Don’t Touch This Button review for PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X, Switch

A couple of years ago, I played a fantastic game called Please Don’t Touch Anything. The objective: don’t touch anything. Or, alternatively, do touch things, and risk facing the apocalypse. It wasn’t a complicated premise, nor was it a long game, but Please Don’t Touch Anything managed to get an impressive amount of mileage — and humour — from that basic scenario.

Don’t Touch This Button is the same basic set-up as Please Don’t Touch Anything, just worse in almost every way.

For one thing, it’s not nearly as smart or as funny as it seems to think it is. Rather than asking players to solve increasingly lengthy, complicated, bizarre puzzles, Don’t Touch This Button sticks you in a room and prominently displays how not to solve the puzzle right on a giant screen. The twist/joke — which reveals itself immediately and then serves as a template for the other 59 levels, so this is hardly spoiler territory — is that you just do the opposite of whatever it displays, and you easily move on to the next level.

To be fair, there’s the odd level where you need to think a little more. Some require codes, for example, that may call for a bit of logical thinking, while others require some trial-and-error as the ground beneath your feet disappears after you step on it. Such levels, however, are few and far between.

There’s also a boss fight at the end that kind of comes out of nowhere, as you fight against a giant computer. It kind of comes out of nowhere, it’s nothing like anything else in the entire game, and it doesn’t really add anything to any of it.

Obviously, Don’t Touch This Button is hampered by the fact that other games have mined very similar territory, and done the same kind of thing much better. If this were a world where none of those games existed, Don’t Touch This Button might have more to recommend it, but as it stands, you should probably just play those games instead.

Ratalaika Games provided us with a Don’t Touch This Button PS4/PS5 code for review purposes.