Official Review
You might have guessed it already, but Arranger is more than just a puzzle game. As the title suggests, it borrows a lot from the role-playing genre, mostly in terms of its story. There are boss fights, dungeons, usable weapons, and gadgets – really, while it could be an RPG, it's just as akin to a Legend of Zelda title, albeit with a coming-of-age slant.
If you've ever played an RPG, or read even a handful of books in your life, you'll know this has been done to death, but Arranger's brisk pace, peppy protagonist, and big heart really help elevate the story. It follows Jemma, a young girl who wants to find her place in the world. She leaves home to go on an adventure, and outside of the comfy confines of her village she finds a big, beautiful world, and the immovable force of 'static'.
Jemma, however, has a special ability, one which disrupts the order of the world – when she moves, everything in the same column or row moves with her. This is the central mechanic of Arranger, and it works perfectly with the game's central themes. Change is scary, and different is scary, but it's also wonderful. Jemma herself is such a lovely protagonist, ready to beat down and make jokes, but she's also accepting of the world's weirdness.
Over a brisk five hours, Jemma goes through a lot, visiting new towns, making new friends, and solving (and creating) more problems. She's a misfit who can't help but be a little nosy. The narrative isn't overly sappy, and the writing is sharp and funny. There are moments where the story could have done with more time to breathe, particularly towards the end of the game where we feel things wrap up a little too quickly, but Arranger does a nice job of integrating the narrative and gameplay in a way that feels meaningful. And despite some of the heavier themes – identity, finding your place in the world, and the nature of change – Arranger never gets too bogged down in the weeds, always delivering its message with a cheery smile.
Jemma's individuality is key to the story, but so is her power to 'change' the world. As we mentioned, if you move left or right, the whole row will follow; move up or down, and the same will happen there. You can even loop around the grid-based tiles by walking to the edges. Arranger, then, is like one giant Rubik's Cube or sliding tile puzzle, and as you progress through the game, new items, mechanics, tools, and even enemies are integrated into the world for you to parse and progress past.
It's delightfully simple, and the game never stops throwing these new ideas your way. Jemma can only ever move, but it's what you do with those movements and how you move the object around you that adds little wrinkles to the gameplay. Swords can be used to take out static monsters; later on, you have access to large hook machines (take that, Link) that will grab onto an obstacle and let you cross large gaps. One area has you catching fish for the local fisherman, which involves getting around using rafts and building (and rebuilding) bridges before pulling the rod hard enough by dragging it along the tiles.
What Arranger does so brilliantly is that it never outright tells you what to do to progress, but the gameplay is so intuitive that it rarely takes more than a few seconds to figure out. We never got stuck on a single crit-path puzzle either, and that's not because of a lack of challenge. Even when we did take a few minutes to reach the correct solution for a given room, we always sussed it out just as we were about to topple into a mild frustration.
As any good RPG should have, there are even optional quests (amusingly referred to by other characters as Side Quests) to unlock secrets. These are harder than most of the required puzzles and don't often give you many hints, but like everything else, never feel insurmountable. We do wish these were sign-posted a little better, though, as there was one in particular where we tried to use every single object, from swords to spider webs to bushes, to solve it, but the solution didn't feel natural.
Luckily, if you ever do get stuck, there are a handful of helpful features to toggle on and off at any point. If you get lost, then there's a Quest Tracker which will point you in the right direction. Alternatively, if puzzles aren't your thing, you can turn those off completely and simply experience the story. Both of these work really well and ensure that no roadblocks stand between you and your journey with Jemma. Equally, if you find things a little too easy, there's a Hard mode which cranks up the difficulty of the puzzles to give your brain a pretty good workout.
David Hellman's lovely artwork also ensures that you're never tired of looking at Arranger's bright, colourful, and varied world. The grid-based pathways really feel like an actual world because of each section's backgrounds and the accompanying acoustic music, which either help to illustrate the environments like the desert or the jungle or use comic book panels to illustrate the protagonist's feelings as you control her through an area. Moving into the forest for the first time, we see images of Jemma stepping through the trees, her laces untied, and creatures such as birds and squirrels watching as our intrepid adventurer steps out of her hometown for the first time in her life.
It all looks lovely on Switch, too, both docked and undocked. The game runs at a smooth frame rate with no dips at all, and the colors naturally pop on an OLED. It would be absolutely perfect in handheld if the game didn't need to zoom out to tell some of its moving narrative sections – often making Jemma look pretty tiny and hard to follow. There are also a few sections where the game takes a few seconds to load while moving between new zones – not every new screen, but jumping from the jungle to the waterfront town, or whenever the game autosaves, causes a few moments of slowdown.
Conclusion
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure dares to be different, and it succeeds with aplomb. By interweaving a heartwarming and inclusive story with addictive gameplay, Furniture & Mattress teaches us that puzzle games can be more than just a vehicle for making the cogs in your brain turn. If you're looking for pure puzzling, then the game won't be for you, but a simple story and simple gameplay loop are both elevated to new heights because of the thought and care that's gone into them.
