Please, Don't Touch Anything
game
•Updated Sep 2026iOSPuzzle Games

Please, Don't Touch Anything

A clever one-room puzzle game that turns a single forbidden button into about 25 endings, most of them darkly funny. It rewards patience and a notepad. Its most obscure solutions will send many players to a walkthrough.

Where it ranks in Puzzle

Scores 8.0 against a category average of 8.7 — below the Puzzle average, ranking 19 of 19 Puzzle games we've reviewed.

Price
$4.99
one-time or subscription
Released
Oct 21, 2015
Platforms
iOS · Steam · Android · Nintendo Switch
Developer
Four Quarters
Age rating
9+
Store rating
3.8 ★ · 373 ratings
from the app store listing

More iPhone & iPad app reviewsMore Puzzle Games ranked by score

Quick summary

Please, Don't Touch Anything (iOS) — scored 8.0: A clever one-room puzzle game that turns a single forbidden button into about 25 endings, most of them darkly funny. It rewards patience and a notepad...

Pros

  • A brilliant premise built on one red button and one instruction
  • About 25 endings give real payoff for curiosity
  • Clever, dense design that turns one room into a layered mystery

Cons

  • Some solutions are too obscure to deduce and push players to walkthroughs
  • Chasing every ending means tedious repeated resets
  • Little replay value once the solutions are known

Scores

Score breakdown

How the overall score splits across the categories we review.

Design
8/10
Innovation
8.5/10
Value
7.8/10
Utility
7.5/10

Our strongest category here is Innovation (8.5/10); the weakest is Utility (7.5/10).

Verdict

Is Please, Don't Touch Anything worth it?

Please, Don't Touch Anything stays true to its game-jam constraint. It takes one room and one button and gets a surprising amount of design out of them. The first hours are excellent, with a steady stream of "what does this do?" moments that pay off. The game does not hold up as well at the end. Obscure late solutions and the chore of resetting over and over wear down the discovery that makes the early game so good, and once the secrets are known there is little reason to return.

Still, it has a clear identity and turns the urge to disobey into its main mechanic. Play it blind, keep a notebook, and hold off on the walkthrough for as long as you can. New players should pick the Switch edition, which has the most content.

Pros

  • A brilliant premise built on one red button and one instruction
  • About 25 endings give real payoff for curiosity
  • Clever, dense design that turns one room into a layered mystery
  • Pixel art and chiptune score build real tension and dark humor

Cons

  • Some solutions are too obscure to deduce and push players to walkthroughs
  • Chasing every ending means tedious repeated resets
  • Little replay value once the solutions are known
  • Small details can be hard to read on phone screens

Pricing: $4.99

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Gallery

Screenshots

4 screenshots · tap to enlarge

What stands out

Key features

  1. One Room, One Button: The whole game takes place in front of a single control panel. That constraint forces the design to reward close observation instead of exploration.
  2. About 25 Endings: Every solved chain ends in a distinct outcome, from slapstick to apocalyptic, so each experiment has a payoff.
  3. Layered Hidden Mechanics: Switches, keypads, codes, and physical tools reveal themselves step by step, so a simple panel slowly becomes a dense system.
  4. Environmental Clue Design: Answers are hidden in the room, in patterns on the panel, and in what plays out on the monitor. Players are pushed to take real notes.
  5. Enhanced Switch Edition: The Nintendo release adds redrawn visuals, new mechanics, and more endings and solutions.

Full review

Please, Don't Touch Anything in depth

Bottom Line: A clever one-room puzzle game that turns a single forbidden button into about 25 endings, most of them darkly funny. It rewards patience and a notepad. Its most obscure solutions will send many players to a walkthrough.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is simple: touch, observe, reset, deduce. You press something, you watch what happens on the monitor, and you file that result away. After an ending plays, the station resets and you start again with what you now know. The reset is not a punishment. It is how the whole game advances.

Early on this loop is fantastic. The first presses of the red button produce immediate and ridiculous results, and the game teaches its central lesson without a tutorial: every input means something. That is good onboarding. There is no text box explaining the rules. The disobedience itself is the tutorial.

