This has been a particularly great year for puzzle games. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and the recent remake of Riven offer up some mind-bending puzzles to solve, while games like Isles of Sea and Sky and Mars After Midnight find an innovative gameplay conceit and explore the concept to its fullest. The latter type of puzzle game I described tends to be more appealing to me, and a new game launching this week checked off 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 at 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 around as they move. It’s one of those genius gameplay concepts that has existed in bits and pieces in other games, but has never been explored to its fullest like this before. Arranger does just that while telling a coming-of-age story that emotionally ties back into that gameplay mechanic. It’s my favorite puzzle game in a year that has already been outstanding for the genre, and a must-play for fans of the genre.
Putting the right pieces into place
Arranger creates the perfect setup for a game where players must 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 the world, which is split up into floor tiles. That causes issues. Everyone in her hometown seems to want her to leave, and she does so after accidentally awakening some static, a mysterious, controlling substance, in a cave right outside of town. Throughout Arranger, Jemma explores the outside world and learns more about her origins and why this static has overtaken the world.
One of the first things players do is knock someone on a ladder over by clumsily moving a row of tiles. That perfectly captures feelings I had growing up. That includes accepting the fact that it’s hard to neatly control, or arrange, everything happening around us, and that there is some chaos behind putting things in order. It’s not necessarily bad that things are constantly changing and shifting. All of those elements make for a relatable coming-of-age story told through play.
My one issue with Arranger is that it can be quite wordy. Early on, some dialogue exchanges feel like they go on a lot longer than they need to because the developers are trying to fit more jokes into the exchange. Thankfully, this is a game that ties its excellent puzzle design into the narrative quite well. Initially, I was unsure of just how much there was to explore with a tile-shifting mechanic like this, but Arranger finds clever ways to use it. Most puzzles had me moving objects around, and because whole rows of tiles typically 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 controls and how to navigate its grid quickly — like how Jemma can go from one side of the grid to another by walking into the edge of it — puzzles became a thrill to solve. There are also assist options that let players skip puzzles they are struggling with, and that makes the whole experience feel very player-friendly. Every five minutes or so, especially in the back half of the game, Arranger finds some new way to contextualize its core gameplay conceit.
This allows Arranger to circumvent an issue that has sullied quite a few indie games I’ve played recently, such as Schim. That project has a great central shadow-hopping system, but it struggles to explore it beyond its most basic implementations. Arranger is short and sweet, taking no more than five hours to beat, but it still constantly finds new ways to interpret its tile-sliding within that short runtime.
Sometimes a puzzle is as simple as pushing a sword into an enemy. In other instances, it would get much more complex and task me to do things like slide doors around in order to create a perfect path to push objects through. There are even some boss fights that cleverly twist up the mechanics, like an early game one that has players maneuver tiles so the spiky tail of a creature bashes into its head. Arranger never gets stagnant and lasts just long enough to explore its core idea to the fullest, which is one of the design hallmarks of a great puzzle game. 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.