Everyone Should Go Inside and Touch Art...in a Cozy Puzzle Game
Stepping into the cozy virtual gallery of Please, Touch the Artwork, there’s something instantly familiar about the paintings in front of me, even if I can’t recall the name of the art, the artist, or any facts about what I’m looking at. But I know I’ve seen the blocks, the lines, the use of primary colors laid out in front of me before. Maybe in an art book in school, or in passing on a museum field trip.
These are, I am told, the paintings of Piet Mondrian, or interpretations of them. They’ve been compiled and turned into a puzzle game by Thomas Waterzooi, a solo developer with a background in engineering, artist parents, and credits at Larian Studios and IO Interactive. Waterzooi was let go from IO when it parted ways with Square Enix, after which he struck out on his own to make games that were very, very different from the narrative adventures of Divinity or the comedic puzzle boxes of Hitman. Specifically, he wanted to make “pacifistic” games that explored “the bigger picture” and “the human condition.” Something, he says, “cultural.”
Something, maybe, like a game where you solve visual puzzles by touching famous paintings.
In a process that Waterzooi describes as “exactly the opposite of what a game designer would do,” Please Touch the Artwork’s creation came as a bit of a delightful accident. At one point amidst his tinkering with different game ideas, Waterzooi was also reading a book called “What Are You Looking At” by Will Gompertz. It’s about the origins of modern art, and abstract and suprematist movements particularly fascinated while reading.
One night, when Waterzooi couldn’t sleep, he decided to make a “Mondrian generator” just for fun — a simple program that would generate a painting based on the ruleset
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