Developer: Meynen Studio
Price: Free
Size: 359 MB
Version: 1.0.4
Platform: iPhone & iPad
Please, Touch The Artwork 2 might just be the least cynical sequel in all of mobile gaming. Not only is it a completely free follow-up to a highly regarded premium game, but it also takes the original’s basic ‘playing with art’ concept and carries it off in a completely different direction.
While Please, Touch The Artwork took real life abstract art and built a color-matching puzzler around it, Please, Touch The Artwork 2 focuses in on the works of Belgian artist James Ensor and turns them into a grant interconnected hidden object game.
The game’s surreal sense of humor is core to its appeal
Ensor’s work covers a lot of ground, incorporating expressionism and surrealism, with crude sketches rubbing shoulders with still life; and with vibrant portrayals of crowds and carnivals interspersed with serene landscapes and scenes of domestic contemplation.
This makes for a nice amount of variation as your dapper skeleton emerges from his grave and wanders through a selection of frames. Along the way you’ll encounter characters who wordlessly request a certain number of objects, all of which are hidden around the various paintings that make up each set.
Some paintings need fixing with a line-drawing mini-game
Occasionally you’ll encounter a rip in the canvass – often caused by a mischievous masked man – that prompts a brief line-drawing puzzler interlude.
Together with frequent Monty Python-esque animated snippets – an old women jumping down a chimney, a saint rewarding you for finding their halo with a spot of levitation – it all gives Please, Touch The Artwork 2 a brilliantly quirky sense of humor and a unique flavor all of its own.
The grave from whence your character emerges
This is further reinforced by a soundtrack that juxtaposes stately classical music with slapstick sound effects.
As is often the way with hidden object games, the level of challenge is dependent on your patience and your level of observation. Even so, there’s nothing here that will hold most attentive puzzlers up for very long.
This clever section sees you scrolling between multiple paintings
There’s even a permanently visible hint system that will tell you if there are any objects of a particular kind on the current piece of artwork, though this can be toggled off in the pause menu. Together with a well handled fast travel system, it’s a game that encourages you to blitz through it in a couple of sittings.
That’s no bad thing, of course. As we already mentioned, this is a completely free game with no ads or IAPs.
The odd one-off mini-game keeps things fresh
One other note of caution is that you should ideally play Please, Touch The Artwork 2 on an iPad, as too much detail gets lost on smaller iPhone screens. That’s a relatively minor point rather than an outright criticism, though.
Please, Touch The Artwork 2 is a bewilderingly generous slice of surrealism, with one foot in high art and another in gleeful silliness. Buy it, gorge on it, then reward the developer by buying his first game if you haven’t already.