I used to hate slide puzzles. I couldn't understand them and I dreaded them when they arrived in the games that I played. In recent years, though, something shifted within me. The jumble of feelings in my brain slid from hesitation to satisfaction, and I went from slide puzzle interloper to slide puzzle savant.
Now when I run into them, I am excited by the potential of seeing the puzzle come into shape in front of me. I'm a slide puzzle convert, and Furniture and Mattress must be trying to make more of us, because they've given the world a game to help convince future slide puzzlers — an epic "role-puzzling" adventure that sees your hero shifting the world around her to find a place to call home.
Just the Facts |
Developer: Furniture & Mattress LLC |
Publisher: Furniture & Mattress LLC |
Platform(s): PC*, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch *denotes platform reviewed on |
Price: $19.99 |
Release Date: July 25, 2024 |
Review key provided by developer via popagenda. |
Everything's sliding into place
As we covered during Steam Next Fest, Furniture and Mattress LLC are a small and mighty team of folks who've worked on some incredible indies. Writer Nick Suttner worked on games like Celeste and Carto, artist David Hellman was behind the art of Braid and the graphic novel Second Quest, and programmer Nicolás Recabarren previously worked with composer and sound designer Tomás Batista on the beautifully abstract puzzler ETHEREAL. We usually see these types of indie teams pop up with credits from across the AAA space, but there's something special about seeing indie mainstays come together to craft something brand new.
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is their debut release, an adventure game that hearkens back to classic 2D action RPGs like the original Zelda... but replacing all traditional forms of gameplay with one giant slide puzzle. It uses a gentle touch to tell a story about finding your place in the world, it lives up to the "role-puzzling adventure" moniker, and it manages to avoid being truly obtuse as it does.
It's about finding the place where you're allowed to be you, the place that feels like home — and shaking things up however's needed to make that happen.
Arranger's hero, Jemma, has always felt like an outcast in her home. Her every step literally changes the world around her, causing havoc wherever she goes, and she feels ostracized by her community as a result. With a simple introductory segment that shows a stranger leaving Jemma at this town's doorstep, we see that she's an outlier here, and our story begins with her feeling the call of the wild and embarking on an adventure beyond the safety of her hometown's world once and for all. Jemma's journeys brings her face to face with similarly stuck people in the towns around her, and with her special ability to shift things into their proper place, she finally gets to be anything other the nuisance she's been made out to be.
It might feel on the nose to say it, but Arranger's narrative is genuinely all about fitting in. It's about finding the place where you're allowed to be you, the place that feels like home — and shaking things up however's needed to make that happen. Sometimes you need to make your own place. Sometimes you need to fight back against the status quo. And sometimes you need to slide puzzle your way through the world to destroy an evil gooey force called Static that's keeping people in place.
Gently arranging itself within our hearts
There's a softness to the storytelling in Arranger that elevates its otherwise simple story.
It might have to do with David Hellman's graphic novel-like illustrated cutscenes and painterly style that helped build out the game's world. It felt familiar at a glance, and it wasn't until I was finished that I realized I'd read Hellman's video game myth deconstruction graphic novel, Second Quest. His soft highlights and patchwork brushstrokes manage to turn what is the most abstract grid-based world into something bigger. From the simple design of the world's tiles to the layered illustrations that give you a glimpse at what is actually around Jemma in any moment, Hellman's art is key to making this slide puzzle adventure something more.
There's a softness to the storytelling in Arranger that elevates its otherwise simple story.
It might have to do with the soft acoustic soundtrack — plucking acoustic guitars strum in the background of scenes, punctuated by the satisfying click of each tile as you move about the world. Batista's relatively simple instrumentation is used to communicate the atmosphere of each region and generally feels comforting to listen to.
But it mostly has to do with the fluffy dialogue that guides Arranger's cast of characters on a journey to make sense of the strange world around them. It's the silly Twitter analogue in a town run by robotic birds that send messages back and forth, and the romance between Choob and Shofty that really sold it for me.
Even in a game like Arranger, which really doesn't need a narrative with some grander meaning, there are these small ideas that feel like resistance against the painful world we live in. It uses softness, it uses joy, and it uses plain-speak to push back against people ignoring the pain of others for their own comfort, people hellbent on repressing individuality and self-expression, and oppression in its many forms.
The way they quietly push these ideas across the table in an approachable and smiley adventure is exactly why I love the indie gaming space. It reminded me of one of my favorite games, Chicory, and a lot of why I loved Arranger feels reminiscent of what Wishes Unlimited pulled off with that game, too.
