, Waterzooi tries to show how these compositions, however abstract they may be, are emotionally charged by their creation and absorption. Give could
If you’ve made it to the end of this review and still aren’t sure, it’s $7.99/£7.19 at full price, and there’s even a demo available to give you a taste. Given its relatively short length, we recommend trying the full game if it sounds half way through, but the demo is there if you want it. There’s also an update scheduled for mid-January that will patch the Joy-Con controls if you want to play on a TV (at the time of writing it’s only for handhelds). Using the Joy-Con is somewhat against the ethos of the title, but it’s great to see the game supported.
Conclusion
Please, Touch The Artwork is a great little experience that cleverly combines intuitive, imaginative puzzle mechanics with art history and humor to create a truly unmissable interactive exhibition. If you’re at all interested in modern art, you’re sure to enjoy this gem, but even puzzle fans who don’t know their Picassos from their Pollocks would do well to browse these galleries. There’s really nothing else to say. Do what the title says.
