Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

In a single word: disappointing. The puzzles are simply too easy, and the difficulty curve is almost nonexistent. The game introduces its core mechanic, but rarely pushes it far enough to make solving anything feel particularly satisfying. Most of the time, the answer is obvious long before the puzzle has had a chance to become interesting. Movement doesn't help either. What initially feels like a clever and unusual mechanic quickly becomes repetitive, especially when you need to cover longer distances. I constantly found myself looking for shortcuts simply to avoid having to go through the motions of moving Jemma across yet another large stretch of the map. At that point, traversal stops feeling like part of the adventure and starts feeling like a chore. Instead of enjoying the journey, you're looking for ways to skip as much of it as possible. The biggest problem, however, is that the game falls headfirst into the same trap as so much of modern indies: it desperately wants you to know that it [i]Has Something To Say[/i]™. There's nothing wrong with a game having a message. Some of the best games ever made do. The problem is when the message stops being part of the story and starts feeling like the reason the story exists in the first place. That's exactly what happens here. Instead of telling an engaging story and letting its themes emerge naturally, Arranger seems to have started with a checklist of [i]Things You Should Learn[/i] and then awkwardly built a plot around it. The result is exactly what you'd expect: clunky characters, painfully cheesy scenes, barely any tension, and the persistent feeling that the game would rather lecture you than entertain you. Jemma herself is probably the clearest example. She's constantly written with this "[i]I'm an outsider, nobody understands me, I don't belong here[/i]" attitude, to the point where what is presumably meant to make her sympathetic eventually just makes her insufferable. The game keeps hammering the same point home instead of trusting you to understand the character without having it spelled out over and over again. Even the conspicuous use of a non-standard pronoun feels less like an organic detail and more like yet another deliberate reminder of what the writers want the character -and, by extension, the game- to represent. None of that would have mattered much on its own. A pronoun certainly wasn't going to make or break the game for me, and if the writing, characters and story had been good, I probably wouldn't even have given it a second thought. But when almost every other aspect of the narrative suffers from the same heavy-handed approach, it becomes a perfect little example of the game's overall problem: Arranger is so preoccupied with making sure you get the message that it forgets to give you a compelling reason to care about it.

Great art, but the puzzles were basic and unfun, and the story feels like a children's game. The trailers give a false impression that it is loaded with puzzles, but the first hour was mostly traversing empty paths with music that put me to sleep