Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Arranger is a character-based Puzzle game released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. Players take the role of Jemma, a young woman setting off from her sheltered village in search of answers about where she comes from. This game’s main gimmick is that Jemma herself doesn’t move directly through the game’s tile-based world, but instead players shift tiles vertically or horizontally to get Gemma where she’s going, along with other objects and people on the same axis as her.

It may seem a bit complicated, but it feels fairly natural after doing it for a little bit. Some objects move with Gemma, while other objects with a purple glow around them are stationary and stay in place, blocking movement when a moving object tries to push through it. Gemma and the objects she moves can also move through the end of one side of a row or column to appear at the other side, skipping everything in between.

Arranger makes excellent use of these mechanics to present players with some really clever environmental puzzles, with new environmental mechanics adding new twists to everything, like stationary enemies you need to defeat by moving a sword into them, multi-block sheep you need to shear by moving scissors through their entire body in as few moves as possible, and fish you need to catch by covering as much ground as possible after grabbing the fishing pole. This is a game that rewards players for thoughtful planning and observation, and some of these puzzles can be quite fiendishly clever.

It’s not all about the puzzles though, as the game has an interesting world to explore, and an engaging story with fun and interesting characters to meet. Given this game’s focus on moving not only your character but everything around her, it makes sense that the worrisome force threatening the people of the land is “static” threatening to make everything and everyone immobile. And as Jemma looks for answers about her past, she’ll encounter plenty of strange people who are dealing with their own problems in the world, with some of those problems clearly tied to this static. It’s a clever twist on the classic “hero saves the world” story, and Jemma makes for a fun and lighthearted protagonist to explore it.

Despite featuring tile-based 2D visuals, the world of Arranger is surprisingly beautiful. It’s bursting with color, and with some really expressive cartoony character designs, and with the borders of the traversable areas you move through surrounded by still images depicting the environment, characters, and scenes taking place around you as you move. It’s all quite striking, giving this game a really unique look that works really well for the game. This is joined by a soundtrack filled with lovely plunky strings and drums, with great songs like Once Upon a Tile, Taking It Breezy, El Mundo se Mueve Conmigo, and A Tile as Old as Time, to name a few.

When it comes to complaints, I think my main complaint is that there isn’t really any sort of hint button or anything like that when you get stuck, nor an indication if you need to backtrack to bring forward something you left elsewhere – I wasted a lot of time at one point backtracking to see if I could bring a sword I encountered earlier with me to take out an enemy I was struggling to get past, only to realize that there was a much easier solution right there waiting for me.

Still, overall I think Arranger is a well-crafted Puzzle game with a clever central mechanic that the game uses extremely well, re-thinking and recontextualizing that mechanic numerous times over the course of the game, and with all of this packaged within an excellent presentation, with an interesting story filled with likable characters. If you enjoy Puzzle games, this is absolutely one you’ll want to pick up.

tl;dr – Arranger is a Puzzle Game where players don’t move their character but instead move the entire row or column their character is on. It’s an interesting mechanic and this game finds numerous clever ways to make use of it, all within a great presentation with likeable characters in an interesting story. Puzzle fans should absolutely consider picking this one up.

Grade: B+

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