That includes taking the traditional adventure game and turning it on its head with one unique gimmick that they find a million ways to innovate with.
Puzzlers lock in, grids are back in
As advertised, Arranger's gameplay is primarily based on basic slide puzzle concepts. Within rigid barriers, find a way to bring a certain object to a specific point on the grid, removing all obstacles in your way as you go. When you move about the world, you're sliding the entire path ahead of you, which means shifting items in the world — like chairs, plants, or people — to both solve puzzles and create complications. You can wrap around longer connected paths by pushing through the edges. However, Static-filled objects, outlined in wriggling pink and blue lines, remain untouched by your sliding.
Go from screen to screen, grid-based room to grid-based room, shuffling until you find the path forward. Fight monsters, push buttons, open doors, build satellites. Your usual adventure.
What Arranger nails as a puzzle game is the incremental growth in complexity and the impressive ability to teach through doing instead of ever outright telling you outright how to interact with the world or objects around you. A sword in front of a monster is pretty straightforward, as is a key in the same room as a locked door. Smaller puzzles pop up as you explore the overworld, starting as simple as ever, and the area's puzzle concepts slowly build in difficulty each step of the way.
Indicators glow on the edges of the tiles to show where you'd end up if you push around to the other side. There are small visual cues that tell you which tiles cannot be budged, and every room in the game (for the most part) holds everything you need to solve its puzzles right within it.
By keeping its basic rules so simple, experimentation is expected and encouraged. You'll fiddle and you'll bash against walls and question things, but whenever you finally figure out how to get that sword into that monster's face or that key into the locked door, it's always satisfying. It never feels like your fault when you struggle, and it never makes you feel incapable, because there are only so many things you can do to get through each area. It's just up to you to keep poking at it to find out what steps will get you where you need to go.
There are tons of unique modifiers to Arranger's puzzles that enhance the simple slide puzzle concept in fascinating ways: lasers that, when blocked, change the map in some way; or fishing rods that need you to take a certain number of steps away from their source to pull something up, for example. These complexities help reframe things and keep the ideas fresh most of the time, regardless of the fact that, at the end of the day, you're still just sliding around, and a lot of the basic core concepts are going to lead you to success no matter what.
A surprise that I only poked at toward the end of my play time: Arranger has some tools that you can enable at any time, like a tracker counting the number of steps taken and an in-game timer. These made me curious how far folks will go to tear this game apart and find the theoretical step limit needed to beat the game or how to speedrun its puzzles. There's even a hard mode that makes Jemma move two tiles at a time, removing a lot of the precision needed to solve some of these puzzles without tearing your hair out. Braver gamers than I will embark on these quests, and I can't wait to see them do it.
Just a few missteps... slide steps?
As much as I celebrate the emphasis on experimentation and the lack of handholding, I totally understand that people can be frustrated by slide puzzles, and I was a little disappointed that the only major assist offered in Arranger was a "skip puzzle" option that could be employed in any room of the game.
There is also a "quest tracker" assist that will keep you pointed in the right direction, which I imagine would help some folks in the game's more wide-open areas with optional dungeons, but knowing where to go may just frustrate folks who just can't figure out how to get there.
Other solutions are undoubtedly harder to implement or probably better found in the community's inevitable walkthroughs and guides, but I think the best and most accessible puzzle games find a way to remove barriers through hints of some variety in the games themselves, and I wish some of that was present here.
That, alongside a few obtuse puzzle solutions that took more than a normal amount of fiddling to get to, are my only real issues with Arranger, though. If you aren't a slide puzzle fan, I think this game delivers enough in its impressive story and art to make it worth the attempt — but come into it prepared. It won't be for you if slide puzzles make you run like they once did me.
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is an explosion of creativity. The team of artists behind it turned one simple concept into an adventure worth taking, turned simple tiles on a grid into a world full of imaginative concepts, and, hopefully, will turn many more slide puzzle strangers into converts overnight.
If you're looking at the hefty 2024 gaming season and wondering if you should slide some pieces around to make space for Arranger, I say leave the space open and you won't regret it.
Video Games Are Good and Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is . . . GREAT. (9/10)
+ smart puzzle pacing and intuitive hands-off instruction make it a stellar puzzling experience, the audio/visual experiences elevate simple tiles into a fully realized world, a gentle story about finding your identity
- assists aren't perfectly implemented, hard to buy in if you aren't a fan of its core concept, a few obtuse puzzle solutions
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