Arranger Review
ARRANGER REVIEW
Furniture and Mattress have created a unique puzzle game in Arranger that has a concept, which breaks free from the crowd and joins recent puzzlers like Viewfinder and Cocoon that have made their mark on the genre. It might not be a genre revolution like Portal, but it will easily be one of the best puzzle games of the year.
PROS
The elevator pitch is that the world is a grid and the grid moves with you. If you move up or down the whole row slides up and down with you. If you move left and right then the whole row moves side to side as well. What makes the game unique is trying to figure out how to manipulate the environment to help you solve puzzles, find keys, collect items and even defeat enemies during your journey.
The gameplay loop is extremely satisfying and addictive. The puzzles are always in small, bite size chunks where it’s never overwhelming, but it’s always challenging. With help from the objectives in your journal, you always have an idea of what you should be doing and every puzzle is usually pretty easy to understand what needs to be done. Understanding what the solution needs to be is the easy part. The difficult part is trying to align the grid in the correct way to get everything correctly placed, while sometimes navigating obstacles, which can prove devious at times.
The good news is that Arranger does what all good puzzle games must do: Make the puzzles hard enough, but always within grasp.
The adventure begins by deciding to leave your secluded bubble of a town in search of an identity in a world full of danger. The farther your journey takes you, the more the onion unravels as you learn that the game is about less about finding your place and more about understanding what modern reality is. The game isn’t overly subtle with its story and messaging about social media and media in general.
It’s impossible not to look at the world today and notice the rise of social media and the decline of mental health. In Arranger, the world is filled with static, which can be a stand in for negativity. At all times there is constantly so much noise around us at all times. Arranger is about finding happiness and identity on your own terms with help from some pretty heavy metaphors.
The visuals of Arranger share a striking resemblance to the 2008 indie darling, Braid because the same artist behind Braid is also behind Arranger and the watercolour stylings give the world a fairly tale feel. Especially when paired with the whimsical score that gave each place its own personality even the decision was the absence of music
CONS
There really isn’t anything bad to say about Arranger outside of the fact that it doesn’t really feel like much of a role playing game as it’s advertised. Although, since RPG is not in dictionary, the definition is up to interpretation. It's a fun adventure built around a unique puzzle mechanic, but it never really gave you any type of choices to make on your own or upgrade in any ways, which is what we feel truly defines an RPG.
VERDICT
Arranger feels like comfort food in the best possible way despite being a bespoke offering. There is a familiarity with Arranger that gets combined with a relevant story, a very unique puzzle mechanic, and a gameplay loop that offered manageable puzzles. As a result, Arranger was a great experience with an addicting quality that was hard to put down.