This has been a particularly great year for puzzle games. Lorelei and Laser Eyes and the latest remake of Shredded offer several puzzles to solve, while games like Islands of the Sea and the Sky AND March After midnight find an innovative game conceit and explore the concept to the fullest. The last type of puzzle game I described tends to be more appealing to me, and a new game launching this week has checked all the right boxes for me. Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure from developer Furniture & Mattress is coming to PC, PlayStation and Switch on July 25, but you can play it on mobile for no extra charge if you’re a Netflix subscriber.
Arranger is a grid-based puzzle game where the world is made up of tiles and players slide them as they move. It’s one of those genius game concepts that has existed in bits and pieces in other games, but has never been fully explored like this before. Arranger it does this by telling a coming-of-age story that connects emotionally with the game’s mechanics. It’s my favorite puzzle game in what has already been an incredible year for the genre, and a must-play for fans of the genre.
Putting the right parts in place
Arranger it creates the perfect setup for a game where players have to arrange and move tiles. It’s a coming-of-age story about a girl named Jemma who was abandoned and left to grow up in a village when she was younger. Unlike the people around her, she can see and move around the world, which is divided into floor tiles. This causes problems. Everyone in her town seems to want her to leave, and she does so after accidentally awakening a static, mysterious, controlling substance in a cave just outside of town. all the time ArrangerJemma explores the outside world and learns more about her origins and why this static has taken over the world.
One of the first things players do is knock someone down a ladder by clumsily moving a row of tiles. This perfectly captures the feelings I had growing up. This includes accepting the fact that it is difficult to carefully control or order everything that happens around us, and that there is chaos behind putting things in order. It’s not necessarily bad that things are constantly changing and changing. All these elements create a relatable coming of age story told through the game.
My only problem with Arranger is that it can be quite wordy. At first, some dialogue exchanges feel like they go on much longer than they should because the developers are trying to fit more jokes into the exchange. Thankfully, this is a game that ties its excellent puzzle design to the narrative quite well. Initially, I wasn’t sure how much there was to explore with a tile-swapping mechanic like this, but Arranger find clever ways to use it. Most of the puzzles had me moving objects, and because entire rows of tiles usually move in the same direction at the same time, getting an object exactly where I needed it could be a challenge.
Once I learned the intricacies of the controls and how to quickly navigate its grid—such as how Jemma can get from one side of the grid to the other by walking on its edge—the puzzles became a thrill to solve. There are also assist options that allow players to skip the puzzles they’re struggling with, and this makes the whole experience feel very player-friendly. Every five minutes or so, especially late in the game, Arranger finds a new way to contextualize its central gameplay conceit.
This allows Arranger to circumvent an issue that has plagued quite a few indie games I’ve played recently, such as Schima. This project has a great central shadow movement system, but it struggles to explore it beyond its most basic implementations. Arranger it’s short and sweet, taking no more than five hours to whip up, but still constantly finds new ways to interpret tile sliding within that short running time.
Sometimes a puzzle is as simple as thrusting a sword into an enemy. At other times, it would become much more complex and task me with doing things like sliding doors around in order to create a perfect path to push objects through. There are even some boss fights that cleverly twist the mechanics, like an early game that has players maneuver tiles so a creature’s spiky tail slams into its head. Arranger it never stagnates and lasts long enough to fully explore its core idea, which is one of the hallmarks of great puzzle game design. It’s one of my favorite puzzle games of the year and a must-play for die-hard fans of the genre.
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure will launch for PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Netflix Games for iOS and Android on July 25.