The game's real skill is escalation. Once you've used up the obvious inputs, the panel starts to show hidden depth. A compartment you ignored turns out to open. A keypad appears. A sequence of lights that looked decorative starts to look like a cipher. At its best, Please, Don't Touch Anything gives you the rare puzzle-game feeling of realizing the answer was in front of you the whole time.

Where Deduction Becomes Guesswork

The game also stumbles here, and the complaints in player reviews are fair. A handful of solutions ask for leaps of logic that are so obscure they break the deduction contract. Good puzzle design follows a simple rule: once you see the answer, it should feel inevitable. Too many of this game's late puzzles feel arbitrary instead. The clue exists, but reading it correctly takes either inhuman pattern recognition or a lucky accident.

Players then run into the second problem: the reset tax. Getting every ending takes a lot of trial and error, and each failed attempt means replaying a sequence of inputs to get back to the state you wanted to test. In the first hour, repetition supports the fun. By the fifteenth ending it is friction. A faster way to restore a known state would have taken much of the sting out of the completionist grind.

Pacing and Length

The game's biggest structural weakness is short shelf life. Its value is almost entirely knowledge-gated. Once you know the solutions, nothing is left to discover and very little to replay. An experienced player who knows the answers could get through most of the content in a small fraction of the time a first-time player spends. That does not ruin the game. It is a one-time experience, and it knows it. But you are paying for discovery, and discovery can't be repeated.

That is also why walkthroughs hurt more here than in most puzzle games. Look up one obscure solution and you have spent a meaningful share of the game's content. The best advice is also the hardest to follow: stay stuck longer than feels comfortable. Keep a physical notebook, write down every pattern, and treat the panel as a system to reverse-engineer rather than a list of buttons to cycle through.

Tone

It would be easy to undersell the writing, because there is so little of it. The humor comes almost entirely from consequence. It is the dark comedy of watching a pixelated city suffer for your curiosity, and the fact that no one comes back to stop you makes it funnier. It is the office-prank energy of being the bored person left alone with the equipment, scaled up to apocalyptic stakes. The game gets tension and comedy out of the same moment, which is harder than it looks.

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FAQ

Common questions

Is Please, Don't Touch Anything worth it in 2026?

Please, Don't Touch Anything stays true to its game-jam constraint. Our experts scored Please, Don't Touch Anything 8.0 out of 10 — recommended.

Is Please, Don't Touch Anything good?

With a score of 8.0 out of 10, Please, Don't Touch Anything lands in our recommended band. Innovation is its strongest category at 8.5 out of 10. Utility is the weakest at 7.5.

How much does Please, Don't Touch Anything cost?

Please, Don't Touch Anything costs $4.99. Its Value category scores 7.8 out of 10.

What do users like most about Please, Don't Touch Anything?

A brilliant premise built on one red button and one instruction. About 25 endings give real payoff for curiosity.

What do users dislike most about Please, Don't Touch Anything?

Some solutions are too obscure to deduce and push players to walkthroughs. Chasing every ending means tedious repeated resets.

What platforms is Please, Don't Touch Anything available on?

Please, Don't Touch Anything is available on iOS, Steam, Android, Nintendo Switch.

Who makes Please, Don't Touch Anything?

Please, Don't Touch Anything is made by Four Quarters.

What are good Please, Don't Touch Anything alternatives?

The closest alternatives to Please, Don't Touch Anything are Deus Ex GO, Puzzmo, Wordle.

Is our Please, Don't Touch Anything review up to date?

We last refreshed our Please, Don't Touch Anything review in Sep 2026.

About this review

How we scored Please, Don't Touch Anything

Please, Don't Touch Anything was scored on Design, Innovation, Value and Utility — each from 1 to 10, with the same rubric as every other game in its category — for an overall 8.0. Research and drafting follow Rankeno's fixed editorial rules; the rubric, the checks before publishing and the decision to publish are ours. Published Sep 26, 2026.

Editorial disclaimer The reviews and scores on this site are based on our editorial team's independent analysis and personal opinions. While we strive for objectivity, gaming experiences can be subjective. We are not compensated by developers for these scores.

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8.0Please, Don't Touch AnythingApp Store