Arranger : A Role-Puzzling Adventure (Preview)
Jemma’s made up her mind : it’s time to leave her sleepy, stifling hometown and head out into the great wide world. The demo covers the opening hour, where Jemma looks for a place to offload her worldly possessions before she leaves. Her neighbours all feel like they’ve been plucked out of a tiny English village, but life isn’t perfect - the magically-bolstered barrier they call the Hold is all that keeps them safe from the dangerous purple-blue-tinged force known as the Static. And the Hold is showing a few cracks…
A “role-puzzling” game, Arranger is centered around the ability to rearrange the world’s tiles based on which row or column of the grids making up the world Jemma moves along. Unless a Static item blocks the way, she can loop around the paths and bring objects with her to solve puzzles and injure enemies. With the game’s focus on a grid in the centre of the screen, lead artist David Hellman (Braid) adorns the blank space with comic panels that flesh out the setting : open windows in houses, bird’s nests in forests, that kind of thing.
The only problem I had with the demo was that I couldn’t rewind or reset rooms. Although the game seems incredibly polished, I anticipate softlocks popping up and would have appreciated the ability to revert the puzzles I got stuck on. The demo could not save so I’m not sure if “save and quit” will return you to the exact same spot in a puzzle or back to the start of each room. Arranger caught my eye with its tile arranging puzzles in the February Nintendo Direct and I look forward to it taxing me when it comes out.
In a word : griddy.
Arranger : A Role-Puzzling Adventure is a puzzle game developed and published by Furniture & Mattress LLC for PS5, PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, Nintendo Switch and mobile devices via Netflix.
