debtFor Gemma, her life is a puzzle. Ever since she was left on a stranger's doorstep as a baby, she's never felt like she belonged, and she's desperate to know what the world is like outside the small town where no one ever leaves. What's more, when she moves, the whole world moves with her, like sliding tiles, a series of conveyor belts. It's the puzzle that gets her from point A to point B.
Each scene in Arranger: Role Puzzling Adventure is its own sliding block puzzle, where you need to think a couple steps ahead to move Gemma and the surrounding objects in the right direction. Some things don't move with Gemma, like purple static-covered rocks and robotic birds, but everything else does. So you'll need to carry a sword towards an intruding monster, a key towards a door, or a banana towards a shy orangutan. As long as Gemma's path isn't blocked, when she hits the end of a row or column, she'll reappear at the opposite end, adding another layer of spatial logic.
The game is hard to describe, but strangely enough, it's incredibly intuitive to play. I'm not sure exactly how I solved some of the rooms (I had been struggling for ages with a particularly tricky one with lasers and mannequins, and then suddenly it wasn't). My brain just figured out the rules. It made sense how Gemma moved along a tiled conveyor belt. The arrangers added surprising twists to these rules, introducing rafts to cross water, joysticks to control robots, grappling hooks, and more. I'd probably play it for 30 minutes to an hour before moving on to the next idea. It pushed the sliding block puzzle idea to its limits.
The cutesy fantasy-inspired art style and writing didn't do much to complement the puzzles for me; it's not without personality, but it felt mostly perfunctory. Arranger hints at a coming-of-age story for misfits, but doesn't really deliver on it. Instead, it's full of surreal vignettes, like shearing strange creatures for a painter who uses them as muses, or a teenager trying to sneak out of her parents' house to meet up with her long-distance boyfriend. The cartoon-inspired frames indicate the action and emotion that happens between puzzle scenes, but Arranger feels more cerebral than emotional.
Sure, it was brain-wracking at times; I briefly couldn't understand the logic of the puzzle's conveyor belt, not figuring out how to get three blocks to land on three separate switches at the same time, and just moving things around in circles. But mostly I felt trapped, racing through levels, placing them almost by instinct, and feeling like I was playing Tetris. I've reached the end of Jenna's adventure, so I'm definitely done with block puzzles for a while. But it's rare to play a game that explores one great idea so thoroughly.
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Source: www.theguardian.com
