Don’t Touch This Button! Review

Don’t Touch This Button! is best described as a simple first person puzzle game that tries to mess with players by having oddball solutions and misdirects aplenty. What results is a game where the answer is generally the opposite of whatever the ‘hint’ in the room says and as such, loses whatever chance it had of posing an interesting and different challenge early on.

We enter a room to be greeted with one or more buttons in various configurations, and are tasked with pressing the right one to open the exit door. Those aforementioned hints are generally on the wall opposite the entrance, and will unsubtly hint things like (to paraphrase) ‘don’t press the left button’ or ‘it’s definitely not this specific button highlighted’. As you might guess, it usually is the left button, or that specific button in a room full of them. While initially full of promise, all that really transpires is that this same line of thinking is repeated in each consecutive room, meaning any real challenge is practically non-existent. Enter a room, read the ‘clue’ then do the opposite and away we go. Even later on when new elements are added such as moveable boxes or switches, it’s usually blatantly obvious what the solution is.

That’s not to say there weren’t a few moments where the game gave me pause, but those were few and far between. To the games credit, movement is at least swift, and interacting with the necessary parts of the rooms is easy enough to do, but there could have been much more done with subverting expectations in each room to provide more of a challenge certainly. At the very least the visual design could have done with a little more variety to keep players engaged. As it is, each room looks almost identical with its green and grey colour palette.

Conclusion

There are already plenty of excellent first person puzzle titles on Xbox, and so Don’t Touch This Button! struggles to stand shoulder to shoulder them. If you’re after something in that genre that’s short to get through this might pique your interest, but those looking to settle in for a night or two of puzzling would do best to look elsewhere.

This game was tested and reviewed on Xbox Series X/S. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.