Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure review

As I grow older and possibly even wiser, I find myself craving puzzle games more and more. Often these are endlessly playable tile games like Grindstone or Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, but I’m also more than happy to play a rare puzzle game with an ending. It also turns out that the more thoughtful pace of a puzzle game rather lends itself to a story based experience, and Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure proves that with style.

Our protagonist Jemma isn’t like the other people who live in her small and isolated village. While they all move around normally, Jemma moves the world beneath her to slide around as she sees fit. As she reaches an adventuring age she decides to try and find out more about her unusual abilities, and sets off into a world that is being corrupted by a mysterious force known as Static. It doesn’t take long for Jemma to realise her powers are very well suited for fighting this evil, and she sets out to help save villages of frightened people from its thrall.

The first thing you’ll need to get used to in Arranger is moving around. The world is helpfully made up of square tiles, and by pushing the stick in a direction you’ll move yourself and the tiles in the line you’re standing on in that direction. Although this is a novel way to move, it’s pretty easy to get to grips with, but mastering it to solve puzzles takes some time. Realising that continuing to move off the edge of the grid teleports you back to the other side of it is especially useful, and makes getting around less obstacle filled areas a breeze.

Moving through the gorgeous world of Arranger is one thing, but solving puzzles is a whole other kettle of fish. It doesn’t take long for you to meet your first static beast, which will block your way with its immovable form. To destroy one of the pink pests you’ll have to slide a sword into it, which because they don’t move isn’t too difficult. Learning how to arrange objects with your sliding tile abilities will serve you well when problems like this present themselves, especially when more static objects rear their ugly heads and block your shuffling attempts.

These are the basics of Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure, but this is not a game that shoves the same old puzzles in your path over and over again. The variety of activities Arranger throws in your path is wonderful, with everything from fishing to helping monkeys fall in love represented with tile shuffling puzzles. Each new problem you have to help solve on your adventure mixes up the shuffling and sliding mechanics just enough to keep things fresh, and this kept me hooked from start to finish.

Although Arranger isn’t a particularly long game (clocking in at around 4-6 hours) it does feature a whole host of side content to explore if you’re a completionist. With a fairly open world to explore and (unless you choose to turn on the objective marker) often no particular direction that you’re aiming for, there’s so much opportunity to get lost and enjoy bonus puzzles to your heart’s content.

As much as the actual puzzles are the star of the show in Arranger, there are plenty of aspects of the overall package that make it a truly special game. The gorgeous and vibrant visuals are a joy to look at, and the variety of locales you visit ensures an all you can eat buffet for the eyes. The story is also remarkably well written, with likable characters and witty dialogue that I wasn’t expecting to get so invested in.

There aren’t a whole lot of issues I had during my time with Arranger, but one in particular did somewhat affect my enjoyment. While puzzles can be outright skipped if you’re struggling in Arranger, when you do this you aren’t shown the solution that you were struggling to find. This means that if a particular type of puzzle or object is confusing you then you’ll never get the chance to learn quite how to tackle it, and because of this I ended up (rather reluctantly) skipping one late section of the game entirely. A bit more hand-holding or a hint system would go a long way to solve this issue, but unfortunately that doesn’t exist.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is a wonderful and unique puzzle game, with novel tile sliding movement, a gorgeous world to explore and a whole lot of variety. The lack of a hint system might mean there are some elements of the game you struggle with, but for the most part Arranger is a tile shuffling good time that goes above and beyond what most puzzle games aim for.