Don’t Touch This Button! Switch Review – Don’t Touch This Game!

Don’t Touch This Button! is a first-person puzzle game from 9 Eyes Game Studio and Ratalaika Games. It banks off of the ideas of previous titles like Portal and The Witness, but to even compare to those two would be a grand insult, as Don’t Touch This Button! is less of a puzzle game and more of a “guessing game” or “find the obscure clue game”.

Well, it is a cheap one, so it is worth the $5 asking price? Or should we never touch this first-person puzzler? Let’s find out.

What can really be said about Don’t Touch This Button!? It is a first-person puzzle game. It has 65 puzzle rooms and a “boss”. It takes about 30-60 minutes to beat, and it is a drag from start to finish. Oh, boy. This is not going to end well.

Each room gives you a “clue”, if that is even what you want to call it, in an attempt to be witty and comedic. Sadly, there is nothing funny about the horrible set ups here, and each room is a pain. It is not even a puzzle game, to be honest, as it is more of an obscure observation game than anything else. Half of the rooms you will just be doing the opposite of what the screens say to do, and most of the other rooms you will be wasting time looking around every nook and cranny trying to find whatever nonsensical clue it expects you to figure out based on the “witty” set ups.

There are no consequences for failure, either, as death just immediately resets you to the front of the room. That means in a room where there are 12 switches and only one that opens the gate, there is no need to “solve” the puzzle because you can just flip all the switches in no time to more quickly find the correct one.

Since the only mechanic of Don’t Touch This Button! is literally to touch the button in order to go to the next room, every single room is just a matter of figuring out how to push the right button. There is no rhyme or reason to much of anything, as it is just simply that reality. The signs tell you not to do something, and you have to do the opposite. Some times they tell you the truth (As a joke, I assume) in an effort to throw you off. Other times it just makes no sense or is so obscure that you are wandering around trying to figure what in the world the puzzle maker is trying to convey.

There are some items to mix things up, like cubes you can pick up and throw, big cubes you can push around, and platforms that dissolve when you step on them, but none of these really add layers to the puzzle solving moreso than they do add more of an annoyance to the gameplay. Since this is a first-person title, the game also expects you to do some random platforming here and there on top of the obscure puzzle solving, which is quite hit-or-miss for me, as there are a couple rooms that expect you to jump after you have spent the past 20 rooms not jumping at all.

At the end of the long and exhausting stream of puzzle rooms, there is a boss fight at the end. This is definitely no GLaDOS from Portal, as I was able to beat the boss on my second try in about 1 minute. Surprisingly, the boss fight is about as straight-forward as it can be, which is a wild change of pace from the entire game.

The look and feel of it all is fine and does its job, but I do think that the color scheme is a bit bland. I did run into a couple technical issues where cubes would just disappear through the wall or floor, and I was forced to reset. Thankfully, resetting is harmless, and I was quickly back in a room I did not want to be in.

Don’t Touch This Button is not a good game. It clearly borrows its ideas from significantly greater titles, but the execution is poor. It lacks substance and personality, and the “jokes” (If that’s even what you want to call them) are not funny in the slightest and add nothing to the gameplay outside of making the puzzles more annoying.

The price will not hurt you at all, but the experience will. If you are a gaming masochist and are looking for the next puzzle experience to bore you to death, then look no further and don’t touch the button.

But if you are a person of sound mind, don’t touch this game.

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Don’t Touch This Button Review provided by NintendoLink
Review also available on OpenCritic
Publisher: Ratalaika Games
Developer: 9 Eyes Game Studio
Release Date: September 24, 2021
Price: $4.99, £4.99, €4.99
Size: 96 MB