Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure | Review

A Jemma in the rough.

Puzzle games don’t always need a unique angle to hook me if they are good at tickling my brain, but having that anchor helps keep me from floating on by. Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure differentiates itself within the puzzle genre by introducing a main mechanic that helps shuffle itself away from the pack. Although, it’s not just the stellar tile shifting that slots Arranger into the top shelf but the abundance of heart in the narrative that unravel on this puzzle quest.

In Arranger you play as Jemma, a misfit on her path to discovering who she really is by moving along the grid-like world. As you slide her around any person or object will move if they are in the same connecting horizontal and vertical path as you leading to a chaos that coalesces as you strive to solve your way forward. It’s within these pathways that you’ll encounter objects or enemies that cannot be moved without either defeating them or discovering what other objects need to be moved in order to circumvent the blockage. Sometimes the solution is as simple as maneuvering a sword into an enemy drenched in Static– a pinkish purple force the dwellers of this world are afraid of– or simply realizing that walking to the edge of a path has you appear on the opposite side of that same set of tiles.

In the early moments of Arranger, I felt like the puzzle structure was intuitive and guided you instinctively to discovering these solutions in order to prime your mental palate for the slow addition of mechanics and incremental difficulty that would ensue. Puzzles that may challenge you to consider things outside the bounds of the area you are in or even utilizing new tools that appear as you progress. For instance, certain areas introduce rafts to traverse water tiles while in another area grappling machines to traverse gaps popped up. These slight additions to the world induce intricacies layered over an already splendid puzzler which kept Arranger fresh throughout the entirety of the journey, while never fully diverging from the foundation of what made the puzzle mechanics so delicious to begin with.

Even so, with a puzzler that was quite worthy of playing on its own, it’s not the only path Jemma is on that’s worth exploring. Arranger tells the tale of Jemma, a young woman who doesn’t know who her family is and spends the majority of that adventure trying to find herself and where she belongs. In that search, you’ll meet a variety of other characters who have their own baggage in a world ruled by fear. Dilemmas that range in tone, often accompanied by plenty of humor and quaintness that never made the game overtly too serious but dropped enough crumbs that I sniffed out more from this role-puzzler than I initially intended to.

Themes of feeling lost, feeling alone, and what community means and can do for people are at the heart of Arranger. It was hard not to feel connected to Jemma when even though I do have a family that I know, sometimes the family that you find– or the one that finds you– can be just as important if not more so than the ones you were given. Helping others can lead to helping you in the process whether that’s a realization you come to right away or it’s revealed later. This journey of discovery isn’t the entire plot though, as there’s an overarching story that revolves around the Static and why the world is the way it is. This particular thread wasn’t as compelling to me as the yarn being spun around community, feeling alone, and feeling lost wove.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is easily one of the best games I’ve played this year. A stand-out from Summer Game Fest that stood up to my post-SGF expectations. Catching me slightly by surprise and not because it contains a wealth of enjoyable puzzles to solve with slightly compounding mechanics that never threw off the rhythm and balance. Instead because of the nuanced narrative nestled within the cracks of the shifting tiles. If you’re looking for something to itch your noggin to, Arranger possess a unique gameplay loop that doesn’t grow tiresome during the handful of hours it takes to complete. A puzzle perfect platformer with narrative depth, Arranger is a must-play for puzzle game fans that hopefully finds your heart the way it shifted through mine.

We reviewed Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure on Nintendo Switch with a code provided by the developer.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure releases July 25th, 2024 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Steam, and Epic Games Store.

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