It is the night shift, the masterpieces are falling apart, and the only thing standing between them and disaster is a roll of gaffer tape. So I made a game about it.

In Gallery Gaffer you are the only guard on duty, and something is wrong in every room. Moths are eating the canvas. Pigeons have found the skylight. Geese have arrived, for reasons nobody can explain. A “performance art collective” has bought tickets. Somewhere there is a goat. Your job is to patch up each painting, scare off whatever is causing the damage, and keep the art looking, broadly, like art until closing time.

Seven paintings, seven shifts

Each level is a famous painting redrawn as pixel art, and each one is bigger and harder to look after than the last. Walk over rolls of tape to collect them, stand on a patch of damage and tape it up, and swat or scare away whatever is doing it. Keep the painting’s condition up until closing time and you earn your stars.

There are pick-ups along the way: mega tape for faster repairs, a triple espresso, bubble wrap to shield the painting, and a biscuit, because even a night guard needs one.

How it plays

• Move with WASD or the arrow keys. Walk over tape rolls to pick them up.
• Space is tape. Stand on damage and hold it down to repair. Moths are swatted by bumping into them.
• Shift is the whistle. It scares everything nearby, then needs about seven seconds to recover, so choose your moment.
• P or Esc pauses, and M mutes.
• On a phone, drag on the left to move and use the Tape and Whistle buttons on the right.

Your best results are saved in your own browser, so you can go back and chase three stars on every painting.

Why another game?

After the House of Lords game I wanted to make something with the same arcade rhythm but no Parliament in it at all. Looking after a gallery turned out to be a surprisingly good fit: it is all about triage, deciding what to fix first while everything else keeps getting worse. It is also an excuse to draw some much-loved paintings in pixels.

It is a work of satire and entertainment. The paintings are famous public-domain works, but every visitor, bird and event in the game is invented, and it is a personal project that is not affiliated with or endorsed by any museum, gallery, Parliament or the UK Government. Views are my own. I built it with the help of Claude, which turned out to be a very capable colleague for pixel art and sound effects. No data is collected.

Play it

The game page has the full controls, a trailer and the game itself. It works on a computer with a keyboard, or on a phone using the on-screen controls (landscape works best).

If you get three stars on every painting, tell me. I would love to know whether anyone makes it through all seven shifts with the goat still on the premises.