Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

[h1]A lot of boxes to push and too many dialogue boxes to skip in this pretty and fun puzzle game[/h1] You know when you are in a videogame menu, and if you press up you automathically go to the option at the bottom of the menu? Arranger is like that, but applied to a beautiful and very original sokoban (a videogame genre about pushing boxes). Obviously the game is constantly adding new mechanics and twists to the puzzles and i was always delightes with each change, it's very satisfying to play but i feel like it lacks a defnitive challenged that makes you really really scratch your head mixing all the different mechanics in difficult and clever ways, but heh, it's perfectly fine as it is. It has a lot of concepts but it lacks a lot of glue to put everything together and make you say "that's it, im a master of this specific kind of puzzle", something that makes you look at the bigger picture and challenges you to understand how all the puzzle mechanics work together. In the initial video in steam you get one of those "From the creators of..." texts, and yeah it's pretty obvious the visual artist is the one from Braid, which is one of my favourite games of all time, and Arranger looks amazing too. You can also feel that puzzle logic thingy from the designer of Ethereal which is very good, but sadly i cant say the same about the writing, made by the same writer as Carto, another highly recommended puzzle game. I really liked Carto and i think it's well written, it's a game with short and adorable dialogues, straight to the point and without unnecesary fluff, but in Arranger i felt like most dialogues had too many lines, characters try too hard to be funny and have charisma, it's not natural at all and it felt a bit grating in the later hours to me. But i personally have no gripes with the game besides that, i had a great time and i wonder if the devs are planning on creating a similar game with a bigger scope and a more intense use of the world and it's mechanics.

now, this is a game that knew what it had going for itself and ran with it! everything you do in arranger is achieved by interacting with the world. there's no inventory, you move items within the grid. there's no attack button, you use objects (or enemies) in the environment and move them across the grid. all puzzles AND EVEN THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ FISHING MECHANIC work on top of this mechanic! add the cute art and a story, and you get this concise experience that manages to keep you engaged and make you feel wonder. regarding difficulty, most of it isn't particularly challenging, but there ARE some puzzles that take a bit more to figure out :]

Fun game! Had to go hunting for solutions to a couple of the puzzles, but overall it was a nice challenge. I loved the art and audio, and gameplay was very engaging. My two wishes: 1) I wish it had a world map so that I could better understand the relationships between different areas. It would've been nice to backtrack to get some of the achievements that I missed, but not knowing where they were relative to my current location, I didn't feel like taking the time to just roam. 2) On a related note, I wish that the signs labeling different areas/landmarks were fixed in place. Having them slide around was annoying, plus it was easy at times to lose track of what was where. At one point I spent more time than I care to admit wandering to find a certain place because I thought it was in one direction, only to realize it was in the opposite direction.