HomeNewsPlease, Touch the Artwork 2
Please, Touch The Artwork returns with a free, hour-long hidden object puzzler through art historyPlease, Touch The Artwork 2 is out today
Please, Touch The Artwork 2 is out today
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Thomas Waterzooi
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Thomas Waterzooi
In this comic and delightfulpuzzle game, you guide a besuited black and white, recently-risen-from-the-grave skeleton through an array of Ensor’s artworks. Within them, you’ll encounter several strange and eclectic individuals who are all searching for something - a patron at a seaside bar might want ten bottles of wine, for example, while a cigarette-smoking duck on a table of cooking ingredients is after 24 matches. What for? Who can say. The duck in particular has a very messy and unceremonious end, and don’t even get me started on the bedridden bloke who wants 12 crucifixes. Whatever the task is, though, it’s up to you to use your beady eyes to spot them within the surrounding paintings and bring them to the appropriate character.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Thomas Waterzooi
What I particularly like about Please, Touch The Artwork 2 (aside from the lilting piano renditions of Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No.s 1 and 3, Debussy’s Clair de Lune and other classical pieces of music) is your big giant skeleton hand doing all the pointing and clicking. As you move your hand around the scene, your ulna and radius bones just go on for days - or rather get replicated in stupidly long chains as you wiggle and stretch to reach different corners. The painting characters themselves are also stuffed with daft, wry touches that give a real sense of life and personality to them - like the family of stingrays you reunite among plates of still life food, and the grotesque wedding paintings where vomiting business men lurch over tables while waiters with platters of skulls and living human heads weave through the various tables.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Thomas Waterzooi
Each tableau is packed with amusing little details, encouraging you to scour each and every pixellated brush stroke to find what you’re looking for. Some objects, like the wood planks, you can easily spot a mile off. But others require much closer scrutiny, such as the matchsticks that may or may not be hidden inside a stone statue’s towelled arse crack, or the cats that stretch, claw and lounge around on city rooftops. It’s really quite lovely stuff, and I was almost a bit sad when I have to move on to a different set of scenes. I could have happily stayed noodling about in its busy cityscape for a lot longer.
To help carry you through, there’s a hatted man you’re chasing (well, lightly pursuing) across its five different worlds. This cheeky chap keeps cutting holes in the canvas to escape, and you’ll need to repair each tear before you can move on. These initiate dedicated puzzle screens involving some lightly taxing join-the-dots-style exercise where you have to bandage up the canvas in one continuous motion with no breaks or wasted repair roll. There’s also a dedicated spot-the-difference puzzle at one point, where you survey an enormous beach scene of bare-bottomed bathers (see below, top right).
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Thomas Waterzooi
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Thomas Waterzooi
As mentioned up the top, Please, Touch The Artwork 2 is completely free to play, and arrives onSteamlater today. Do give it a prod when you’ve got a spare moment (and if you’d like further arty recommendations for puzzley video games, do also check out Joe Richardson’sThe Procession To CalvaryandFour Last Thingswhile you’re at it).
