Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure Review (PS5) – A Tremendous Tile-Shifting Time for All
Building the Basics
Arranger is – quite literally – a tile-based puzzle game that stretches this concept to the very limits. Moving throughout each area requires you to think imaginatively and laterally about where things will move and the boundaries of the room you’re operating in. While the core concepts might take some getting used to, there is an innovative idea here that managed to keep me sliding until the very end.
Each area of the game introduces particular obstacles to navigate, each offering its own spin on the core sliding gameplay, and each one feels well explored and utilised to its full potential in the relatively short campaign.
There’s no downtime with Arranger and there’s no sense of slowness. Tile-moving is baked into the very movement of the game and mixes elegantly with bespoke puzzle rooms to offer a cohesive adventure and puzzle experience that fits the name of the game to a T.
There are no fail-states in Arranger, and you’re never punished for taking your time when working out a puzzle. The world only moves when you move and I appreciate this decision as an encouragement to take my time and experiment with the space I’ve got to work with. Even in the more ‘intense’ moments, you’re given space to breathe and figure out what needs to be done at your own pace.
These high-intensity moments introduce some of the most unique scenarios that Arranger has to offer, with each big bad having a distinct approach to “defeating” them. Combat usually involves moving items to particular tiles to remove obstacles, or even stretching enemies out to expose their weak points. There isn’t a stone left unturned when it comes to what’s done here.
This is all brought together by an incredible attention to detail in terms of sound design. More so than any game I’ve played this year, Arranger actively benefits from having a good pair of headphones to experience it with. Each movement of tiles brings a subtle rumble and shifting of the ground beneath you, resulting in some of the most detailed soundscapes I’ve heard in a good while.
I found myself just moving around rooms enjoying the sounds of the moving floor beneath me, which isn’t something I tend to notice in other games!
Setting Out On Adventure
The story of Jemma discovering her true purpose in the world blends perfectly with the experimental gameplay of Arranger to make a cohesive story that will resonate with a wide variety of players. Left at a village by her mother, Jemma yearns to break out of her small town and see what the world has to offer, and to take her unique talent of shifting the world to new places and to help people in need.
While we might not all have the power to literally shift the world around us, we all have something about us that we want to explore beyond our cosy regular lives. Across the areas that she visits, she reminds people to go beyond their comfort zones and explore beyond the four walls of their houses.
A particularly striking sequence in the middle of the game is a stark critique of our convenience-addled lives under technology, and the blessing of giving these conveniences up in favour of just touching the ground with our own two feet for a short while.
Each area that Jemma travels to explores another facet of this overall message of rediscovery of ourselves. The main “enemy” of the game and one of the main obstacles you come across throughout the game is ‘Static’; this is the major force keeping particular parts of the world stuck and unmoving in the face of change and new ideas.
On a gameplay level, these objects can’t be moved and must often be navigated around as they halt your row-shifting antics. On a narrative level, they represent the overly controlling and limiting influences in society that stop us from going in the direction that we want to.
Jemma is an aspirational character who flourishes in the unpredictability of the consequences of her actions. Arranger isn’t a cut-and-dry story of success – she finds herself causing damage and chaos wherever she goes, with the very best of intentions.
Despite this, she keeps moving forward and trying to do right by the people around her. There’s a real earnestness to Jemma as a character that I couldn’t help but love. She isn’t perfect and that’s completely by design. Her power is disruptive and she’s trying to learn how to use it for good.
Charm In Every Tile
The charm of Jemma extends to every other part of the game, and then some. Helmed primarily by the artist behind indie darling Braid, Arranger boasts an expressive art style that makes fantastic use of space in order to tell its shifting story. Big story moments are communicated through illustrated panels full of distinct detail and character.
These also pepper the backgrounds of areas as you move from place to place, and are a smart way of working with the screen space, outside of the player’s influence.
Overworld illustrations and character designs are similarly unique and full of charm of their own, with each new encounter proving to be memorable and a lovely way to break up the puzzle-solving. I was also surprised by just how often I was laughing throughout the game. Unexpectedly, Arranger has emerged as one of the funnier games that I’ve played in recent memory and I was happily chuckling along to some of the sillier bits of dialogue.
There are very few games that manage to balance the needs of the narrative against fun and innovative gameplay, and Arranger manages to nearly perfect it.
Lightening The Load
For players who might not be able to wrap their heads around the screen-wrapping tile sliding, Arranger features some key accessibility features to smooth out the journey. The option to have a consistent quest marker on the screen is helpful in more open areas and keeps a sense of direction going. I’m surprised this isn’t enabled by default, but I appreciate the option to make my journey a bit more directed.
In addition to this small nudge in the right direction, there’s also an option to skip most of the puzzle rooms in the game if a particular challenge proves to be too difficult to figure out.
While this feature is a nice addition to ensure people can get to the end of the story, I’m sad that there isn’t more of a focus on actually guiding players through the game rather than just letting them skip it entirely. Similar puzzle games tend to set out paths to follow and moves to make in order to nudge you in the right direction.
By giving you this security, players will steadily learn how the game works and the moves that they can make, growing confidence to go without help. Maybe this is down to my own approach to learning, but I prefer to be guided than to be rushed through a solution.
There’s no real problem with just offering a skip, but I don’t think it offers as much help as it looks like it does at first glance.
I was also frustrated that there wasn’t an easy way to restart a screen of puzzles after you start moving pieces around. There aren’t any ways you can make a puzzle unsolvable, but it can be easy to get yourself wound up in a tricky situation where a solution feels tough to get to.
These are ultimately small problems that I have with accessibility that didn’t have a big impact on my experience overall but may impact others who struggle with wrapping their heads around this type of puzzle game. Where I may have been able to quickly understand the rules of the game, others may benefit from some more useful nudges and encouragement, rather than just skipping the challenges.
Jemma’s journey is one of discovery and working out what works best – it’s a shame that the game didn’t offer the same privilege to struggling players in some way.
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is now available on PS5.
Review code generously provided by the publisher.