Platform: PC
Also on: PS5, Nintendo Switch
Editor: Furniture and mattresses
Promoter: Furniture and mattresses
AVERAGE: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
Traffic Laws : E
Arranger is an interesting take on the puzzle genre. On the one hand, it's unlike any other puzzle game I've played before: rather than controlling characters or objects, you control the ground on which they all exist, and you must move it around to achieve your goals.
On the other hand, Arranger evokes a type of puzzle that has been around for over a century: the sliding puzzle, where you have to move tiles to find the solution. Arranger is obviously much more complex in the sense that it's not just about solving a single puzzle, but rather a whole series of puzzles – but in broad strokes, the general idea isn't that far off.
This is probably why I didn't like Arranger. As someone who always gets bored of sliding puzzles pretty quickly, having a game built entirely around that concept left me a little cold. There were too many ways to get backed into a corner (literally, in some cases), and not enough room to fix your mistakes.
Granted, that's kind of the fun and challenge of puzzle games, so I don't want to criticize Arranger too much for that. And besides, it would be silly to complain about the game's core mechanics simply because they are, without any more substance. But far too often, I would find myself making a wrong move and realizing it immediately, only to be stuck with my mistake while I painstakingly corrected it. In fact, once I got so confused that I ended up quitting the game mid-level, hoping that the game hadn't autosaved since I'd messed up. (It didn't, but the lack of an obvious save system is another one of my complaints about Arranger.)
That said, while I didn't love the sliding mechanic, it still allows for some fun moments. For example, you attack monsters not by grabbing a sword and running towards them, but by sliding the sword towards them until it hits them. Similarly, you unlock doors by sliding keys into them, and move items from one place to another by moving them tile by tile. Obviously, I found this a bit more tedious than the usual method of moving items (i.e. picking them up and carrying them), but there were definitely moments.
Another area where the game really shines is in its storytelling. While Arranger offers a fairly standard story about a young person discovering loneliness, media manipulation, and all that, which sometimes feels a bit hackneyed, the game always has such a positive attitude that you can never really get upset.
Still, Arranger has enough flaws that I can't say I love it either. There are some good ideas, and sometimes some very good execution, but overall, nothing feels like it fits into a cohesive, compelling whole.
Furniture & Mattress provided us with a PC Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure code for review purposes.
Score: 6.5
