Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

The vibe of the whole game is "feel good while solving puzzles" and everything about the game has been crafted to work towards that purpose. This is great example of "try the demo. If you like it, you'll like the game." If you enjoy the demo the main game is about 7-8 hours more of the same thing (with puzzles that don't feel like they're tutorials/fetch quests). New mechanics and challenges are introduced regularly and keep things feeling fresh despite everything being based on the sliding-tile-floor mechanic. Demo progress transfers to the main game, so you can pick up where you left off (though you may want to start from scratch if you want the few achievements you missed.) Everything about this game oozes polish. The visuals, music, sound effects, and little animations all feel so pleasantly crafted. The characters are there to keep the story interesting and give you a moment to rest between puzzles and they're all great. Everyone has a bit of personality without ever going over-the-top. The story is enough to give the player motivation to move forward without ever getting in the way. The art style reminds me of Braid. The only hiccups that bothered me were that after completing the tutorial there were some achievements that were locked behind my demo progress, so I had to start a new game and play through the first 10 or so minutes to unlock them. There are also a few achievements that are missable due to an area in the game being locked out at one point (though story-wise I feel like it wouldn't be too hard to update that area and let the player back in). But it's a testament to how much I enjoyed the game that I didn't mind speedrunning back to that point in the story to get those last few achievements. The game auto-saves and you can't change the save slot or stop it from auto saving. If we could change our save slot mid-game, that would solve a lot of my issues with the missable achievements. But these are minor gripes. I still highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys the demo.

I had a great time playing through Arranger. It's a breezy, light puzzler with a great visual style and interesting mechanics. There various mechanics introduced throughout the game often don't extend beyond the region they were introduced in, but it was quite pleasant to encounter new wrinkles to the established formula, and I felt engaged throughout. One thing that surprised me was how effectively it conveyed tone -- when traversing through areas, the game makes really skilled use of fixed camera zoom changes, soundtrack, and sound effects to give a surprising sense of space and emotion. It's quite well done! As to the "breezy" and "light" aspects: none of the puzzles in the game are particularly hard or involved. The rooms where the puzzles live are often pretty small, so even if you don't intuit the solutions it's not difficult to stumble on them through pure trial and error. There's also an option in the game settings which can let you skip most puzzles if you want, in case there's something annoying you. For myself, I found that whenever I was "stuck" it was just because I was forgetting some fundamental aspect of the game's movement mechanics. The one caveat I'd mention is the fishing game encountered in one area -- I'd been consistently misreading the visual cues. To anyone else wondering how the heck to manage those: when the underwater-fish icon *disappears*, that's when you've got a fish reeled in. I kept on assuming that the fish going away meant that I'd "missed" the catch somehow. As for one slightly negative point: the game *does* wear its themes very obviously on its sleeve. IMO the dialogue could have benefitted from some more subtlety, rather than explicitly spelling out the game's main points. It'd also be nice to have a button to completely cancel a dialogue tree, Most NPCs end up with two responses to your interaction: the initial longer one, and then a shorter secondary one (which repeats). But sometimes the secondary one is rather long, and sometimes you end up just repeating the primary instead. It can be a bit of a drag clicking through the same thing you've already heard, especially when the back-and-forth lasts for a dozen interchanges. Still, very minor quibbles for me! I'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a cozy puzzler, so long as you don't mind some relatively straightforward puzzles. Well done, IMO!