We’ve seen many times in the past how a good game principle ends up getting diluted, underdeveloped, or replaced as the title built around it progresses. This was my main fear with Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure , a little game I discovered last month in Los Angeles at Summer Game Fest. I immediately fell in love with this core mechanic and the way it’s presented to the player: you can move the main character Jemma in the four main directions in a grid-based environment, but the entire row or column she’s in will move with her, including anything placed on the aligned cells, and she can loop around the edges in a retro way.
The game informs the player about these and other possibilities right from the title screen. There is no tutorial, no real help, because everything is suggested by the level design, and this applies until the very end.
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In my case, I first played Arranger: ARPA on an iPad (since it’s coming to Netflix), where the game felt familiar as I swiped Jemma left and right. However, for this review, I requested a Nintendo Switch code, to get the best of both worlds: touchscreen and controller (it’s also coming to PC and PS5). And guess what? While it’s relaxing and fairly natural to swipe through the game, I ended up relying solely on the D-pad on both the TV and the handheld. You can play one-handed (you’ll end up pressing a few buttons for interactions and missions), but since the whole experience is based on the “up, down, left, right” principle, you can play casually but precisely with your left thumb alone.
There’s another reason why you might want to play this way: the game won’t test your reflexes with tricky button presses, as its increasing difficulty depends entirely on what you do and what you strategically plan to do, with the grid and your movements, almost turn-based. You start out doing very simple things while trying to figure out how the whole world works, and in that initial process you might find common actions like talking to a nearby character a bit too complicated for what they are, but once you get the hang of it, handles grids, you will move quickly, especially when you master the loop mechanics off the edge.
Since then, the developers at Furniture & Mattress have continued to add new elements to tweak the core mechanics. Swords, rafts, bridges, mine carts, hooks, laser beams, enemies and hazards that sync with your movements, portals, pipes, cats, fishing rods (!)… Everything works differently because it follows Jemma’s particular rules in this world, and none of them feel overused or redundant, as they are usually reserved for specific areas of the map, where you will find a well-designed and autonomous progression with a great sense of reward.
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In other words, the design of this game as an adventure and puzzle game is simply masterful. And for me, its difficulty curve is too, because even though I always found it a significant challenge and it took me a good while to solve some of the more difficult puzzles (including the side missions), I never got completely stuck: it was always a matter of keeping thinking and trying, and eventually finding a way to make everything work. And that’s precisely what I expect from a good puzzle, and anyway, there are aids for those who just want to move forward.
But Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure isn’t just a great little puzzle game: it’s also a lovely, moving, and sometimes hilarious story. And it manages to elevate the whole experience to something you’ll remember. Its careful writing (especially the dialogue) and localization (at least in Spanish) will have you eagerly awaiting the next interaction with the characters. A very appropriate sense of ironic humor is there to make parents and children laugh, but there’s also a more mature underlying message reserved for teenagers and adults. The game presented itself as a journey of self-discovery, and in this journey, it manages to talk very intelligently about sedentary lifestyles, addiction to screens and social networks, integration, posture, independent thinking, exclusion, and more.
To round out this beautiful package, the more artistic side of things makes the game design and story work together in the most sensitive way. From the bizarre character designs to the way environments and cutscenes are represented on screen, from the first guitar notes welcoming you to a new area to the feeling of walking on leaves despite the grid-like presentation – it really feels like the developers worked in harmony.
I would have liked a dialogue log to reread some of the more interesting or funny lines, and maybe the game gets a little too obtuse or deliberately confusing with backtracking and map navigation in its second half so you can complete the optional side missions, but the former can be fixed and the latter has more to do with how completionists want to approach this game and its secrets.
Jemma “moves a little differently” in this world, and that’s not a good thing—it’s what gives Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure a dual purpose in terms of unique gameplay and storytelling. It makes you think, and not just about the puzzles themselves, as you try to make everything fit together, or perhaps as you disorganize what was a little too arranged. For this beautiful adventure, we are grateful, this is the game you all need to play this summer.
