HomeReviewsArranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure review: a unique puzzle game that keeps things movingM People would really approve
M People would really approve
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Furniture & Mattress LLC
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Furniture & Mattress LLC
Jemma lives in a small town inside The Hold, a sort of barrier that protects the inhabitants from Static, a purple-rainbow oil-slick sort of a force that locks people and things in place. Jemma, though, being an adventurous person, wants to leave town and see what else is out there. This forms the first part of your adventure, as early puzzles teach you how to navigate Arranger’s moving grid. Bully blocking your path? Turns out the grid wraps, so you can pass through one end of it and appear on the other side. Need to move a box of rubbish somewhere? Figure out how to pull and push it along with Jemma, or move her around without movingit.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Furniture & Mattress LLC
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Furniture & Mattress LLC
It’s ultimately a simple concept for a puzzle game, as most puzzles boil down to ‘get from one side of the screen to the other’, but simple doesn’t mean bad, and it’s amazing how much variety Furniture & Mattress are able to introduce over the game’s 8-ish hours. There are a bunch of differently themed areas in the game - a sort of beachy village, a tech dungeon, an orange, rocky desert covered in cactuses - and I advise you to pay attention to the illustrations that paper the background of scenes, and serve as comic-ish cutscenes when something happens. It’s a really effective way to add character and detail in a zoomed out, 2D game.
In general though, Arranger never really gets old. Despite all the puzzles having the same root concept, they get appreciably harder, and some of them will hit your mind in such a way that it’s like running into a brick wall. I struggled for quite a while with some late-game puzzles where Jemma must move chunks of machinery to remake the floorplan of the level, but I loved moving obstacles around laser traps in a creepy lab.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Furniture & Mattress LLC
Not to fear, though, because there are optional settings that allow you to skip almost any puzzle in the game (not including optional puzzles like finding a necklace in a mine, which was, to be frank, a pisser that I never managed to solve). It’s a friendly touch that I appreciated, as a puzzle fan who is always trying to get other people to try games in a potentially unfriendly-feeling genre.
I’m being a bit of a curmudgeon about that, though. In general Arranger is an imaginative, cheerful, funny game that doesn’t outstay its welcome. I think it’ll provide a great challenge for puzzle enthusiasts, but it’s kind enough to throw at someone who is only just getting into them. In specific, I still haven’t been able to solve the optional mine puzzles. But that just makes me want to try again.
