Please, Don’t Touch Anything (PC)

In Please, Don’t Touch Anything, you find yourself standing before an enormous metallic panel, the only features of major note on it being a small lever labeled RESTART and a giant tempting red button smack dab in the center of the grey console. Your coworker had to step away from this simple control panel to use the bathroom, leaving only the instruction that you shouldn’t touch anything, and if you do manage to wait for him to return without pressing any highly tempting buttons that dominate your view… that’s it! You’ve beaten the game! Congratulations! However, that was only one of over 20 potential endings, and to see what other outcomes this game has in store, you must indulge that overwhelming desire to press that button and see what will happen.

 

Please, Don’t Touch Anything is a puzzle game, and while that barren looking control panel before you may seem so simple at first, pressing the button doesn’t just lead to an immediate outcome. This console will soon reveal it has many more parts and pieces that are unveiled so long as the right actions are performed, and figuring out how the new controls work and how they interact with different clues hidden around this small game space is key to finding all of the game’s unique conclusions. Some results are as easy to find as flipping a single switch, others will require using special tools or clicking on suspicious areas, and even a few of the potential routes to a new ending involve playing short minigames that are time sensitive and can even crop up at random between the rounds spent figuring out the riddles of the game.

 

In Please, Don’t Touch Anything, anything and everything can be a clue. The little nicks and blemishes on the console can suggest the secrets of a certain route, the instruction panel on the wall is packed with patterns, subtle clues, and important data that will interact with the various input methods you utilize in your search for new finales, and even something as simple as the game music might be hiding hints that will only make sense when all of the right parts have been revealed. The wall in front of the console will be adorned with little posters to signify each unique ending achieved, and while these are mostly there for tracking progress, these too can even give a tip or two that will be relevant to pursuing a different path through this short and simple title.

 

While having a puzzle box design does make for an intriguing game to test your wits against, the quality of these does vary quite a bit. Having a few fairly straightforward tasks does do a good job of establishing how the game is even played, but as you move into more complex ending routes you’ll find yourself repeating learned sequences to reach the proper steps and the clues given to help you solve the newer puzzles aren’t always the best conceived. Looking around for suspicious details in a limited space is a good way of integrating the small environment into the puzzle-solving, but Please, Don’t Touch Anything does require some outside knowledge to see every ending. While you might argue puzzle game fans who come to this game might have a good enough knowledge of Morse Code to decipher it when it crops up, other elements can be unfortunately obtuse. For example, the clue “Pisano Leonardo” is a hint at a certain real world figure that many people would know if only the last name wasn’t deliberately left out. The only recognizable part of that name has been clipped, and it feels a little bit like Please, Don’t Touch Anything is being a little haughty in acting like its creators would be able to solve this clue without having to consult online resources or walkthroughs to decipher this esoteric hint.

 

Since there is nothing to shoot for but the endings it’s not a matter of more learned players being able to reach nifty optional content. The goal of the game is essentially to see everything it has since a single run rarely takes more than a few minutes unless you’re stumped on a puzzle. The tools involved and the different control panel concepts in play do mean that making progress often introduces something small but fresh when you do start making progress to a new ending. The few minigames featured aren’t too difficult though. but the clues involved in the puzzles that aren’t either too easy or too hard do mean the game has a decent middle ground to stand on where experimentation and clever thinking can be rewarded in ways that motivate the player to play run after run in search of what the next small challenge might be.

 

Whether or not the endings themselves are particularly rewarding is another question. Your little room features a screen above the console that displays visuals in grey and green, the pixelated skyscraper-laden city displayed on the monitor to be a factor in many of the endings you earn. Naturally, a game with a giant red button and a huge city does mean one ending is a nuke, but the other shapes the endings can take are all over the place. The outcome for your work can be negative, surreal, and certainly a little silly at times, but the way you experience it is often a bit too basic. The city on screen might undergo some change to represent how you’ve impacted things, the city changing its society or structural design being common outcome templates, but it’s a fairly plain graphical reward for the efforts you put in and none of the conclusions are striking enough to really stand out as something truly creative and worth the continued efforts. The endings are mostly about taking the console interactions to a certain point and then getting a little animation as your trophy for figuring out the puzzle design. None of these endings feel particularly lazy at least, and some break the mold by involving elements outside of the display screen, but mostly Please, Don’t Touch Anything is about satisfying a curiosity about what might be next rather than the payoff for all your hard work being satisfying.

THE VERDICT: With sussing out each alternate ending being the main draw, Please, Don’t Touch Anything is an interesting concept but it has very little oomph to those endings even though the reward often involves witnessing a city’s destruction. The conclusions are just a little too quick and often basic, making the extra work put into seeing them a bit underwhelming, but the game’s use of clever puzzle placement makes up for the moments where those clues might expect too much outside knowledge. Please, Don’t Touch Anything is a curiosity with a lot of creativity put into its clue design, but the actual actions and the basic conclusions tied to each ending aren’t as fleshed out and going for them as the game’s direction encourages just isn’t as fun as doing what puzzles you can figure out and then moving along to something else.

 

And so, I give Please, Don’t Touch Anything for PC…

An OKAY rating. The appeal of so much of the game is just cracking open the next new thing in your pursuit of major answers, but each route’s wrap-up can certainly feel a little underwhelming. None of them are really bad since they’re all cut from the same basic cloth and you’ll know what you’re getting into after seeing some of the simpler puzzle paths resolve, but putting in all the effort to uncover the meaning behind some of the game’s more clever hints doesn’t feel like you’re getting a proportional reward for that added effort. Simply using some of its kookier or cooler ending ideas for these longer puzzles could have helped, but it seems mostly that Please, Don’t Touch Anything is a puzzle box with a bit of a sense of humor. The focus is popping open new controls and learning how to use them in the small game environment, and that concept is a decent way to occupy yourself even if it’s lacking in engaging features or the kind of puzzles that rely on complexities rather than the occasional clues from outside the game’s context.

 

Please, Don’t Touch Anything is a simple amusement, a bundle of small mysteries that are mostly about figuring out how to use old data with new hardware to achieve unique results. Because this design scope is small but diverse it manages to achieve a good spread of unique ideas both in ending animations and how the puzzles are solved. Seeing what’s next is a treat even if it’s not always flashy or plays with the other clues well, but there’s still a bit of fun to be had with deliberately disobeying the game’s one main task to see how many wild outcomes you can pursue. If those endings had more substance they might kill their delightful simplicity, so while they may not always be the most satisfying outcome to your actions, at least the endings featured here motivate you to find more just because of how intriguing it is to keep touching new panel parts to see how things will change.