Please, Touch The Artwork returns with a free, hour-long hidden object puzzler through art history

rockpapershotgun.com:

Modern art puzzler Please, Touch The Artwork was a bit of a surprise hit when it came out in 2022. It not only poked fun at the reverential distance enforced on us by stuffy old art galleries, but it also invited us to recreate abstract modern masterworks by clicking, tracing and generally getting up close and personal with them with our big, colourful in-game fingers. Now, solo developer Thomas Waterzooi is back with Please, Touch The Artwork 2, which takes us on a slightly different journey through the art world as a hidden object point and click game. It's out today, is completely free, and was made to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the death of the Belgian expressionist and surrealist painter James Ensor.

In this comic and delightful puzzle game, you guide a besuited black and white, recently-risen-from-the-grave skeleton through an array of Ensor's artworks. Within them, you'll encounter several strange and eclectic individuals who are all searching for something - a patron at a seaside bar might want ten bottles of wine, for example, while a cigarette-smoking duck on a table of cooking ingredients is after 24 matches. What for? Who can say. The duck in particular has a very messy and unceremonious end, and don't even get me started on the bedridden bloke who wants 12 crucifixes. Whatever the task is, though, it's up to you to use your beady eyes to spot them within the surrounding paintings and bring them to the appropriate character.

What I particularly like about Please, Touch The Artwork 2 (aside from the lilting piano renditions of Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No.s 1 and 3, Debussy's Clair de Lune and other classical pieces of music) is your big giant skeleton hand doing all the pointing and clicking. As you move your hand around the scene, your ulna and radius bones just go on for days - or rather get replicated in stupidly long chains as you wiggle and stretch to reach different corners. The painting characters themselves are also stuffed with daft, wry