FFor Jemma, her entire life is like a puzzle. Left on the doorstep of an unfamiliar house as a baby, she has never felt at home and is desperate to see what the world is like outside her small town, where no one ever leaves. More pertinently, whenever she moves, the entire world moves with her, like sliding tiles, like a series of conveyor belts. It really is a puzzle to get her from point A to point B.
Each scene in Arranger: A Role Puzzling Adventure is its own sliding block puzzle, where you have to think two or three steps ahead to move Jemma and the objects around her in the right directions. Some things, like rocks and robot birds covered in purple static, don’t move alongside her, but everything else does. So you have to carry swords toward monsters in the way, keys toward doors, bananas toward shy orangutans. Unless her path is blocked, when Jemma reaches the end of a vertical or horizontal row she rematerializes at the other end, adding another layer of spatial logic.
Describing the game is complicated, but oddly enough, playing it is surprisingly intuitive. I can’t tell you exactly how I solved some of the rooms (there was a particularly nasty one involving lasers and mannequins that stumped me for a long time, until it suddenly didn’t); my brain seemed to pick up on the rules on its own. The way Jemma moves along the tiled conveyor belts made sense. Arranger features a surprising number of twists on those rules, featuring rafts that zip across water, joysticks that control robots, and grappling hooks for maybe 30 minutes or an hour at a time before moving on to the next idea. It pushes the sliding block puzzle idea to the very limits.
The campy fantasy art and writing style didn’t do much to complement the mystery for me – it’s not devoid of personality, but most of it felt pretty functional. Arranger hints at a misfit’s coming-of-age story, but it never really conveys it. Instead, there are plenty of surreal little vignettes, like shearing strange creatures for a painter who uses them as muses, or trying to sneak a teenage girl out of her parents’ house to meet her long-distance boyfriend. Comic book-style frames show the action and emotion happening between puzzle scenes, but Arranger feels cerebral rather than emotional.
It definitely exhausted my brain at times — occasionally I’d just move things in circles because I couldn’t figure out how to get three blocks to fall on three separate switches at the same time, the conveyor belt logic of the puzzles temporarily eluding me. But more often I felt locked in, zipping through levels and arranging them almost by instinct, feeling like I was playing Tetris. Having reached the end of Jenna’s adventure, I was definitely done with block puzzles for a while, but rarely do you play a game that explores a good idea as thoroughly as this one does.
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