The act of organizing is a powerful act. It allows us to make sense of chaos, to bring order and focus to objects around us. A Little to Left, a puzzle game and Max Inferno’s first attempt, sets out to capture this, asking you to tidy up household items while dealing with the occasional cat disturbance. The problem was, the fact that A Little to Left was a puzzle game held it back.
let me explain. Imagine we have a random set of books in front of us. You can choose to sort them alphabetically by author. I have the option to sort by title. I can choose something less practical, like the color of the cover, which won’t help much if I need to find a specific book, but it will be aesthetically pleasing. Part of the power of an organization comes from creativity and control. There is no “right” answer to tidying up, but A Little Left asks you to find it.
At worst, I feel like I’m watching the most depressing episode of Only Connect World without Victoria Coren-Mitchell to discuss my answers. And that’s where A Little To The Left struggled, while others (like Unpacking) succeeded. I can choose how to categorize things, other people may see them categorized differently, but they are equally valid. Decluttering is creative, but once you treat it as a puzzle to be solved, it ceases to be an exercise for your own mind. Some of the puzzles in A Little To The Left do have multiple solutions, but I often found myself asking “How do you want me to arrange these items?” rather than “How do I want to arrange these items?”. Sometimes, despite understanding the general pattern of what the game is asking me to do, I find myself confused about how to place everything, and it all feels downright annoying.
Some of the solutions are not so intuitive, I just managed to work around them by trial and error. These puzzles often “snap” objects into place once you’ve dropped them properly, but it’s hard to find satisfaction using brute force. In those that don’t have this “snapshot” you may have things placed correctly, but slightly off where the game needs to register them as resolved.
Fortunately, Max Inferno added a feature called “Let it be” based on feedback. It allows you to skip one puzzle and move on to the next, so you can keep going even if you get stuck. It’s a welcome addition when puzzles aren’t your thing. There’s also a hint system consisting of hand-drawn sketches of answers, allowing you to simply arrange everything on the screen so that it matches the sketch. I don’t like this because the prompt shouldn’t give the answer immediately. Finally, the hint serves almost the same purpose as the “go with the flow” feature, letting you move on to the next puzzle while also taking away the fun of figuring it out.
If this was purely a game of picking things up, it wouldn’t be so disappointing to get a blueprint to follow. But it does, and it’s a shame that the theme A Little to Left uses to showcase its puzzles is being organized, because despite some (somewhat irritating) setbacks I mentioned earlier, it’s actually A really good core puzzle. Most of them are well designed and require a bunch of logic. Some of them rely on you to recognize patterns, or make sure you’ve been following topics from previous solutions.
And Max Inferno’s own unique take on classic puzzles. A standout piece involves puzzle pieces, but the aim is not to fit them together to form a complete rectangular picture. Another puzzle is like a tangram, but with extra rules to help you figure out where to place each shape. There are even several variants of the Tower of Hanoi (or Professor Layton’s Pancake Stack as I always remember) where you need to stack objects in order of size. These puzzles usually have only one solution, and they are the most satisfying because they are based on a shared understanding. When I get puzzle pieces, I know what you want me to do. I don’t know what you want me to do when I get a bunch of leaves in different shapes.
It’s fun to play when the game gives you puzzles that are easy to click or can be deduced with relative ease. You know more about the way a developer thinks than it appears at first glance. It’s as if you’re actually learning how they furnish their home. The visuals and tone of the game even emphasize this. Objects rattle and vibrate as you interact with them, each with its own unique sound. The popping of cardboard boxes, the crunching of a slice of toast, and the creaking of cloth all remind you of the game’s home setting. It’s hard for me to really get annoyed with a game when the descriptions of every object are carefully created. The game’s preference for cool, pastel tones is eye-catching, and the soundtrack uses lighter instruments such as xylophones and an array of stringed instruments to keep the overall game’s bright and relaxing atmosphere.
It’s a pity that A Little to Left is held back by its nature as a puzzle game. Despite its beautiful hand-drawn graphics and mostly well-thought-out puzzle design, it can’t get rid of the contradictions it introduces by offering hard-and-fast solutions to collation’s free-form creativity.
