For Jemma, her whole life feels like a puzzle. Left on a stranger’s doorstep as a baby, she has never felt as if she fitted in, and is desperate to see what the world looks like outside her small town, which nobody ever leaves. More pertinently, whenever she moves, the whole world moves along with her – like sliding tiles, like a series of conveyor belts. It really is a puzzle getting her from A to B.
Each scene in Arranger: A Role Puzzling Adventure is its own sliding-block puzzle, where you must think two or three steps ahead to move Jemma and the objects around her in the right directions. Some things, such as rocks and robot birds covered in purple static, don’t move alongside her, but everything else does. So you have to transport swords towards monsters that stand in the way, keys towards doors, bananas towards shy orangutans. Unless her way is blocked, when Jemma hits the end of a vertical or horizontal row she rematerialises at the other end, adding another layer of spatial logic.
Describing the game is tricky, but oddly, 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 had me stumped for ages, until it suddenly didn’t) – my brain seemed to pick up on the rules by itself. The way Jemma moves along the tiled conveyor belts just made sense. Arranger presents a surprising number of twists on those rules, introducing rafts that cross 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 idea of the sliding-block puzzle to the very limits.
The cutesy fantasy art style and writing didn’t do a tremendous amount to complement the puzzling for me: it’s not devoid of personality, but most of it felt quite functional. Arranger hints at a misfit coming-of-age story, but never really delivers it. Instead there are plenty of surreal little vignettes, such as shearing weird creatures for a painter who uses them as muses, or trying to sneak a teenager out of her parents’ house to unite with her long-distance boyfriend. Comic-book-style frames show you the action and emotion that occur in-between puzzle scenes, but Arranger feels cerebral rather than emotive.
It definitely exhausted my brain from time to time – now and then I was just shifting stuff around in circles because I couldn’t figure out how to make three blocks land on three separate switches at the same time, as the conveyor belt logic of the puzzles temporarily eluded me. But more often I felt locked in, darting around the levels and arranging them almost on instinct, feeling as if I was playing Tetris. Having reached the end of Jenna’s adventure, I am definitely done with block puzzles for a while – but rarely do you play a game that explores one good idea as thoroughly as this.
• Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is out today (25 July); £15.99
