It’s a perfect blend of puzzles and exploration, with an enchantingly interlocking twist.
One of my favorite moments in the game is when the world just spins. It’s a simple bit of magic that’s been around since the bright, bustling days of arcades, but I never get tired of it. You run all the way to the right side of the screen, and then—whoops!—you’re suddenly back to the far left. You run all the way to the top, and with one last push, you find yourself back at the bottom.
I like Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure more than I do. It’s a wraparound screen: a video game. Arranger tells the story of Gemma, a misfit trying to escape a delightfully stagnant culture. She leaves her hometown and moves out into the wider world, trying to right her wrongs and find a place for herself in the process. It’s all great. But she does this by manipulating a grid-movement system, which means that if she moves away from the top of each column, she moves back to the bottom, and if she moves away from the right side of each row – well, you get the idea.
Of course, there’s more. Every row or column that Gemma is in moves with her, which means anything on that row or column moves with her. This is a puzzle game, and these things form the core of the puzzles. Most objects move with Gemma, merrily tangling around as she moves. But some of the objects arranged in purple are either locked in place, meaning they don’t move at all, or they move but don’t tangle: they get stuck on the edge and freeze the entire line.
As a result, you spend a lot of time in Arranger figuring out how to get forward: how to navigate a road full of trash cans that you can’t wrap around, or how to get over a boulder that simply won’t budge. The answer is almost always simple – if that boulder is in the middle of the road and you need to go to the left of it, the perhaps counterintuitive solution is to just go all the way to the right of it and let the wraparound magic take you back to the left! – but it also almost always feels like a revelation.
Arranger is a game of small epiphanies, and it’s also a game that lets you get those epiphanies in the best possible way, simply by playing around in the sandbox. Each puzzle is fairly compact: the level can be much larger than a single screen, but the puzzle part almost always depends on things being within your field of view. This means that when I come across an obstacle that I can’t figure out how to navigate, my best opti on is almost always to push the boundaries of the game and see what happens. Can’t I go around to the left? How about to the right? Or up or down? Can I move the object that’s blocking my way? Can I shift it to another row or column? If so, what would that do?
The navigation challenge is the easiest part of the game. Arranger quickly escalates into combat, which involves maneuvering weapons to hit enemies in a row or column, escort missions where you have to make objects or people move with you, and even things like fishing mini-games. Fishing is actually kind of fun: you hook the fish, and then you have to move back, pulling your line across as many grids as possible. Eventually, the fish will give up and jump out of the water. You’re done!
My favorite moment was maneuvering the raft to move from one island to another in what felt like an archipelago. No, my favorite part was busting someone out of a house by blocking the guards’ view with furniture that clipped into my rows and columns as I moved. But that’s the thing – it’s hard to pick a favorite element of a game that takes a simple concept and tries to squeeze everything it can out of it, shaking up the puzzles with new elements, new gadgets, and even the odd new ability, all while taking you away from home and out into the world on a grand adventure.
Along the way, I learned lots of little ways to handle situations, most of which were wordless to me: I’d randomly interfere with space, and what I wanted to happen would happen. I worked out how to close the distance between me and another object in my row or column, for example, by moving in a circle that felt like gathering yarn. I learned how to quickly carry an object or character around a tight corner; it felt almost like quickly tapping out a security code I’d long memorized on a keyboard. Everything in Arranger started to feel like this: like a physical skill you’ve learned. You manipulate space in a way that makes perfect sense, but you’d have a hard time explaining to someone else. Wizardry!
I’d say Arranger has two informal modes. In one mode, you’re in the middle of a series of puzzles, say, making your way through rooms in a mansion and tackling single-screen puzzles based on the same series of elements. I enjoyed that mode, but I liked the other mode even more, where you’re just trying to get somewhere. The grid is divided into paths and little courtyards, and you’re still solving puzzles, but they’re all A-to-B. Here, Arranger feels like a speculative, daydreamy logic doodle. I know where I’m going, and I’m confident I can get there, so on the way, let’s solve all these little moment-to-moment challenges.
All of this is aided by the charming, playful script and beautiful cartoon art by David Hellman, who created Braid’s artwork and manages to evoke a world that feels thick and detailed, full of thick Fantagraphics brushstrokes and employing a picture-in-picture effect, meaning that as you walk through a room or meet a new character, the background may fill the panel, offering alternative views of the action.
I never tire of the coherence of the artwork from one moment to the next, or of something a puzzle teaches me that I find myself subverting, overturning, and remaking several puzzles later. Arranger is tight, funny, and clever, presented in the most relaxed, least overbearing way possible, and it’s just lovely.
Furniture & Mattress Magazine was provided with a copy of The Arranger: A Character Puzzle Adventure for review.
