Please, Don’t Touch Anything

Genre: Interactive Toybox / First-Person Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Please, Don’t Touch Anything is an interactive toybox/puzzle game where the premise is simple: You have been asked to sit down in a room for a few minutes while the guy who normally mans the post is away, at a station with a large and ominous-looking machine, and you have been asked to do… well, what the title says. Of course, the first thing you’ll start doing is fiddling with buttons and switches to see what happens, right?

Just to be clear, this game is a 3D remake of the original, which is also on the eShop as Please, Don’t Touch Anything Classic. It appears that this version of the game was intended for VR devices, but that’s not necessary to play it.

The game promises 30 different endings depending on your actions, but I gotta’ be honest, I had genuine trouble getting to even a fraction of that. There seem to be plenty of interesting things to toy with in the room, but only a small handful of them seem to respond to your commands. There’s no hint of what you can and can’t interact with, which means you’ll be doing a lot of randomly clicking around the room in a desperate hope to find something to do.

Even the stuff you can mess with is seemingly inexplicable. I open a panel to reveal there’s three numbered buttons to enter in a six digit sequence. Okay, just gotta’ find the right three digits… except there’s plenty of numbers around the room, and the only six-digit number consisting only of 1-3… doesn’t work. Oh, and if I clock on this blank spot at this time, a button appears, which is odd… but doesn’t seem to do anything – how am I supposed to follow that up?

The game not only provides no indication of what you should do (that’s up to you), but it also provides so very little indication of what you can do that it quickly becomes frustrating. I don’t know how long I spent trying to click around the room looking for something useful, but it felt like far too long with no results.

Now, I suppose I could go look up answers of GameFAQs or something like that, but it would kinda’ defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?

Those who enjoy a good puzzle box that doesn’t give you any indication how to make the damn thing work, you’ll probably love this. But I absolutely hated it.

tl;dr – Please, Don’t Touch Anything presents a tantalizing opportunity to play with an ominous-looking machine and see what it does, but it provides so little indication of what you actually can do with it, that for some players you’ll end up not really being able to do anything at all.

Grade: D-

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