Among the indie devs behind Arranger: A Role-Playing Puzzle Game are Braid artist David Hellman, Carto writer Nick Suttner, and Ethereal designer Nicolás Recabarren. It will come as no surprise, then, that the game is overflowing in personality.
Arranger looks fantastic—colorful, with bold brushstroke outlines. There’s also a patchwork effect achieved by the use of more sketch-like illustrations on the margins of its puzzle grids. These enrich the game’s world by giving zoomed-in views of important details, or by hinting at what lies down the paths of its interconnected 2D world. Sometimes perfectly timed to appear at just the right moment, they can even add dynamic action to certain sequences, such as when they’re used to accent pieces of the ground disappearing, as if the path is crumbling beneath your footsteps. This wonderful presentation is heightened further by a sneaky soundtrack that packs percussive hooks that support the action without ever getting annoying.
Although Arranger’s dialogue can run long at times, don’t tune out, as doing so would mean missing out on one of the most consistently funny video game narratives of the year. Never forced or memetic, it’s just a steady stream of light, effortlessly charming jokes. Mr. Help, for instance, is a character you’re introduced to early, and the game leads on that he’s there to help guide you through a tutorial or give the occasional hint. But before you get the chance to ask any actual questions, he tells you he doesn’t have time for that and promptly disappears.
The story itself follows Jemma, a young girl of unknown origin who was raised in an insular community that exists inside The Hold, a large structure that purportedly keeps its inhabitants safe from the dangers of the outside world. Jemma’s quest naturally sees her venturing out into that world in search of answers about both herself and the nature of the force known as the Static, a corruption that holds some parts of the world permanently in place.
Along your way, you’ll work through a procession of puzzles that look sort of like the standard block pushing puzzles you find used for filler in many games, except Arranger’s are different, and much more interesting. Working almost like a Rubik’s Cube, these have you moving an entire row or column at a time, meaning that each action has a multitude of intended and unintended consequences. And there’s the added catch that Jemma herself is attached to the grid, so she can’t move at all without pushing and pulling bits of the world around with her.
This can make some of the game’s sequences much stickier than they seem, since you might achieve the right organization of blocks while still leaving your poor hero trapped in a corner. The difficulty curve consistently escalates in challenge while remaining remarkably well-tuned, which prevents the frustrating roadblocks that hamper many lesser puzzle games.
That Arranger manages to be so smooth while using almost no traditional tutorialization (apologies to Mr. Help) is a major accomplishment. The game also makes the somewhat ambitious decision to operate entirely on the grid, such that everything you do works like the puzzles do. This means you’re always thinking in terms of the main mechanic, even when you’re simply walking around a town and talking to its inhabitants. As such, you quickly and naturally learn how to make the most of Arranger’s idiosyncratic movement system. For example, jumping from one end of a row or column to the other (shades of Pac-Man) is critical to solving many of the game’s toughest puzzles, yet it becomes like second nature long before that point simply because it’s such an efficient way to traverse your environment.
This continuity also deepens your connection to the world in interesting ways. Since every step Jemma takes affects everything around her, it means that she’s always moving other people in ways they find helpful or annoying. Sometimes she solves problems and other times she just breaks things. The resulting consistency and believability suggests an actual world with real problems that need solving, fulfilling the promise of Arranger’s subtitle by turning a smart, winsome puzzler into something that also feels like an adventure.
This game was reviewed with code provided by popagenda.
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