Arranger: A Puzzle-Filled Adventure Furniture & Mattress is the kind of delightful, genre-bending game that words can feel inadequate to describe when it’s much easier to understand in motion. Yes, telling you it’s an adventure game where you navigate via a grid that moves the environment with you is technically accurate, but it doesn’t explain how or why this simple, intuitive way of moving through its world and accepting its inherent restrictions scratches an itch in my brain.
There were times when I was playing through Arranger It didn’t seem like a stretch to call this a “perfect” video game, as Furniture & Mattress expresses an idea concisely, without letting it drag on, repetitive, or boring. The team integrates its clever puzzle design with the game’s themes, while also delivering some genuinely charming writing. At the center of it all is the heartfelt story of Jemma, a small-town outcast who was born with the undesirable ability to alter the environment around her as she moves through it. If she moves to the left, the entire x-axis in front of her moves with her. This means that anyone or anything on that line will be dragged along with her, looping between edges until she leaves that line and enters another one to start the process over again.
Jemma, feeling like she doesn’t quite fit in in this small town, decides to leave and discovers hidden truths about this world and its powers that her lifelong neighbors could never understand. Arranger delivers all of this with writing as clever as its puzzle design, but even though I was invested in Jemma’s self-discovery and desire to leave the claustrophobic confines of her small town, navigating ArrangerThe puzzle-driven world alone was captivating enough to keep me hooked.
ArrangerJemma’s basic concept of moving parts of the world as she traverses it is presented as the most ridiculous of annoyances. She runs through the town square and knocks a ladder over the other side of the walkway because she can’t control her abilities. But it also proves to be her greatest asset as she navigates new and unfamiliar places and you master her abilities. Arranger There is combat, but it’s done by manipulating the environment to push swords into enemies. Often, though, they’ll be positioned just awkwardly enough that you can’t just drive a blade into a beast’s heart. This is where the puzzle part of Arranger comes into play. Pushing entire paths with your movement while only being able to move on the x and y axes is the perfect instinctive limitation that Arranger is under constant construction.
Each new area that Jemma arrives in has a distinct mechanic added to the main loop. Some are as simple as avoiding laser beams that trigger barriers in her path, while others are as complex as controlling two characters at once who aren’t on parallel paths. Arranger The game never gives you tutorials on these new ideas, instead letting you figure them out for yourself as each new obstacle appears in your path. Yet the game is so concise in its visual communication that understanding these new obstacles feels almost innate, like something hardwired into your muscle memory. And while you’re limited by the game’s movements in some ways, it also frees you in other ways. Discovering that I could quickly traverse long paths by looping from one side to the other was an incredibly satisfying moment in which I realized I was navigating Arranger‘s world with the same kind of precision and awareness in the area that I associate with games like Tetrisand there are moments like that until the very end.
Arranger is a quick adventure, but it’s filled with so many clever and perfectly executed ideas that by the end, I was left wanting more. Jemma’s story may be over by the end, but I’d love to see Furniture & Mattress add new puzzles in future updates, because the team has such an impeccable and intelligent eye for what makes puzzle games so satisfying. Now, I’m just waiting for my memory of the game to fade so I can go back and try to solve those puzzles with fresh eyes once more.
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